legalienate

2012-01-30T19:19:00.000-08:00

Muslim Film Outlines Jewish Threat to USA

“Don’t Eat That Pastrami”, a documentary financed by theInternational Islamic Conspiracy To Take Over The World And Forbid Eating Pork( the notorious IICTTOTWAFEP) has been shown to New York City school teachersas an instructional aid to a healthy diet but is actually a threat toUS-Israeli relations.

The film mentions control of the American government by Jewswith dual citizenship and proposes that American interests are threatened bysuch anti-democratic means as involving the USA in wars against Islam that costbillions, kill thousands and alienate most of the world.

The two hour film, with ominous, eerie, sinister andmenacing sound track music and countless images of Semitic looking bankers andmerchants who are not Arabs also features a short lecture on why pork isn’tgood for you, which fooled the Board of Education into approving its use in theschool system.

Reels of the film were taken to Central Park and burned in areligious ceremony witnessed by the New York City council, the Mayor , membersof Congregation Beth Midler and several squirrels, but authorities fear that DVDcopies may be in the hands of New York cabdrivers who sympathize with theracist sentiments of the film. “It may already be too late” warned Holocaustsurvivor Fox Abeman.

New Environmental Threat: Political Gas Shortage

After the recent State of the Union address by the presidentand several debates among Republicans applying for his job, the EPA announcedthat national supplies of political gas were at record lows which threatenedlong periods of silent politicians from now through the election in November.

A poll found 99% of Americans strongly in support of theshortage , marking the first time an environmental crisis has enjoyed such onesided favor. “We need more crises like this” said a woman who wore a gas maskduring the debates and the president’s speech but was now happy to go aboutbreathing freely.

Joint Chiefs Pledge End To Policy Of Urinating On The Dead

Military leaders from all branches of the service expressedsupport for continued mass murders according to accepted civilized rules of warbut promised that American military personnel would no longer be allowed tourinate on people after they had killed them.

“If some angry soldier pisses on an enemy while that enemyis still alive, that will be okay but we will not tolerate degrading the deadby such disrespectfulness” said Joint Chief spokesperson Admiral General Flight Commander Hillary Eunice Chan vonSantos.

Debt Limit Raised to 16.4 Trillion for Government And 1Million for Individuals

Economic economists at the Economic Institute for EconomicRecovery of the Economy hailed the increase. Nobel prize winning Director ofthe EIRE Dr. Wilhelm Shtuperman said “This will bring the economy back from thedead and enable consumers to shop until they drop before banks urinate onthem.” Wall Street responded by laughing and introducing a new Derivative HedgeBorrowing Loaning fund scheme called The Madoff. Investors will be able toborrow money and then loan it to themselves in order to hedge against inflationby cashing in the loans from other borrowers before the borrowed money is dueto be paid to the, um, original loaner of the borrowed money and anyway it willwork with the new raised levels of debt so Shtuperman says just buy lots andlots of stuff with your new raised credit limit and charge it and don’t worryuntil the bubble bill comes due, which shouldn’t be for a while if the nationaldebt can be raised to 20 trillion before the end of the year and we can get abailout before the next war in Asia, Africa, Europe, South America or OuterSpace.

Poll Finds Fox TV Viewers, Congress, Professional Athletes and University Professors Less Informed Than Domestic Pets and Undomesticated Termites...details later

Obama Selects Bush As Running Mate

2012-01-28T18:19:00.000-08:00

Return of “The Decider” Stuns Washington; GOP Presidential Debates Thrown Into Chaos

By Michael K. Smith
Special to Legalienate

RELATED HEADLINES

Bush Pick Hailed as "Pragmatic Master Stroke"

Outraged Biden Joins Tea Party, Threatens To Sue

Obama Lauds Bush Vow To “Follow the Cheney Tradition” as VP

Washington, January 27 - Barack Obama today named George W. Bush of Crawford, Texas as his running mate, the first ex-president selected to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. The president announced his historic step before an ebullient crowd of Blackwater mercenaries on the White House lawn. ''There's an electricity in the air, an excitement, a sense of new possibilities and of pride,'' Obama told a section of cheering snipers moments after disclosing the stunning development.

Calling for an end to partisan bitterness, Obama introduced Bush as “an exciting choice” and “clearly the best” for healing a divided nation. Bush thanked the president for continuing the family dynasty, and offered to formally adopt him into the Bush clan if he thought it would “help carry the South.”

Obama said the decision to choose the former president was a ''difficult'' one, but explained: ''GW has excelled in being bailed out, and this country certainly needs more of that!” He added that GW’s political return was ''really the fulfillment of a classic American tradition: to fail continually at everything and emerge triumphant anyway.''

Harvard Lawyer Obama Cites Constitution

''History speaks to us today,'' Obama told the Blackwater throng. ''Our founders said in the Constitution, 'We the people' - not just the identity politics focus groups, but all of us.''

''Our message,'' the president went on, ''is that America is a country of diversity where the spirit of conciliation overcomes all philosophical differences. As President Bush has said many times: ‘ politics stops at the water’s edge.’”

Bush, who was anointed president in 2000, has received the endorsements for the Vice Presidency of numerous Democratic Party organizations, including, On Our Knees, Inertia Unlimited, and Strength Through Servility.

Increase in Pragmatic Energy Seen

''He loves Israel, he's charismatic, he believes in God,'' enthused one adviser to Obama. ''We have broken the barrier. He will energize, not just southerners, but a lot of Republicans, which will make the Democratic Party more inclusive.''

Another adviser to Obama said that although Bush had engendered “unfortunate” bad publicity around foreign policy issues, he nevertheless would bring “new chemistry, new passion, and new understanding” to the ticket, especially of an often overlooked minority group: the rich. “People never seem to realize that as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy become a smaller and smaller minority group,” said Obama campaign manager Marshall Cash.

In the last three weeks Obama interviewed seven prospective candidates and made it plain that he was seriously considering a break in precedent and selecting a candidate who “reflects our values,” rather than just another identity politics token.

Ranking aides to Obama indicated last week that Bush had outdistanced Biden in his personal interview with Obama, as well as in his press comments afterward. Some aides said Biden had proved somewhat disappointing, a comment that angered the outgoing vice-president, who is threatening to sue.

Factors in Choice Listed

What apparently swayed Obama, Democratic officials said, was Bush's experience in ramming through deeply unpopular policies, his considerable support among Blue Dog Democrats, and perhaps most important, his appeal to blue-collar superpatriots, coupled with his traditional “tough love” views, which seem to coincide with the president's.

Bush had emerged in recent weeks as the strong favorite among pragmatic liberals, typified by the vastly influential NAACR, the National Association for the Advancement of Crackpot Realism. But Democratic advisers to Obama said the decision in favor of Bush was based heavily on the notion that his political strength would enhance Obama’s support among the super-rich and religious fanatics. “They vote,” explained Obama at the announcement ceremony.

At the conclusion of the day's historic event, Obama and Bush clasped hands high overhead in the classic victory stance and called for world peace through the obliteration of Iran.

Ethnic Studies: Teaching Class Division

2012-01-26T13:51:00.001-08:00

“Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you’re on.

Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.”

America has finally developed a movement for social change that seems conscious of political economic divisions that transcend race, sex or other very serious but sometimes overstressed problems. That movement offers the only solution to the inequality which grows more glaring and unjust. Calls for the 99% to take control from the 1% at the top of the financial pyramid are threatening to that ruling minority , its agents from the upper levels of the 99%, and the totally misinformed from the bottom. But those upper level agents represent the beneficiaries of divisive social policies that have brought personal gains for some, always at serious social costs to others. This is according to the dictates of profit and loss hardly free market capitalism. These agents often stand in strong support of socially divisive policies because those policies are good for “their” people. More often, those policies are good for “their” political and economic security.

Affirmative Action programs have enabled many previously shut out of the system to make progress and gain footholds within it, achieving professional, corporate and government positions that tend to make the upper strata look diverse, at least according to the limited definition that word has taken on in American culture. Almost always overlooked are the shortcomings of AA programs which have set groups and individuals farther apart when action of an affirmative nature for some creates, as should be expected, action of a negative nature for those on the other side of the ledger. A system which creates profits on one side must always create loss on the other; there can be no profit without loss, as eloquently explained to his clients by a former great hero of finance capitalism, Bernie Madoff. This basic structural truth of the system still escapes most because it is supposed to, having been taught out of reality by an education business that serves the production of individual consumers without social consciousness. This helps strengthen the competitive drive to personally consume while gulling us into thinking as first person singular egos only identifying with groups when they are minorities, and thus powerless.

Though women and other minorities have benefited far more from them, the old criticism of AA programs when they were supposedly focused on so called blacks still resonates:

Send one to Yale and send ten to jail.

While the college population of African Americans is considerably higher than it was before AA programs, the population of black Americans in prison has skyrocketed far beyond that. Note also that the new upper and middle class members are called African American – despite the fact that they have been native to the USA far longer than many if not most European descended people who are no longer identified with hyphenated labels unless they adopt minority status and defensive postures – while ghetto and project dwellers of the working and poorer class are still seen as “black”. Both labels are among many used to disguise commonality among humans. They all serve to keep the divisions within society strong, even to separate alleged members of the same group ethnicity by class. The programs originated to do exactly what they have done; maintain , protect and strengthen consumer private capitalism by rewarding a minority at the expense of the majority.

We are presently seeing a struggle around Ethnic Studies programs at colleges and universities which relates to the same maintenance of minority power of the 1% over a divided 99%. What passes for academic diversity, cultural education and histories of subjugated and neglected people often turns out to be branding labels for cultural and ethnic marketing. It has served to keep groups divided into sub categories in order to prevent them from ever threatening minority power of the 1% on top. Much neglected reality is confronted in Ethnic Studies courses, but the consumers of these studies are tracked into and out of programs as minorities, slated never to become anything more. By having previously unknown pains and joys of their groups preached to them they will hopefully strive to be just what their rulers want them to be: happy, proud, diverse identity groups who support the status quo by believing they are different from everyone else who lives under the same regime but can acquire professional class status within it and thus help their families and communities. In other words, stay divided from fellow citizens not seen as members of their own ethnic, racial, sexual or intellectual groups and remain democratically powerless in a class, not ethnic society.

And so we have programs in the marketplace to reward some members of some groups at the expense of most members of most groups with supposed meritocracy strengthened by success achievers allowed to rise to the upper middle strata: affirmative action. And in academia, the teaching of American history in balkanized form, with various groups ghettoized into special studies that make them separate from – but equal to, in some warped return to past racist policies ? – the great majority. Rather than teach American history as a subject in equal parts concerning settlers, invasions, discoveries, exploration, land theft, slavery, fights for survival, massacres of indigenous people and more, these become special areas only studied in special classes aimed at special groups. Result? Warped, balkanized views of American history, divided groups and sects among Americans, and a stronger control by the 1% ruling class and its agent servants of the upper levels of the 99%.

American groups identified as minorities by virtue of their not being direct descendants of Europeans have been tracked into patterns of discrimination no longer officially acceptable. But alleged social changes that only transform certain individual members of an ethnic or other identity group and leave larger populations still operating as second class citizens while being manipulated into showing pride in the fact that they are hyphenated and not whole Americans is hardly social progress.

Ethnic studies classes were introduced as a means to allow “out’ groups to learn “their” culture and soon become “in” by having increased knowledge, pride and general academic acceptance that could lead to further affirmation, as long as action continued along officially prescribed system enforcing lines. America’s professional class and upper middle strata has become a more diverse group in the look, sex and ethnic makeup of its component parts, but members of groups still identified as “minorities” suffer many of the same injustices the ethnic studies classes teach them about, while instilling resentment to the society that commits the injustices and grossly mis-identifying the sources and power groups that profit from them. Which is exactly what they are supposed to do. Thus we have “racial” animosities growing as supposed “diversity” increases, and this along class lines that do nothing to increase community, social cohesiveness and solidarity among Americans, but simply create more division, individualism and hostility that maintains and expands animosity among the 99%.

While it is admirable to connect with sometimes ancestral cultures and often those merely a generation or two away, it can become a socially compulsive disorder to be forced into boxes of ethnic and alleged racial difference while a nation claims diversity and democracy as its credo, all the while infantilizing the first while making the second impossible. Of course, electing a Chicano, or gay, or white, or black or Asian, or Jewish, member of congress, the city council or the presidency, can seem wonderful when reduced to minority consciousness. But from the standpoint of majority good, continuing the system of private profits accruing to ever smaller minorities at the expense of the great majority can only be seen as progress by a the dim witted, the ignorant, the misinformed, or those who gather the profits; the 1%. And their agents, however racially, sexually, ethnically or intellectually diverse they may think themselves.

MLK, Mayans and Another World

2012-01-16T18:51:00.001-08:00

The celebration of MLK day hopefully reminded us that his dream of a better world involved not only racial justice but:

"the masterfully cooperative venture of persons in which they realize the solidarity of the human family by assuming responsibility for one another."

Hardly the present dog eat dog reality which has many depressed souls interpreting a Mayan prophecy as a sign of the end of the world in 2012. But the ancients were probably foreseeing a beginning as well. They were not limited by the conjoined twins of western civilization - individualism and capitalism - and so tended to see life as cooperative and cyclical, with beginnings and endings that continued beyond personal experience.

Present conditions are so bleak they could be forecasting the end of civilization, especially from the dim view of either/or dualism. But a broader perspective might perceive a giant step forward for humanity by our casting off shackles of ignorance that have imprisoned us for generations and the liberation of age old demands for freedom through real democracy, as opposed to the sham we have inherited.

Minority controlled politics is facing its end as people become aware of the dangers to nature and the lies that set a majority against itself. A world dominated by financial minorities which amass personal wealth at the expense of billions of humans cannot continue. But it won’t stop because of legendary prophecy or contemporary dreams. Without democratic action it wont take place at all. And given the sorry state of our global condition it’s easy to see environmental destruction and humanity‘s fraying bonds as signs of the end of life itself. That is what the 1% at the top puts into the minds of the 99% through its political and media servants: despair , defeatism and division among the majority that guarantees minority control of almost everything. We need the opposite and it’s likely the Mayan, as well as other ancient prophecies, are about visioning solidarity and success for humanity rather than division and failure, just as Martin Luther King.

The ravages of a perverse economy robbing the earth’s support system and an entire race to accumulate private profits for a small class is a problem calling for united material confrontation and not just faith in prophecy . But religious and social prophecy can help motivate that confrontation; it only impairs when controlled by shaman-agents of the 1% who manipulate parishioners into acting against their own interests.

In much of the world radical change is being violently resisted by minority dominators. Even without violent suppression, American elections in 2012 will accomplish nothing if the electorate continues accepting candidates bought and paid for by the 1% rulers. We may face the Mayan prophecy seen as an ending. But a series of democracy demanding uprisings are signs of a beginning. Not yet enough to bring national democratic change, but that will come, and globally as well, if people stress cooperation that promotes the common good , true equality, and an end to the bloody wars that bring profits for the few and murder, debt and poverty for the many.

The next American election promises to be the most expensive and possibly most useless in recent history. With the exception of Ron Paul, a host of status quo zealots are poised to replace the most hopeless excuse for an agent of change the nation has ever seen. Of course , if change is simply a matter of identity politics, the USA is the most radical nation in the world. Its ruling parties and corporations are composed of women, people of color, people of no color, gays, lesbians, every hyphenated American sub-group known to the market and practitioners and prosecutors of hate speech, dumb speech and suppressed speech. The 1% have hired an affirmative action team to simultaneously screw itself, a majority of Americans, and large sectors of the global community, in order to wear the shiniest economic chains in the history of political economic slavery. Democracy?

What passes for liberalism has provoked balkanized divisiveness which has conservative fakers appealing to groups and ideals it has neglected: American workers , social values, political economics and more. Thus we have survival-of-the-fittest individualism stronger than ever because political forces work to divide the nation into controllable minorities and in the process keep them from becoming the democratic majority. Our elections involve agents of the 1% calling themselves Americans against agents of the 1% calling themselves hyphenated Americans and whichever side wins, America loses.

But people now see alternatives to divisive ego-capitalism and the damaging aspects of class inequality. And that movement of minds is being transferred into a movement of bodies rising to demand the changes necessary for another kind of world to be born as the older one ends. And that old order threatens new bloodshed in Iran, Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, Bolivia and even Russia and China if the 1%, their agents and hired mercenaries have their way. The ancient Mayans could not have predicted the details of our plight and even MLK could not have foreseen what we face, but the threat to end all lives on the planet is real and has nothing to do with prophecy. If the people do not create another world, that old one could destroy us all. The spirit necessary to bring such change was articulated by Martin Luther King whose prophetic words inspired everyone demanding justice for black people in racist America, but they are even more important now to help end injustice, inequality and war for all of the human race. To close with his words, again:

"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world."

1968: Memphis

2012-01-15T21:57:00.000-08:00

Portrait of a Dangerous Man

The Reverend Martin Luther King preaches against the Vietnam War. He protests that twice as many blacks as whites are dying there, cannon fodder for an imperial adventure comparable to the Nazi crimes. The poisoning of water and land, the destruction of people and harvests are part of a plan of extermination. Of the million Vietnamese dead, says the preacher, the majority are children. The United States, he claims, is suffering from an infection of the soul; and any autopsy would show that the name of that infection is Vietnam.

Six years ago the FBI put this man in Section A of the Reserved List, among those dangerous individuals who must be watched and jailed in case of emergency. Since then the police hound him, spying on him day and night, threatening and provoking him.

Martin Luther King collapses on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. A bullet full in the face puts an end to this nuisance.

-----Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 3, Century of the Wind

Happy New Year: Down With Fuzzy Liberalism

2012-01-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Here in Marin County, California we are surrounded by affluent liberals who can't see the political forest for the trees. A case in point is John H. Howard, a self-described "retired international banker" whose New Year's Day editorial in the Marin Voice, "Occupy puts focus on disparities," is a classic of fuzzy liberal analysis and "we're all responsible" psychologizing.

Howard defines our central problem as income "disparity" between the 1% and the 99%, not the one percent's class power to make the rest of us work for them and vote for their ideas. On this crucial point, Howard assumes "inequalities" are the result of mismanagement, rather than systemic features of class hierarchy and centralized power.

Although the lopsided maldistribution of wealth has rarely, if ever, been worse than it is right now, the problem is not really income "disparity" but private control of social wealth, which is illegitimate in principle. For the relationship between plundering bankers and the rest of us is parasitic, not unequal, and we had best get that clear right from the start. Would we say that a fungus and the blighted potato on which it grows have an unequal relationship? Or does common sense compel us to conclude that the fungus simply prevents the potato from being healthy at all? Logic favors the latter conclusion, but liberals love to call for "balance" between insanity and reason, as though there could be such.

Here are more examples of fuzzy thinking from Howard's column.

1. More government oversight, not less, might have prevented the Great Recession.

But government financed by Wall Street has no interest in reigning in private capital, which will destroy any politician reckless enough to challenge it. The point is that speculation simply cannot be brought under control when finance capital owns the government and orchestrates capital flight from any region of the world that shows the slightest sign of populist revolt. Private control over public resources must be directly challenged and overcome, not fine-tuned with regulations that are routinely re-written or ignored when profit is at stake.

2. "I am not among the 1 percent . . . [but]I share the good fortune that has permitted the extreme wealth enjoyed by the 1 percent: High expectations from our parents, a solid education, and coming of age when employment prospects were favorable, a functioning democracy — the result is a fixed income from Social Security and two modest pensions, no debt, adequate government medical insurance, and a nice nest egg that allows a comfortable life style."

Old age pensions, the ideal of full-employment, universal education, and democratic politics are not gifts from capitalism of a more benign era, but rather, are the product of bitter class warfare over many generations, in which working people were routinely blacklisted, beaten, trampled, jailed, and killed by capital, in hopes that such social democratic features of modern life would never come to exist. Now that they do exist, liberals want to forget the bloody history that bequeathed them to us. But delusions of a benign capitalism can only lead us astray.

Social Security, for one, did not come from parental expectations, good education, better economic times, or the established political system. It is a watered down version of socialism's call for a guaranteed income for all. It came into being because of massive popular upheaval in protest against capitalism. FDR used popular indignation at capitalist exploitation to political advantage, but he remained steadfast in saying that he had saved capitalism for the wealthy few who dominated it (and who loathed him for helping usher in social democratic protections that kept the system from collapsing).

And just why were employment prospects "more favorable" a few decades ago? Wasn't it to a considerable extent because Washington and Wall Street felt themselves to be in competition with the Communist world for the loyalty of workers, so that wages and benefits were higher, unemployment lower, and unions far more common than they are today? Are liberals now prepared to praise Communism and unionization for their historic role in forging a middle class? If not, why not?

3. I agree with the 99 percent that the conditions that favored the 1 percent and me are no longer available for millions of Americans. . . .The Great Recession is partly to blame, but there are new barriers to success . . . the absolute corruption of politics by big money; the lack of political will to effectively regulate industry, especially finance; the absence of people of good will from the country's power structure; and most critically, our willingness to "let someone else do it" — fight our wars, pay our debts, raise our children, lend a hand down the street.

"Corruption" is something of a misnomer, since capitalism is designed to be "corrupt," i.e., to reward the highest bidder. Under capitalism, therefore, politics is not so much "corrupted" by big money as it is defined by it. Private centers of wealth inevitably translate into political power, and there is hardly a need for a quid pro quo between politician and financial donor for this to be the case. As long as massive accumulations of private wealth are allowed to exist, we will be beholden to them.

The "lack of political will to effectively regulate industry" correlates perfectly with the massive accumulations of capital that reward people handsomely for their moral indifference. And isn't it precisely the point of a profit-maximizing oligarchy to replace moral values with acquisitive values? So why should we expect "people of good will" to ascend to positions of power? In fact, we should expect the opposite.

As for "our willingness to 'let someone else do it' — fight our wars, pay our debts, raise our children, lend a hand down the street," wouldn't it make more sense to give us a moral leg to stand on before asking us to act morally? Is it really morally contemptible for parents to try to have their children sent to Stanford rather than Afghanistan? And is it our fault that corporate America prefers to enslave us with debt rather than give salary increases in a time of rising productivity? Finally, can parents really "raise their children properly," and "lend a hand down the street," when financial necessity routinely requires they be absent from the home 50-60 hours a week, and burdened with unfinished work when they are at home?

In any event, Howard's focus on "success" is the problem, not the solution. We need to think in terms of evolutionary success, not personal financial success. If we continue to define profit as the superordinate goal of social life, to which all else must be subordinated, the human species will soon cease to exist. Worldwide environmental crisis obviously cannot be solved by tinkering with market incentives. We need a new system, a real society, not just the cash-nexus of the marketplace.

4. Medicare is an entirely appropriate entitlement for all citizens, and its cost can be controlled through the some means testing, full implementation of health care reform, and newly vigilant oversight.

If it's truly an entitlement, i.e., something everyone gets, then it shouldn't be means tested. Means testing social insurance is the first step towards its abolition. And Obama's health care "reform" leaves the HMO profiteers in charge, unlike in every other industrial democracy, where they have been removed from medical systems so that human health, not private profit, can come first.

5. "We have lost the sense that we are all in this together, all riding the same planet, and that we as a society succeed or fail by what we do or don't do together."

There is plenty of this sentiment remaining in the U.S., especially in the Occupy movement. But people are beaten, gassed, and arrested for expressing it - at the behest of the 1%.

Source:

John H. Howard, "Occupy puts focus on disparities", Marin Voice, January 1, 2012

"Occupy" and nonviolence

2011-12-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

_,_._,___

There may be a time in future when violence will be necessary to combat the state power of capital in the usa, but without meaning sarcasm there may also be a time when foreign intervention is necessary to liberate America from that power...all things are possible but neither is likely, and the first is even less likely than the second...

the world has changed and is changing more rapidly than any of us can keep up with, and those changes not only involve the power of the state to kill more people but also the power of the people to democratically take control of the state...that situation has never before existed and it offers far more hope than trying to organize an army to fight the state, when it is more likely and hopeful that we can disarm that state with democratic power...

I’m not advocating that we should all join hands and sing in the face of an attacking army, but if we have not organized an army in our defense we might as well sing as we die since physical resistance under such circumstances would be meaningless...an organized military force will slaughter us unless we can counter it with our own organized military force...this is not to imply support for a non violent philosophy according to the old reality but to suggest that philosophy makes far more sense and offers far more possibility of success in the newly emerging world…

past non violence that never fought back physically but accepted vicious attacks with passive resistance swayed many of those watching on film or TV but guaranteed those taking the abuse certain physical pain and possible death...it may seem romantic but thus far it has not worked… despite myths and legends about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, India still suffers appalling poverty and black men are crowding America’s prisons in greater numbers than ever before...and militantly violent opposition brought about by the failure of passive resistance has also failed, leading many to die or waste away in prison at trying to confront massive military force with relatively egotistical, if sincere tactics of killing some policemen and soldiers, taking some temporary territory that the state doesn’t want or need for the moment, or robbing banks… and let’s not forget that both heroic passive figures, Gandhi and MLK, were violently murdered...however, this is a different time and place and it should be remembered and meditated on, if necessary, that the entire world is seeing uprisings of a kind never before imagined, with democratic power possibilities and communications across borders and barriers that can no longer permit the state power to separate , isolate, divide and conquer peoples with the ease in which it could in the past...

while our anger may provoke us to wish to strike back at an ugly force of armed representatives of the antidemocratic state, we had better be prepared to counter such force with equal force of our own or forget about it...and organizing an armed, revolutionary uprising in the USA at this time seems as likely as hoping for a messiah to return or show up for the first time…the desperation among the people necessary for such to happen would mean a chaotic situation of near total social breakdown had taken over, and given the tremendous task of trying to create democracy now, that task would seem a more positive endeavor to work on than trying to counter , say, nuclear arms with more nuclear arms, rather than gaining control of nuclear stockpiles and destroying them…the first is hopeless but the second is possible…

much better to follow the lead of places like Venezuela and Bolivia, where previous attempts at military coupes , armed uprisings and over throwing governments failed but democratic efforts are showing signs of turning entire nations and areas of the globe around via organized political and economic and not necessarily military power...that kind of force exercised by the people of the west, whose nations have plundered and savaged for generations and continue to do so under control of tiny anti-democratic minorities, would not only ease burdens in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, but create a balanced movement in the west operating in the same democratic, non-violent fashion and offering hope for the global community itself, and not just one or another nation …and doing so with an army of humanity militantly demanding and exercising its rights as a majority against which no minority would have a chance….

More Thoughts On the Occupy Movement

2011-12-20T14:42:00.006-08:00

The Occupy movement has dramatically and wonderfully seized the political moment, putting Wall Street and its mass media lapdogs on the defensive where they belong.

Predictably, Occupy critics decry the inconvenience of protest, as though protest were not already synonymous with inconvenience. Such antagonists would do well to recall that Martin Luther King was also denounced by his critics for illegal and allegedly immoral behavior. The civil rights movement in its day was every bit as inconvenient as Occupy Wall Street is today, blocking public streets, shutting down department stores, swamping local jails, forcing their unwanted anti-lynching philosophy on an unwilling public. Nevertheless, equipped with the benefit of hindsight, we now know the civil rights protesters were right.

Having said that, the free speech issues would be stark and more compelling if Occupiers were to occupy the major media corporations - NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, - since they monopolize the public airwaves with propaganda on behalf of the 1%. The 99% is flatly excluded from access to large audiences, in spite of the fact that such audiences are composed almost completely of the 99%. This cannot be justified on rational grounds.

Those who don't like public space being occupied ought to ask themselves this: Why can't we engage in real political debate (i.e., not just Democrat vs. Republican) over the public airwaves? Because the private owners of the economy won't let us. We cannot hear social democrats, libertarians, communists, socialists, anarchists, white nationalists, black nationalists, or any other popular grouping engaged in uncensored debate before mass audiences in the United States. Until that changes, public space will continue to be occupied, because that is the only means of bringing the views of popular constituencies before a mass audience.

For those who almost plaintively ask why the Occupy protesters don't express their discontent through the electoral system, one can only say this. How do you target the 1%, (actually probably more like one-tenth of one percent), who own the "private" economy? You can't do it by resorting to electoral politics, as the 1% owns the politicians.

True, a Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, or Ron Paul can run a third party campaign, but the 1% routinely deprives them of media time on the basis that they are merely "vanity" candidates. You can't get elected if you are not seen daily in the mass media, and the mass media is literally owned by the 1%. The last time around Ron Paul finished second in Nevada primaries, a result which was not even announced in the corporate media. The first place and third place finishers were announced, but not the second place finisher. Why? Because Paul is not under the control of the 1%. No populist candidate, whether of the right or the left, can be elected or taken seriously nationally. That's why there's an occupy movement.

Let's stop kidding ourselves about our "democracy." Under capitalism, the business cycle (presided over by the one percent) causes recessions, depressions, panics, and break-downs on a regular basis, after which the perpetrators demand huge public bailouts on the basis that the swindling class is "too big to fail." Only by going well beyond the electoral arena can we do anything about this, i.e., by organized protest.

Was slavery ended at the ballot box? Was child labor? Elections played some role, but a subordinate one, and well after organized protest had re-shaped electoral options (and in slavery's case, the entire society). That's what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do today. All history shows that progress is dependent on popular protest, which is not to say that everything a protest movement does is right. But it is always the midwife of social advancement.

Occupying public space is not the same as destroying it, as occupy critics are prone to claim. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the Black Bloc has a predilection for trashing, but they are not the entire Occupy movement, far from it. We should also recall that those who shout the loudest for smashing and destroying are routinely found to be working for U.S. intelligence when government documents are published years after the damage has been done. The COINTELPRO documents from the 1960s protests are very revealing as to who the real criminals are, and no thinking person ought to be surprised.

To reiterate, Dr. King was subject to very similar criticisms for "violence" and "inconvenience to working people." But it's now clear he was right and the critics were wrong. While popular movements should try to minimize inconvenience to the public, critics should recognize that faulting protesters for inconvenience is the same as faulting all protest. There is no progress without inconvenience.

Wiesenthal Center names top 10 anti-Semitic slurs

2011-12-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

not from the garlic!

December 13, 2011

NEW YORK (JTA) – A comment by Mahmoud Abbas referring to Palestine as the “holy land” placed first in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Top 10 Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic Slurs of 2011.

The Palestinian Authority president made the remark at the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23.
“I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people,” he said.

The Wiesenthal Center said it did not consider statements by terrorist organizations, the Iranian government or “the lunatic fringe."

Other remarks that made the Top 10 list included Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's accusation that "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed" by Israel; Christian Dior fashion designer John Galliano's rant about his love of Hitler; and director Lars Von Trier, who said he sympathizes a bit with Hitler and that "Israel is a pain in the ass."

“These 10 examples constitute a fraud alert from people who should know better who have crossed the line,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center.
For the 2012 list, the Wiesenthal Center is collecting suggestions from members of the public at slurs2012@wiesenthal.com.

from the garlic:

Early submissions include:

Mrs Grundy, Herbie Weintraub just farted.

Is that Temple Beth Midler or a White Castle?

If a Jew owns a bank is he a Jewish Banker?

Gigantic Balls or Microscopic Brains? Both!

2011-12-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

from the nytimes ( so it must be true, right?)

"Iranian officials reacted with outrage and incredulity after President Obama said Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return the drone. “That is a shameless demand raised by the U.S. president,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy chief of staff of the Iranian military, was quoted by the semiofficial Fars News agency as saying. “They raise such claims instead of apologizing to our Islamic establishment and people.”

Inspired by America's act of supremacist chutzpah, a rapist has demanded that his victim return the condom he left in her vagina.

Democracy in 2012

2011-12-15T12:16:00.000-08:00

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, torment, slavery, brutalization and moral degradation at the other…”

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19^th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21^st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Khadafy’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly urged "the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone."

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal , state and municipal public banks , owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all . 2012 should be a big one for humanity.

Happy New Year.

Still More on Agents of the 1%

2011-12-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

“Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on, and class analysis is knowing who is there with you.”

anonymous

The emerging class conflict in America involves great confusion among many as to which class they belong to, represent, or stand with. In the far more progressive than usual division of the 1% at the top from the 99%, that overwhelming majority is still fiction when so many of them do not know, care or even think about such social division, but only respond in capitalist individual identity group fashion to any uprising of a social nature:

How come I - and/or my group, my people or whatever minority you are forced into and accept - are not front and center of this movement?

Agents of the 1% are among alleged supporters of the 99% when they directly represent them professionally, criticize them from an allegedly more “revolutionary” position , or when they are carried in establishment journals and other media which find their critiques of society safe enough to disperse among the divided American public to keep it that way.

Divided.

Any attempts to bring people together around common problems and issues will find these agents claiming their particular problem(s) are being slighted by these less politically well informed folks who don't understand the problems of : gays-blacks-women-immigrants-workers-jews-people of color-people of no color -choose one , and need to be better informed before they - the intelligentsia of revolution can possibly join them. As in:

I haven't heard a word from these "occupiers" about Palestinians, the rape of the native Americans, the slaughters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the lynching of Sicilians, and most important, not a word about the plight of Arab-American lesbian hiv positive unemployed people in America...outrageous!

Who the hell really cares if 1% of the richest people in America own congress, the white house , the judiciary , corporate capital and the banks? What the hell difference does it make if climate change and foreign wars advance the cause of capital while destroying the planet and its people, when a disabled gay defrocked priest falsely convicted of child molesting cannot find an apartment in Columbus Ohio and not one of these Occupiers has mentioned his plight?

Let's get our priorities straight.

repeat:

Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on, and class analysis is knowing who is there with you.

Which side are we on?

Capitalist Journalism Linked to Brain Damage

2011-12-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

We have long since reached the point where the Consumer Product Safety Administration should issue warnings about consuming corporate broadcast and print journalism, which is surely as toxic as anything ingestable. The model has already been set in the tobacco industry, which long ago began warning buyers that "cigarette smoking has been found to be hazardous to your health." So why not a federal warning along the following lines: "Warning! Production and consumption of corporate media content has been found to cause brain damage in laboratory animals, i.e., consumers. If accidentally swallowed, dilute heavily with skepticism until normal brain function returns."

Exhibit A in the brain damage display case should be a recent Forbes column by John Tamny ("What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters"), which takes the Occupy Wall Street protesters to task for failing to realize that the fabulously wealthy 1% that dominate the political system are in reality our benefactors, and that we had best stop "demonizing" them and instead express gratitude for their heroically self-sacrificing efforts to enrich themselves, which deliver vast trickle-down benefits to all of us.

Such a tall tale would be embarrassing to read even to a class of toddlers, but such is the state of intellectual opinion in the U.S. that such claims are not only given wide dissemination but are typically accorded the status of self-evident truths. This makes the title of the article transparently ludicrous, as who can really believe that we rarely hear that the rich are hardworking benefactors of the general public? In point of fact, the rich are continually praised for the alleged public benefits their asset allocation bestows, so that even the most devoted monk living a completely renunciate life in the remotest possible location could not hope to escape this fatuous theme.

Below are more of the specific claims Tamny makes in his article. Let us examine each of these "ideas" in turn.

1. Critics of the 1% are motivated by envy. They rarely consider the work and sacrifice involved in making it to the top of the economic pyramid.

There can be little doubt that the hungry envy the well fed, but how does that justify a system that awards a tiny minority of investors more wealth than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes while tens of millions of impoverished people die every year from starvation and disease? It does no good to say that the latter group lacks the initiative to take care of itself, since it is obviously impossible to take care of oneself without regular access to food. This is precisely what the starving lack.

Where conditions are less severe than those that obtain under outright starvation, it is not clear that the rich are envied at all. The Occupy movement, for example, does not appear to even be interested in entering the ranks of the wealthy, but rather, seems to want to abolish their class power, so that wealth may be created and distributed differently, and all may live decently. In other words, the goal is not personal enrichment but social well-being: None rich, none poor, all gainfully employed and reasonably well off. The fact that some, many, or all rich people have undergone personal sacrifice to accumulate their fortunes does nothing to discredit this aspiration. In fact, it simply misses the point.

2. If anything, the 1% at the top are the exploited, since they are guaranteed no return and in fact risk their very capital, whereas the "exploited" 99% get paid for their labor no matter what.

Whose capital was risked on the pretext that banks are "too big to fail?" Obviously, the public's. Who sacrificed their homes, jobs, and retirement pensions so that financial swindlers could enrich themselves, often by betting against stocks they were avidly promoting? Obviously, the general public did. Who is currently sitting on trillions of dollars of bailout capital while tens of millions of Americans wallow in economic misery? That's right, the one percent, our economic "benefactors," who somehow never get around to investing in job creation, though they claim they are doing so night and day. But where are the jobs?

On the labor question, the idea that workers enjoy a guarantee of being paid for their labor is absurd. Most of the necessary labor in society is at best very partially paid, and much of it completely unpaid, like the raising of children. At present, the economic gains realized from rising productivity created by human labor are monopolized by a corporate elite that itself produces nothing. Commodification of production is not a productive effort! (Question: How many credit default swaps does it take to feed a family?)

3. Billionaire cable television "visionary" John Malone had to share motel rooms with his fellow owner Bob Magness on the way to the top.

Sacrifice on the way to the top does not justify having a "top." The pyramid structure of capitalism, in which the 99% resemble crabs in a bucket climbing all over each other, in order to arrive at the summit where the 1% reside, is simply unnecessary. Another world is possible, and urgently necessary.

4. Successful people have the nerve, drive, and self-assurance that the rest of us lack, and are extraordinarily hard workers. They "work a lot harder and smarter than do the rest of us."

Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that some combination of personal attributes correlates with financial success under capitalism. Tamny believes "being smart" has a lot to do with this, although without a scientific understanding of human nature we are not in a position to know what the relevant combination of success-breeding qualities are. It seems a reasonable surmise that greed and aggression are more prominent among these than "being smart" is, since these are the qualities capitalism most rewards, but let's leave this part of the discussion aside. What follows from the fact, if it is a fact, that 1% of the people have "success" attributes that the 99% mostly lack? The only thing that logically follows is a critical comment about the perversity of capitalist incentives and rewards, which breed moral indifference at the top and mass starvation and disease at the bottom. Why is such a grotesque social arrangement tolerable, much less praiseworthy?

5. "It's not where we start in life that dictates where we end it."

In fact, quite the contrary. If we are born with the attributes of a mathematical genius, but live in a nomadic society whose members only know how to count to ten, what are the chances that we will develop the ambition to be a mathematical genius, much less fulfill it? What are the chances that a child born with brain damage because his mother passed her pregnancy in chronic hunger, will become a great scientist, a great teacher, a great anything? For that matter, what are the chances that a child born to a billionaire will develop a healthy social conscience? In all of these cases, the chances are close to zero. Only a social revolution could change this, which is hopefully what the Occupy movement will become.

In short, whatever a society's capacity for upward mobility (and it is greatly exaggerated in the U.S.), it simply does not justify an arrangement where one percent of the population monopolizes social wealth for its own enrichment while starving the general public of the resources it needs for education, social services, and even survival.

6. People who criticize Wall Street investment bankers for merely "moving money around" are guilty of "staggering" naivete. These people dispense capital, the lifeblood of society, and their skills are so rare and valuable that work consumes their entire lives.

The frequently joyless grind that so many of the rich become trapped by may simply be added to the rest of the unbearable social costs of capitalism, so that it, too, may spur us on to revolution. There is nothing naive in this. In fact, the "naivete" rests with those who think capitalism, now subject to world-wide protest and virtually constant environmental calamity, is a sustainable system.

7. The 1% "make all of our lives easier, cheaper, and more entertaining."

Suicide is certainly easier and cheaper than living a long life, and the spectacle of an intelligent species being led to extinction by 1% of its members is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but such observations hardly justify a lemming-like devotion to suicidal leadership.

8. John D. Rockefeller thrived in spite of repeated rejections, unlike most people, so he deserved his wealth. This was also true of Steve Jobs and (author) Kathryn Stockett.

In 1914, John D. Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which owned the mines, the boarding houses, the campgrounds, the buildings, the saloons, the recreation spots, the schools, the churches, and the shacks of his coal miners.

Rockefeller employed the miners, the supervisors and guards who beat them, the spies who ferreted out the union members, the scabs that broke the strikes, the company coroners and judges who refused damages for injuries and deaths, and the detectives who ended up riddling the miners' families with bullets from a Gatling gun.

For years Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had ignored the miners’ leaking roofs, sagging floors, and broken windows, the old newspapers nailed to the walls to keep out winter, the thick clouds of soot that blanketed the ground and choked the air, the stagnant creek full of mine slag and garbage that ran behind the miners’ huts, the barefoot, hungry children that played beside the putrid water, the illiterate parents who could offer them no better life, and the inadequacy of $1.60 a day pay. The company summarily rejected the miners’ request for an eight-hour day, an honest weighing of the coal, a chance to shop in non-company stores, a 10% raise, and union recognition.

John D. Rockefeller, with $24 million invested in Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was utterly devoted to perpetuating misery and preventing unionization: “We would rather that the unfortunate conditions continue...than that American workmen should be deprived of their right, under the Constitution, to work for whom they please.”

One fine day, the miners struck. Troops loyal to Rockefeller mounted a machine gun on a hill overlooking the miners’ camp and exploded two dynamite bombs. The miners grabbed their rifles and took up positions in nearby streams, leaving women and children alone in their tents.

At dusk, the militiamen descended from the hills with coal oil and set fire to the miners’ tents. The workers’ wives and children died like trapped rats while the rampaging soldiers looted their belongings. The next day, a telephone linesman lifted a twisted iron cot and found the “Black Hole of Ludlow,” a pit filled with the charred, pretzel-shaped bodies of two young mothers and eleven children.

Publicist Ivy Lee issued press releases announcing that Rockefeller’s strikebreaking triumph had cast a blow for “industrial freedom.”

Granted, few of us can match John D. Rockefeller in the personal attributes necessary to accumulate vast capital while producing such social disasters, but how many of us want them, or should want them?

The Sources:

Adamic, Louis, "Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America," (Chelsea House, 1958)

Chomsky, Noam, "Equality: Language Development, Human Intelligence, and Social Organization," reprinted in "The Chomsky Reader," (Pantheon, 1987)

Foner, Philip S., Ed. "History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 5 - The AFL in the Progressive Era 1910-1915," (International Publishers, 1980)

Tamny, John, "What You Don't Often Hear About Those 'Greedy' One Percenters" Forbes, November 27, 2011

Tye, Larry, "The Father of Spin - Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations," (Crown, 1998)

Yellen, Samuel, "American Labor Struggles," (S.A. Russell, 1936)

Election Bulletins from The Garlic News Bureau

2011-12-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Republicans to hold group Bar Mitzvah ceremony for all candidates – except Michele Bachman who will have a Bas Mitzvah – to show allegiance and devotion to Israel.

“After the ceremony, as further sign of their deep devotion to financing from American Jewish interests, they will all participate in a bombing raid on a Palestinian refugee camp” said party spokesperson Rush Bimbo.

Depending on how quickly funding follows bombing, the candidates may also participate in additional attacks on Iran, Syria and Rhode Island .

Herman Cain Accuses Michelle Bachman, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher of Sexual Harassment

Hillary Clinton says “ All options were on the table” re her relationship with Herman Cain.

Bill Clinton says “ I did not have sex with Herman Cain, Margaret Thatcher or my wife.”

Barrack Obama leads Perry ,Bachman, Romney, Grumpy, Sleepy and Doc in polls, but trails Dopey, Gingrich, Santoro, Sneezy, Sleazy and Steven Colbair .

Republican Debates to Become Weekly Reality Show on Fox

Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Bill Moyers and Annette Funicello to form new Populist-Disney party, run intellectually superior cartoon candidates for elections in Venezuela and Bolivia.

“ Americans are not yet up to the collective intellectual level we need so we’ll start with more advanced countries” said party spokesperson Helmut Wittgenstein.

Crackpot Realism moves ahead of Perpetuation of Idiocy as primary reasons for voting.

In Primaries or General elections.

Stay Tuned…

in or out…

wont make any difference

Occupy Wall Street Is No Tea Party

2011-12-10T18:55:00.001-08:00

by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

In spite of the predictably absurd attempt of the corporate media to portray the Occupy Wall Street movement as a left-wing version of the Tea Party (so Obama and GOP "moderates" can pose as reasonable centrists) the two movements are completely different. The Tea Party is a fake populist movement of the well-off seeking to attack "big government" that helps the poor and middle class, while Occupy Wall Street is a movement of the downwardly mobile ex-middle class seeking neither small government nor big government, but rather, representative government. Their objection is to a government of rich capital, by rich capital, for rich capital.

The Tea Party attempts to paint the Occupy movement as hypocritical on the basis that Danny Glover and Michael Moore are included in the 99% while successful businessmen are considered part of the 1% exploiting class even when they are far from being millionaires or billionaires. But this is nonsense, as both Glover and Moore acknowledge that they are the part of the 1% that happens to sympathize with the just aspirations of the 99%, while small business is obviously not part of the gargantuan centers of private wealth that the Occupy movement is indignant about. If anything, small business has benefitted from the occupy movement, which has been a boon for coin laundries, pizza parlors, and camping supply stores. In any case, small business is simply not part of the corporate owning class monopolizing social property for its own ends.

The important distinction between the one percent and the ninety-nine percent has to do with private ownership of social property. The one percent lives mostly on investments, i.e., stocks, bonds, rents, and other (social) property income. Its income derives mostly from the labor of other people. The 99% lives mostly on wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. Its income derives mostly from laboring for those who own.

The one percent doesn't see anything wrong in runaway war spending; continual tax cuts for the rich; HMO price gouging; the off-shoring of millions of jobs; trillions of dollars in unconditional bailout money going to banks and transnational corporations; fiscal stimulus packages that make the stock market boom while doing little or nothing to help 25 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. The good society is the society that promotes maximum profit for the 1%, no matter how much suffering and injustice is borne by the unimportant 99%.

According to the Tea Partiers, U.S.-based corporations have every right to flee the country, enticed abroad by lower taxes, less regulation, and cheap labor. These are sound moves any corporation accountable to its shareholders has to make, and the fact that such outsourcing systematically erodes the U.S. middle class, and has for several decades, is an incidental consequence. Profit is holy, however earned, and the destruction of people's lives mere collateral damage ("externalities" in the jargon of free trade theorists).

A favorite mantra of Tea Partiers is that workers are not being robbed by capital but are voluntarily agreeing to whatever wages and benefits employers feel like offering. Of course, we could say the same of robbery victims on city streets, who voluntarily hand over their wallets to armed hoodlums when given the choice of doing that or having their brains blown out. This makes almost as much sense as saying that U.S. workers voluntarily erode their standard of living by submitting to outsourcing, runaway military spending, repeated tax cuts for the super rich, bankster bailouts and on and on. What choice do they have? (Note: polls show that the American people favor increased taxes on the wealthy rather than further cuts in government services, but who cares? The wealthy control the government, and trillions of dollars in further cuts are on the way, while tax rates continue to decline for the wealthy.)

Particularly ludicrous is the Tea Party claim that Occupy Wall Street and Obama are European-style "socialists," and that their penchant for excessive social spending is driving both Europe and the U.S. to economic ruin, the characteristic destiny of socialist states. This fanciful thesis overlooks the fact that the Occupy movement is a severe critic of Obama, while European socialism ended with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (it was in all the papers). Apparently, Tea Partiers need a refresher course on political economy: Cuba is a socialist society; the European Union is entirely capitalist. There is no question but that it has fallen into serious crisis, but it's capitalism that's in crisis, not socialism.

Equally foolish is the notion that the Occupy protesters' criticism of capital is hypocritical unless they renounce their use of cars, airplanes, computers, smart phones, Facebook, any and every technological item owned by corporate America. The upshot is that if you object to capital buying the government, you are anti-business! Of course, a slave in the ante-Bellum South could have pronounced slavery morally irreproachable on similar grounds, since slavemasters were the source of everything the good life had to offer in their day. Abolitionists were simply anti-cotton.

The Tea Partiers never tire of reminding us that we are children of the Founding Fathers, and therefore somehow obligated to allow corporate America to loot the public treasury. History is not their strong suit. Thomas Jefferson explicitly rejected rule by "monied incorporations," which he regarded as a kind of slavery. Speaking at the 50th commemoration of the Declaration of Independence he said their triumph would spell the death of the American Revolution. If he had lived to see corporations given all the rights of biological persons, he never would have stopped screaming.

The accusation that the Occupy movement is just an attempt to foist more "big government" on the American people can simply be dismissed as the rantings of modern day Know Nothings. Ask yourself this: Is anyone calling for the elimination of the U.S. national security state, now the largest planned economy in the world? This is the biggest part of "big government," and the GOP, the Tea Party, and the Democrats are all united in promoting it. In short, big government is here to stay; the only question is what master it shall serve, corporations or we-the-people.

There is no need to deny that government had a hand in the 2008 disaster, but capital created the speculative monster, and not for the first time. Busts, panics, crashes, and break-downs are a constant occurrence under capitalism, and can't be remedied at the ballot box, no matter who our preferred candidates are. Hence the Occupy movement, and the rising tide of protest throughout the world.

Tea Partiers like to claim that government "interference" in the marketplace is artificial and destructive of "free markets." (Their belief in the immaculate conception of capitalism is truly touching.) But so is corporate interference. Market distortion due to the centralizing influence of private tyranny, i.e. corporations, is completely contrary to the free market forces described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. According to Smith, free markets are characterized by extensive and pervasive equality, not oligarchy, which is what we have now. Tea Partiers never take this into account.

What Tea Partiers, libertarians, and other free-trade enthusiasts never get is that big government is the creation of big business, which demanded national regulation of a national market to replace the chaos of conflicting state regulations inherited from the 19th century. So being pro-big business and anti-government is like being pro-acorn and anti-tree.

Postscript: Ron Paul can no longer count on a warm welcome in the Tea Party movement, and he more than any other single individual gave the movement its claim to populism.

Sources:

For a Tea Party take on the Occupy Wall Street movement, see Sally Zelikovsky, "Occupy Wall Street Protesters Need a Dose of Reality," Marin Independent Journal, December 6, 2011

On Adam Smith, see Daniel Fusfeld's "The Age of the Economist," (Harper Collins, 1994) pps. 23-36

On Smith's view that free markets need to be characterized by pervasive equality, see Noam Chomsky, "Keeping the Rabble in Line," (Common Courage, 1994) page 248.

On the Tea Party, see Paul Street's "Real Populism vs. Fake," in the December 2011 edition of Z Magazine.

On big business being the source of federal government regulation, see Gabriel Kolko, "The Triumph of Conservatism - A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916," (Free Press, 1963)

More From Agents Of The 1 %

2011-12-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

After divisive bickering over use of the word “Occupy” as the name for the movement to transform the system and not simply work on grievances of a particular group within it, the unofficial agents of the 1% came together and submitted a series of new title words deemed more politically correct.

These came from many different multi-diverse-ethno-racial-sex-lifestyle language specialists. What follows is only a brief list of submissions:

Sodomize Wall Street

Circumcise Wall Street

Make Wall Street Your Bitch

Cut Wall Street’s Balls Off

Beat The Living Shit Out Of Wall Street

Send Wall Street To A Therapist

Run Your Mouth Until Wall Street Gives Up

Colonize, Decolonize or Recolonize Wall Street

Overwhelm Wall Street With Hugs and Love

Curse Out Wall Street in Many Languages But Not English

For the complete list, and the strategy and tactics paper on How To Keep The Movement Divided and Powerless, write to:

Chief Agent of the 1%

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington D.C.

Occupy Oz

2011-12-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

by Michael K. Smith

Those who never wanted an Occupy Wall Street movement are now in the business of telling us why it's all over, even as its animating concerns continue provoking popular discontent. L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal (Are Tent Cities Free Speech?) claims that Occupy Wall Street "has worn out the patience of even the most liberal cities" due to alleged "threats to health and safety." "If they have to rely on unlawful campouts and disrupting neighborhoods instead of using speech," Crovitz goes on, "their message must not be very persuasive."

As usual with the Journal, there is no logic to the conclusion. There is no way the Occupy protesters can get a fair hearing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, or in the corporate media in general for that matter, which is what made occupying public space a speech issue in the first place. Crovitz might have some credibility if he had persuaded the Wall Street Journal's editors to give regular editorial space to the Occupy Wall Street movement in return for their voluntarily dismantling the protest encampments. But that would have quickly led to a critique of capitalism, which the corporate media cannot abide. Better to slander and distort the message of the opponent you fear you can't honestly defeat, than permit a fair debate. Hence we repeatedly hear that Occupy Wall Street "has no message," as though "Make The Banks Pay" were a declaration of impenetrable obscurity.

In any case, what has really worn out American patience is not protest, but capital, especially the global corporations that monopolize the gains from productivity increases created by the entire U.S. workforce, then squander them on endless war, hucksterism, and outright fraud. This has left nearly everyone deeply in debt, and increasing numbers without jobs, houses, pensions, or hope for the future. Naturally, the proposed remedy is more tax cuts for the class that looted the public treasury and now sits on trillions of dollars of unproductive assets, refusing to invest in job creation. But giving them more money is like giving free gasoline to arsonists.

There is no protest without disruption, of course, so Crovitz's complaint on this score is simply a rejection of protest per se. The policy implication would seem to be to cancel the Martin Luther King day holiday and renounce the civil rights movement, which was as inconvenient in its day as Occupy Wall Street is today. The nerve of those people who violated established norms for the use of public space, in order to impose their anti-lynching views on the rest of us!

As for the wisdom of occupying public parks, there may be some merit to the claim that political speech has no right to usurp the other legitimate uses of park space. Perhaps it is time to consider occupying the headquarters of major media corporations, which monopolize access to mass audiences with infantilizing commentary and "entertainment," both designed to pre-empt the emergence of a popular challenge to plutocratic minority rule. In such venues the free speech issues couldn't be more stark and compelling.

Left Agents Of The 1%

2011-11-23T13:05:00.000-08:00

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation, mistakes and setbacks occurred which are minimal when compared to its success in calling attention to the private domination of America’s wealth by the upper 1% as major cause of our social problems. Agents of that minority are feverishly at work, whether directly on the payroll or simply acting according to anti-social programming that teaches individualism , selfish egoism and the divisive identity politics that reduce the 99% to splintered minorities and assure continued domination by the richest 1%.

Direct employees of corporate capital in media and politics either downgrade the movement or try to incorporate it, while some supposed progressive critics claim that only their specific problems must be on its agenda. Any attempt to bring down barriers between people and promote unity is labeled racist, sexist, exclusionary, bigoted and other expletives that play well among these agents of division.

Groups that have penetrated the gated communities of political isolation and begun to learn about each others problems and the need for unity in overcoming them are obviously seen as a major threat by the ruling powers. But less obvious are the alleged social critics who operate as a second front for the 1%, exercising their negative judgments of the movement while opting for change in the system, but only the kind which either guarantees their privileged positions in it, or assures their reputations as revolutionaries of the word, if not the deed. These servants of the 1% are often well meaning members of the working class, but just as often from the upper income levels of the 99% and quick to solve America’s problems by maintaining walls between ghettoized citizens and creating progress only for specially affirmed individuals behind those walls. In faithful service to their patrons, they help keep Americans divided , conquered and forced into thinking as minorities rather than acting as a majority.

The movement has to contend with liberals claiming alliance in order to soften its critique and bring it back into affirmative politics for corporate capital that guarantee negative outcomes for most of the 99%. These political hustlers speak out of both sides of their mouths but are exceeded by a conservative lunatic fringe which openly scrapes and bows before that wealth. Many liberals pretend to work for the nation’s majority while maintaining their jobs on the payroll of its tiniest minority while many conservatives openly grovel at the feet of wealth and unashamedly attribute all American well being to the generosity of the same earthly deities: rich capitalists.

Some left critics operate from a funky version of the more conventional ivory tower; while professing true belief in their respective subdivisions of the 99% , they insist that minorities - of all diminished labels - must flock to the defense of a democratic party owned by the 1%, because the republicans are even worse. In other words, in the American political tradition, vote for crippling polio or you may get terminal cancer, and don’t even think about a cure for the disease much less being healthy. This earns them credentials as approved radicals with tenured academic positions , best selling books and op-ed space in establishment gazettes, but they should be seen for what they are: agents of the 1%.

The liberation movement labeled Occupy Wall Street is a local manifestation of a world wide phenomenon not likely to be destroyed by overt or covert opposition, no matter its temporary setbacks. Its global status is important as political and economic crises grow more dangerous and threatening to humanity’s future. The truly radical democratic practice of Americans coming together over a common systemic problem affecting all and not simply a single issue , however serious, affecting only a few is something new and profoundly important. The call for the 99% to act as a unified majority and not allow itself to be victimized any longer by the divide and conquer politics of the 1% and its agents could not come at a more critical time.

As threats of expanding war, environmental destruction and poverty accelerate, public control over national wealth would mean a giant step towards creating peace and justice. This enrages rulers who have the power to inflict physical and mental violence through their control of weaponry and information. But social media have moved from being simple marketing devices to become democratic tools for change. They help bring human liberation closer to global fulfillment of a democratic ideal: society run by and for all the people, and not just a tiny segment of the wealthiest among them.

Agents of the 1% are desperately trying to muffle humanity’s increasing call for justice by promoting greater paranoia with irrational stories about pending nuclear violence from Iran, which has no nuclear weapons, and deafening silence about the nuclear threat presented by Israel, which has hundreds of nukes and a paranoid narrative of pending extermination to occur at any moment. The United States and NATO act as tools of the global 1% in suppression of the will of the 99% everywhere, and in signs of disintegrating sanity among the paranoid rich present themselves as spreading democracy and freedom among a global population by murdering more of its people.

Occupy Wall Street USA is part of a liberation movement to Occupy All Streets worldwide and create a whole new system , but on the way to that goal activists and supporters must be wary of agents of the 1% both in and out of established circles. They will stop at nothing to impede the move of the 99% toward democracy, from fearlessly defending the right of millionaires to become billionaires to divisively insisting their issue or group must be the center of attention, to worst of all, the insanity of not only more war, but even nuclear war.

Another world is possible and necessary but in moving forward to reach it, we also need to watch our backs in order to create it.

A Global Revolution

2011-11-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

What began in Tunisia and was dubbed an Arab Spring has spread to the rest of the world, seemingly for different reasons in different places but slowly becoming one vast movement toward democracy and the political economic transformation necessary for humanity’s survival. But while this hopeful sign of people on the move increases, the threats to it become more numerous and deadly. As electronic communication tools help the tendency toward unity and democracy among the 99%, they also increase the destructive power of the 1% . The imperial minority’s ability to kill more people, destroy more governments , enslave more populations and increase damage to the environmental basis of all life while rushing to further exploit it in pursuit of profit has brought dangers of a newer and more deadly kind. The dawning consciousness among people across the globe needs to overtake and end the destructive process of private profit accumulation at the loss of all publics on the planet, wherever they may reside and whatever belief system they practice or preach.

The American phase of this movement began with the Wall Street occupation in New York and has spread to many American cities since, with success in highlighting a radical democratic governance technique and message of unity that surpasses its flaws and overcomes attacks by agents of the 1% . This is all happening at a time when American belief in supposedly democratic government has sunk to deservedly new lows. Established power is at an extremely bipolar phase in response as it simultaneously attempts to crush, subvert or incorporate the growing demands of a public frustrated into becoming what minority power fears most: a majority democratic movement for substantial and not merely cosmetic change in the system.

Minority dominators practice obsessive concern for their economic private parts and this masturbatory focus brings the system closer to moral and financial bankruptcy. As the perverse lust for private profit reduces well paid employment in the center by increasing low paid labor in peripheral parts of the shrinking empire, it attacks meager social safety nets in that center which were created to save capitalism during its last global crisis in the 1930s. Public sector work forces are savagely slashed and pensions are cut as less and less people are employed in a political economy that has further reduced humanity from commodities in a market to electronic symbols on a computer screen.

Positive changes in communications offer an opportunity for a massive democratic leap forward but private profiteers still control staggering wealth and their blind lust to amass even more billions has eclipsed – until now – the need to trans-form and not simply re-form material reality.

The American movement has corporate media parroting the political line in the same bi-polar fashion that often lauds the democratic aspect of what’s going on while questioning its purpose. Meanwhile, military slaughters continue unabated, sometimes with long distance murderers who kill innocents with electronic devises that enable them do their dirty work in rooms thousands of miles away from their victims with no more human contact than someone playing a video game while seated on a commode. The isolated assassins are an ironic contrast in a world that sees millions in contact they have never before been able to achieve. While some agents of the 1% operate in solitude totally removed from the bloody murders they commit, Bradley Manning sits in prison for acting on his conscience and informing his fellow citizens of the crimes of modern warfare. His action, representative of the high moral ground most people at least wish to occupy, contrasts with the murderous idiocy of what passes for “normal” material reality, and what the new global movement stands against .

Electronic media have finally become truly social but they are not simply the domain of those organizing demonstrations that represent the 99%. Agents of the 1% operate networks of murder and spying that can’t succeed in the long term but add to producing confusion and more violence in the short term. Attacks on the 99% in order to maintain criminal profit margins for the 1% and their agents are taking on increasingly insane character, with even some ruling class members worrying that this could destroy everything and not just their personal wealth.

As an example , continued and ever more feverish claims that Iran is threatening to annihilate jews with nuclear weapons which do not exist, while the hundreds of nuclear weapons which do exist in Israel are unmentioned by the fanatics there and alleged American government representatives who work for them here. More deadly war is threatened, with death and destruction that would make the present crisis even greater, and it is already slipping beyond the control of the ruling 1% and its agents. Truly, it has never been more essential that the great majority of the 99% move towards the radical economic restructuring and totally transformed political process that is the only thing that will save humanity. And political democracy means the end of private profit accumulation in control of the social and natural environment of planet earth, and the beginning of a system that acknowledges the rights of all people to share the benefits of their world.

We should thank the demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt and of the Occupy Wall Street Movement for calling our attention to the fact that another world is not only possible but necessary. And then we should join them in bringing it about. Quickly.

Occupy Wall Street and the False Cry of "What Do They Want?"

2011-11-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

Now that the one percent of the population that owns the "private" economy has been put on the defensive, the corporate media is making a show of false concern that the Occupy Wall Street protesters need to seize the moment and pursue change in the electoral arena that capital dominates from top to bottom. The upshot is that Wall Street wouldn't have systematically lowered the standard of living for eighty percent of Americans for the past three-and-a-half decades if it had known that the victims of that policy would find it objectionable, so now those "inadvertent" victims need only pressure their elected representatives with a precise message and relief will be dispatched forthwith. Sure.

Our leaders are not idiots, as might appear, but they are desperate. The system of global capital has fallen into deep crisis with no solutions in sight, while worldwide protest continues to grow. The only way of arresting the momentum of popular rebellion is to straitjacket it within the arena of sound bites and bumper sticker slogans, where it can be gradually suffocated.

Obviously, we should not take the bait. The only reason big business has sat up and taken notice of the plight of the 99% is because the 99% announced loudly and inconveniently that it had no intention of remaining passive one moment longer. On the eve of Occupy Wall Street's emergence into the national spotlight there was no shortage of damning reports showing the vast destruction an increasingly lopsided distribution of wealth was wreaking, but those reports were routinely ignored. Wall Street has never cared that misallocation of wealth inevitably produces grotesque poverty and mass insecurity, and it doesn't now. It only cares about profit and market share, and anything that threatens its drive to maximize them. The latter is the only reason the corporate media deigns to notice Occupy Wall Street at all.

Now is the time to insist that capitalism is the central problem, not this or that corrupt politician or greedy corporation. Capitalism is by its very nature greedy, and capitalist politicians are by their very nature corrupt. There is little point in pretending otherwise.

We have been told - ad nauseam - that the "free market," i.e., capitalism, delivers a broad prosperity while protecting individual liberty against unwanted encroachments by the state. To whatever extent this may have been true in the past, it is clearly untrue in the American present, where the middle class is shrinking, poverty is growing, and the Bill of Rights serves as toilet paper for a national security state determined to wage endless war.

The Occupy Wall Street movement ought to say, loudly and repeatedly, that free markets don't exist. Their doctrinal requirements are regularly flouted by the entire developed world, which became developed protecting its fledgling markets against international competition it couldn't hope to beat until its own markets got established. How could it have been otherwise? There isn't a single industrialized country that got that way adopting the fantasies of the free market enthusiasts. And when these fantasies are imposed, economies collapse, as with Argentina in 2001, which was the International Monetary Fund's most faithful adherent of free market orthodoxy.

In point of fact, all developed countries feature extensive state involvement in the allegedly private economy, including in the U.S.. So the issue is not free markets vs. government involvement, it's the nature of that government involvement. That is to say, the question is simply whether the government should promote exclusively business interests, or the general welfare of all Americans. Occupy Wall Street says the latter, but the message will not be taken to heart unless popular rebellion remains in the streets.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans support federal guarantees of public assistance for those who can't work, unemployment insurance, subsidized prescription drugs and nursing home care for the elderly, at least a minimum level of health care, social security, and federally guaranteed child care for low-income working mothers. None of this can be justified on "free market" grounds. In fact, the free marketeers have long been hard at work stripping away these social democratic protections.

In short, neoliberal "free market" economics undermine education and health, increase inequality, and reduce labor's share in income. That's why there is an Occupy Wall Street movement, and why there must continue to be.

Combative Obama Renounces Socialism

2011-11-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

by Michael K. Smith

Washington (CNN) - Seeking to recover his once-impressive standing in the polls, President Obama on Monday continued to position himself as the most responsible candidate in the 2012 presidential race.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at "so-called progressives" clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

"Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up," he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. "The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government."

"We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed 'too big to fail.'" Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare." To sustained applause the president added, "I hereby do so."

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a "private option" that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. "The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all," proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. "We've got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight." The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. "As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves - like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks."

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available to the elderly through Medicare. "Obviously the market is more efficient than government," said Obama. "I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you'll pardon the expression," the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those "don't count," because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq "over," Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. "George Bush declared 'mission accomplished' in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country," the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for "staking out the middle ground" by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.

The Garlic: Big Tweets About Small Twits

2011-11-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

35,000 More Women Come Forward With Claims Of Being Sexually Harassed by Herman Cain.

Bill Clinton says “I did not have sex with any of those women.”

Democrats and upper middle class feminists call for Cain’s public execution.

Republicans demand 2012 election be cancelled and Cain become president by acclimation in 2011.

99% of American public doesn’t give a shit.

Israel Charges Iran With History’s First Anti-Semitic Hate Crime.

“Ancient Iranians murdered Christ” claims Israeli foreign minister Meshugina Goyishacupp.

More orthodox jews claim that Christ deserved to die and charge him with being history’s first self hating Jew.

U.N. Insecurity Council demands boycott and embargo of all Iranian thoughts dating from the death of Christ.

Experts agree it may be difficult to completely suppress all thoughts but free world democracies should at least try.

Sarkozy And Obama Accused Of Being Right For The First Time.

Private conversation reveals that both leaders think Netanyahu an obnoxious and murderous liar who exceeds their own obnoxious and murderous lying and makes things bad for all other obnoxious murderous liars who lead western free world nations towards final victory in the battle against godless communism.

Or terrorism.

Or global revolution .

Or something.

Gloria Allred And Alan Dershowitz Challenge Rush Limbaugh And Ann Coulter To Nationally Televised Battle To The Death.

Tag-Team opponents will spit, hissy fit and taunt one another verbally until total brain death results.

Bout will be simulcast on all three networks and PBS, C-span , the Comedy channel, ESPN and the Cartoon network. NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, World Cup and Kick, Punch, Stab, Eye Gouge and Genital Crush TV games all cancelled so world can watch.

99% of Americans rooting for all four to lose.

New Ballot Measure To Make Corporate Fetus Eligible To Vote And Get Food Stamps But Not Serve in Military.

Members of the new Cro-Magnon political party placed the measure on the ballot by getting the necessary signatures at mental health crisis centers.

As few as two conspirators who speak of incorporating can be guaranteed all rights – including many denied to quite a few citizens – from the time of mental conception.

“The mere idea of incorporation is enough to make it plain and clear that a new life is to be formed, and anyone threatening that life will be guilty of a capital crime” said an anonymous Republican presidential candidate.

An anonymous Democratic party spokesperson expressed shock that the corporate fetus would still be unprotected in its earlier form as a zygot. “All life in formation – except in cases of national defense or profit protection - must be held sacred”, he, she or it said.

Stay tuned for regular updates...

The Garlic , a subsidiary of Legalienate , owned by card carrying members of the 99%

Monotheist Capitalism, Monopoly Religion,and the Mall of One God

2011-11-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

When humans were worshippers of numerous deities we were at a materially primitive level of development. Life was such a struggle that its mystery could not be dealt with unless some explanations or rationales were created for what seemed too crazy, even at our early stages. So we created deities for just about everything; the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, the stars, trees, insect life. You name it and we had a god for it. We organized our lives, kinships, religions and styles of worship around these numerous deities. But then something happened that took ages to transform us into what is now called monotheism and it saw the material development of the world, or at least the western dominated part of it, such as had never been seen before.

Part of this organization of ever larger societies and their wealth under the control of ever smaller classes of ruling people can be timed with the breakdown of all those gods and their conglomeration, or really incorporation, into the one god abrahamic faith. While the descendants of the abraham-old testament scriptures have been at each others throats during the time of development, they share in the story of monopoly control of the supernatural and immaterial explanations for the mystery of life, which may have helped make monopoly control of natural material reality more possible. Neither has been all good or all bad but at present both are a menace in their controlling form, while possibly offering some hope for humanity’s future in their idealistic essence if that essence is ever taken from the minority royal priesthood of wealth and claimed by democratic masses.

The abrahamic triad has much to atone for, perhaps especially the jewish-christian branch .They reduced truly multi-cultural and diverse deities to a monopoly monetary-supremacist patriarchal CEO of sun, moon, fire, water,wind and soil , the awesome mystery and majesty of the universe reduced to something with a penis.

And circumsized at that!

Republicans To Run Zygote in 2012: Obama Appeals for Pre-Birth Vote

2011-10-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Debating the Legal Start of Life

A constitutional amendment facing voters in Mississippi
would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person,
effectively branding abortion and some forms of birth
control as murder. (NYT 10/26/11)

The 99% Solution

2011-10-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith

The sudden return of mass protest around the theme of class warfare is the best news we've had in a long time. While a clueless alliance of Blue Dog reactionaries, Tea Party Know Nothings and "traditional" cement-head Republicans waxes rhetorical about "unfunded mandates," the deranged killing machine known as U.S. foreign policy continues to run amok on a limitless credit card without a peep of protest from the political class. Fortunately, the people in the streets know self-serving hypocrisy when they see it.

Calling themselves "the 99%," the Occupy Wall Street campaign has loudly rejected the notion that the U.S. operates with the consent of the governed, and in just a few weeks has mushroomed from a local protest into a global movement against unrestrained greed.

Calls for the movement to provide instant solutions and precise demands badly miss the point. In the initial stages protest is its own message, and need not sign its name to a laundry list of grievances. With time those grievances can't help but become well known, but for now, "Make the Banks Pay," should be a clear enough message to those who have lost their jobs, homes, and pensions to the Wall Street swindlers.

As always, dangers abound, and the Pelosi narcotizers are already at work trying to co-opt the movement. But it appears they will have no easy time of it. Something more than a cosmetic jobs bill (offering employment to perhaps four percent of the workers who need it) and Obamacare administered by HMO profiteers will be necessary if protesters are to be enticed away from their anti-corporate rebellion. But there is no sign the Democrats are prepared to abandon their GOP Lite dogma, which means that the protests can only grow, as they are doing.

Popular rebellion has re-emerged because of longstanding elite contempt for the common people and the commons. Wages and benefits have been cut, jobs exported, government services slashed. Pensions have been looted, the environment and the Bill of Rights trashed, millions of homes foreclosed. And six countries have been attacked by Obama in less than three years, with attendant destruction on an appalling scale, while Obama indulges political rhetoric appropriate to a juvenile gang leader. And through it all the two major candidate producing organizations, the Democrats and Republicans, have continued to proclaim the U.S. the land of democracy, prosperity and freedom. All of these values still exist in America, of course, but increasingly only for the favored few who own the private economy and run the national security state. For the rest, life is a mad scramble to catch the crumbs falling off their plates.

The banks cannot be forced to pay by re-electing Obama, who came to the White House on an avalanche of Wall Street contributions and returned the favor with the most generous bail-out package in financial history. Obama is what Malcolm X termed a "House Negro," so identified with his owner that he uses the pronoun "we" to inquire after the master's failing health. "What's the matter boss - we sick?" One can easily imagine Obama asking George Soros the same question about the ailing U.S. economy.

Political scientist Michael Parenti has helpfully outlined the one percent of the population that the Wall Street protesters are demonstrating against as follows:

"You are a member of the owning class when your income is very large and comes mostly from the labor of other people - that is, when others work for you, either in a company you own or by creating the wealth that allows your investments to increase in value." Parenti notes that this has little or nothing to do with engaging in hard work. "Hard work seldom makes anyone rich. The secret to wealth is to have others work hard for you. This explains why workers who spend their lives toiling in factories or offices retire with little or no wealth to speak of, while the stockholding owners of these businesses, who do not work in them and usually have never visited them, can amass considerable fortunes."

And amass fortunes they have. According to PBS, the top twenty percent of Americans own 84 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom forty percent have only 0.3 percent, that is, virtually nothing. But as the Tea Party reminds us, that's OK, because poor people have "never given anyone a job," while the rich always allow us to prostitute ourselves to their demand for limitless profit.

What is it about elite generosity we don't understand?

Sources:

Street, Paul, "The Filthy Rich," Z Magazine, October 2011

Rasmus, Jack, "Emerging Labor Responses to the Economic Crisis," Z Magazine, September 2011

Parenti, Michael, Democracy For The Few, Seventh Edition, p. 7

Class War : It’s About Time

2011-10-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Whenever murmurs among the people indicate growing awareness that they are paying an exorbitant price in order to enrich a tiny minority, the terrified cry of “class war” is raised by the poor huddled masses of billionaires, millionaires and their corporate servants in politics and media. This contradicts the fictional notion that there are no classes in American society, that we are all “middle class” and oh, a few unfortunates are poor but that’s only temporary. As soon as their investments pay off they too will arrive at the exalted status of “middle”. That would be right after the Easter bunny delivers chocolate covered Tooth Fairies to all the little boys and girls.

In truth, this nation has been a stratified class society since its origins under the rule of rich Europeans who drafted a constitution ensuring their rights of property and assuring that the majority rabble would not threaten those sacred scriptures. It was Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising of the common people incensed over debts and foreclosures – sound familiar? - that brought about the first ten amendments to that document and saw to it that human beings and not just their property owning masters had some rights. Unfortunately, you still need lots of money to establish that equality in court but corporate mind management has done a great job creating illusions among a great mass of Americans that they are somehow equal to a very small group which earns (?)millions and even billions a year. In fact, while demonstrators at Wall Street and in other cities representing the 99% of us who live below the top 1% strive to create real democracy, it should be understood that only a fraction of that 1% are rich beyond the imaginations of ancient rulers who were seen as deities by the peasants of their times. That these modern god-like creatures can manipulate citizens of an alleged democracy into thinking they are just like common working people is indication of how successful their faithful servants in media and politics have been at warping the collective mind. But those days are nearing an end.

Even though the “class war” label still draws negative response from subjects who have been on their knees for so long they may never be able to stand up, a majority of citizens who refuse minority masters ruling their world into what could be a terminal state are indeed on their feet loudly saying, no way. That scares the hell out of rich owners of a fiction they have been calling democracy. It’s threatening to become just that and they and their minions are in desperation that the majority rule they fear may soon become reality.

In defense of inequality, hand wringing pleaders for the opulent weep about their enormous tax bills, leaving out the massive amount of dollars they maintain after taxes. Even with the old 90% top tax brackets of the 1950s republican Eisenhower administration, a poor soul with a billion dollars would be left with a measly 100 million. Oh dear! And rest assured that after their well compensated accountants took massive deductions and did other book juggling, nobody ever paid anything remotely close to 90%. And now we have tax rates on the wealthy that are so low even some of them are embarrassed .

When the 400 richest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million Americans - about half the population – and use that wealth to buy politicians and government power , only corporate mind management and slack jawed imbeciles can call that a democratic system. Our income disparity is greater than at any time since 1928. As evidence, over the past twenty five years 80 percent of increased income in America went to the top 5 percent, while the bottom 60 percent lost 7.5 percent. The US has the most billionaires in the world (413), and among those global deities with $5 billion or more there are 57 from the US. If you’re not weeping in pity but in rage, you’re part of the 99%.

The last major crisis of capitalism, the Great Depression, ended with what was called the New Deal. It simply replaced private investment with public investment in order to create jobs, avoid social revolution and save the capitalist profit system for the wealthy minority. This time the crisis is even more serious and it calls for something greater than a New Deal. In fact, we need a whole New Deck.

The increased problems of warfare, environmental destruction, unemployment, poverty and a besieged public sector cannot be solved by relying on the market lust for private profit which created them in the first place. These universal crises call for radical transformation of the political economics at their core. It does seem that more people the world over are demanding change but the forces of reaction will try to channel those demands into further acceptance of a status quo. We need a party that stands against the one percent capitalism that rules, and for the 99% democracy that should. Republicans boldly stride toward soft-core fascism while Democrats mince closer to hard core neo-liberalism. Not just America but humanity cannot accept anything less than wholesale, radical restructuring of the system that threatens all into one that benefits everyone.

Class war? It may be an idea whose time has finally come.

Market Schizophrenia : Wall Street Hears Voices Inside and Out!

2011-10-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

- TOP NEWS -
Goldman Loss Offers a Bad Omen for Wall
Street
The first loss at Goldman Sachs since the financial crisis
points to what could be a more lasting shift in the
financial industry.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/goldman-loss-offers-a-bad-omen-for-wall-street/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Bank Shares Lift Wall Street in a Turnaround
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/business/daily-stock-market-activity.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

U.S. Reveals Evidence of Past Iranian Genital Terror !

2011-10-14T17:40:00.000-07:00

After the shocking news of an Iranian-Mexican plot to murder a Saudi Arabian diplomat, the U.S. State department revealed even more shocking revelations concerning a past crime that rocked the nation and almost caused impeachment of a great leader.

The Secretary of State and her feminist staff claim that the terrorist woman who conducted a vicious oral attack on president Clinton's innocent genitals was actually an Iranian agent sent to work at the White House in order to destroy the government by making Al Gore president after Clinton was impeached.

Corporate media was shocked, as were politicians from both parties .The Israeli lobby called for immediate nuclear attacks on Iran. Actually they've been demanding those attacks for years now, but this astounding charge may well tip the precarious balance toward total insanity.

Stay tuned, take cover, say your prayers and check out Legalienate for all the news that causes fits.

Netanyahu Heals Partisan Divide in Washington

2011-10-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

Fiery Address Unites Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Party Idealists Behind "Jews For Genocide"

Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau
Washington, D.C.

Moses parted the Red Sea. Jesus walked on water. And now Benjamin Netanyahu has healed the partisan divide in Washington D.C., the greatest miracle of all time, according to this morning's editorial in the New York Times.

In a forty-five minute address before a Joint Session of Congress the tough-talking Israeli Prime Minister convinced a heretofore bitterly divided U.S. political class to lay aside its budget battles and concentrate on America's transcendent purpose: to resettle Palestinian Arabs in outer Mongolia so Israel need no longer face the Arab "demographic threat" to Jewish democracy.

The nuance-laden speech, entitled "They Must Go!" was interrupted 637 times by standing ovations, which left many Congress members afflicted with repetitive motion disorders. "He makes it all so clear," gushed California Senator Barbara Boxer, rubbing an elbow dislocated by continuous applause. "Why should we be at each others' throats over budget matters when Israel faces extinction at the hands of HAMAS (Horrible Arab Mothers Affirming Sexuality)?"

"If they are not stopped from having babies on Jewish land," said California's other Senator Diane Feinstein, Jews will soon be a minority in their own country. In other words, it will be the Holocaust all over again."

"And that would undermine the free market," added Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, "because God gave the land to the Jews, and no one has the right to tell a landlord what to do with his land."

"It would also be a defeat for immigrants' rights," said Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) a leading spokesman for comprehensive immigration reform, "because Israel is a nation of immigrants continually made subject to terrorist attacks by Arab nativists refusing to recognize that unlimited immigration is good for everyone. They'll find that out once we relocate them to Mongolia."

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) agreed that violent expulsion was the best solution, but added that Fidel Castro should be included in the forced march to Mongolia. "The Arabs are radical Communists like Fidel. I mean, what's more Communist than one person, one vote? They're birds of a feather that should flock together."

Michele Bachmann (D-Minn.) offered to switch her party affiliation to Likud " if that would help God win in 2012." President Obama praised her spirit of conciliation and said he would consider her as a running mate if she didn't get the GOP nomination.

"She's on my short list," said Obama. "It's either her or Palin or Joe Lieberman," he added." "Bibi has promised to let me know soon."

The president pooh-poohed talk of Bachmann lacking qualifications to serve as president. "She loves God and Israel, and what other qualifications are there?"

KRPA: Kiss Rich People’s Asses

2011-09-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Kiss Rich People’s Asses

Members of the newly organized KRPA group convened in Washington DC and announced plans to run a candidate for president.

“We need to get rid of the socialist Obama. All he’s good for is kissing Israeli ass but we stand for the unappreciated minority that is responsible for creating jobs and making America the great nation it is; rich people are what we are all about and we intend to publicly, passionately kiss their asses, in gratitude for what they do for us!”

Senators, representatives, Fox TV hosts, mainstream pundits and Ayn Rand supporters were thrilled at news of the group’s formation and plans. “At last, a clear sign that the middle class peasants of America finally understand the real nature of things” said P. Clyde Van White, chair of WASMBTYTYWUTEIWTTETTY (We Are So Much Better Than You That You Wouldn’t Understand Things Even If We Tried To Explain Them To You), the organization formed after NMLB (No Millionaire Left Behind) filed for bankruptcy.

A White House spokesperson said the KRPA group would offer no real problems to the Obama reelection campaign. “ We have far more rich people than these scruffy types could ever come up with. And ours are multicultural!

Grateful for Invasion by Integrated Military

2011-09-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

Citizens of the tiny middle eastern nation of Exploitistan were attacked by forces from the USA and despite sustaining horrendous loss of life and property, many said they were happy to be invaded.

A man who lost his entire family under a week long bombing assault before the invasion told embedded media workers he was greatly hurt by the loss of his loved ones but the fact that a totally integrated American force of gays, lesbians, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians and gypsies were among the invaders made him hopeful and grateful that his loved ones may not have died in vain.

“I was so happy to see” he said though an interpreter “ that my gay brothers and sisters were among the killers of my people and were wearing such stylish uniforms. We’ve never been invaded by an army with such fashion taste . It really helped me to get over the fact that my wife and daughter had their heads blown off by a woman soldier named Dutch and that my son was raped and murdered by men wearing ear rings and costume jewelry , when I could see the equality of this force of killers and rapists implied a greater day for the world, some time in the future when we will all be as free as these Americans.”

We asked, and they told ...

Equality At Last! We're All Rich! Yay Obama!

2011-09-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

all the news that fits they print: from the NYTIMES

Published: September 17, 2011

"WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials."

Is this guy the greatest prez since Herbert Hoover or what? Finally, we have a regressive tax system that doesn't even fake being progressive. A multi billionaire will be forced to pay at the same tax rate as someone who makes fifty thousand a year.

The brutha don't be takin' no bullshit!

STOP CALLING UNDOCUMENTED PHARMACISTS "ILLEGAL DRUG DEALERS"

2011-09-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

A group of dealers in medication for people unable to afford to see doctors in order to get prescriptions for their mental medical needs has formed in order to fight the defamation of their class of public servants.

A spokesperson for the group said "Not everyone can afford health insurance that pays for seeing a shrink to get a prescription for happy pills or anti-depressants or motivational drugs or all the other help so many Americans need in order to get through the day. We Undocumented Pharmacists perform a vital service that benefits all of society and we resent being called illegal drug dealers just because we operate outside the stupid drug laws."

Many people who rely on these U.P.s have formed a support group and are working to get media and political officials to stop using hate language and derigatory words like "illegal" when referring to a large and growing segment of the American population.

"With the economy in the state it is in, we're seeing more people in need of medical mental help and having less money to get it, with more of us forced into the dangerous profession of supplying it to them and risking prison, jail and being called all sorts of nasty names that hurt our families, our culture, our heritage and like that " said a newly certificated Undocumented Pharmacist who would not give his name for fear that his relatives back home might be attacked by bigots and police departments.

The group hopes to purge the language of words like" illegal" which make things seem, well, like not observing the law.

"We may operate slightly outside the legal system but what's wrong with that? We're engaged in profit making enterprise and our work is far more dangerous than what most profiteers do, so why pick on us when we are just hardworking people?"

Both groups plan a, um, joint march on Washington to raise awareness of the need for undocumented pharmacists and the further need to end ugly defamation of their character by calling them "illegal drug dealers".

SEEING RIPPLE IN JEWISH VOTE (OMG!OMG!OMG!)

2011-09-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2011
Seeing Ripple in Jewish Vote

WASHINGTON — Not since Jimmy Carter in 1980 has a Democrat running for president failed to win a lopsided majority of the Jewish vote. This has been true during times of peace or war, and even when there has been deep acrimony between the White House and the Israeli government.

Republicans see a chance to change that in 2012, with President Obama locked in a tense relationship with Israel’s leaders and criticized by many American Jews as being too tough on a close and favored ally. Tuesday’s Republican upset in New York’s Congressional election, they say, is a sign of bad things to come for Mr. Obama.

Sensing trouble, the Obama campaign and Democratic Party leaders have mobilized to solidify the president’s standing with Jewish voters. The Democratic National Committee has established a Jewish outreach program. The campaign is singling out Jewish groups, donors and other supporters with calls and e-mails to counter the Republican narrative that Mr. Obama is hostile to Israel.

Among those efforts is a multi-page set of talking points circulated last Friday with the title, “President Obama’s Stance on Israel: Myths vs. Facts.” David Axelrod, a close Obama adviser, has sent e-mails to Jewish voters, pointing them to a speech by the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, praising Mr. Obama and saying he had deepened the military cooperation between the United States and Israel.

And the White House is drawing attention to recent expressions of gratitude from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israelis after Mr. Obama intervened last Friday to help prevent violence after a mob attacked the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, threatening the Israeli diplomats inside.

Legalienate's sources in the White House* say if this Democratic party scheme doesn't work the fall back plan is to have Obama go down on Netanyahu during the half time show at the 2012 Super Bowl...

*no, not Deep Throat...

Nothing Will Ever Be The Same?

2011-09-15T17:06:00.000-07:00

America survived the tenth anniversary of 911 with heartfelt reminiscence of a shocking loss accompanied by the usual propaganda about what the terrorist attack allegedly meant which worked to obscure what it actually brought about:

A program of endless war, destruction of nations, loss of life far beyond that day’s tragedy and a political economic dementia that threatens to consume humanity in its madness.

The mass murdering over-reaction to a murderous criminal attack has been used to bring about what the terrorists of 911 wanted; an over extension of the empire in costly wars that would ultimately sap its strength. But the fundamentalist attackers were minor in their impact compared to the fundamentalist rulers of corporate capital and Zion. They have sent the nation and much of the world spiraling into wars and a debt crisis that threatens further international calamities worse than any conceived by terrorists.

The past ten years of trillion dollar warfare has seen the slaughter of more than twice the number of Americans who died on 911 but more than three hundred times the number of foreigners, almost none of them even remotely related to the events of that day. Devastated nations, massive death tolls and millions of refugees among people who never did anything to harm America are beginning to impact in ever more dangerous ways. In the words of Malcolm X, the chickens are indeed coming home to roost.

As a direct result of paying for homicidal madness, the economic inequality gap among Americans and other citizens in the west is growing at a faster pace than ever. Recent figures show that more than 15% of Americans - 46 million people - are living in poverty. There are more poor people with less money than ever before as upper income groups greatly expand their wealth while actually decreasing in number. We are becoming a nation of a few billionaires, quite a few millionaires, more members of an upper middle class, and a shrinking group formerly called the middle class which is actually a fast growing majority of working and poor people who once had jobs and security but are rapidly losing both. This is inherent in the system of private profit at public loss no matter how many speeches a president makes or how little they mean, and the path of global capital would be the same with or without the events of 911. But that system has grown much worse since then and Osama bin Laden would be happy to see things going exactly as he wished.

The 911 terrorists were driven by hatred of American power for its support of tyrants in the Arab world, and especially for its treatment of the Palestinian people. That has been almost unmentioned in all the hypocritical bigotry around 911 and we suffer to this moment from the control of American politics by fundamentalists of capital and their joined-at-the-wallet Zionist compatriots. Their zealous protection of the apartheid Israeli Jewish state, against all logic and morality, is under new stress including an attempt to give Palestine a seat at the U.N.

While that body’s Security Council is a relic of the western dominated past, its General Assembly may offer some hope for the future. But whatever the short term brings, a vetoed attempt to realize the morally bankrupt two state solution will make it more possible for a long term one state democracy of all the people of Palestine. Fanatics who see a pogrom or holocaust in such a democratic outcome are too crazed to notice that a less than four percent Jewish population has led to enormous Jewish/Zionist power in America and Europe, even without support from many Jews in those places. How can they possibly think that a Jewish majority in Palestine, or even a “minority” of forty percent - with financial and business control - can suddenly vanish in some fabled overnight slaughter? But whatever the ridiculous old nightmares may portend, the newer dreams of democracy will be realized or there may be no homeland for anyone at all in Palestine. Or many other places as well.

The present attempted destruction of Libya is a last gasp effort by the west to stifle the emerging movements toward democracy by retaking overt control of Africa . This euro-controlled attempt at recolonization has killed thousands already and caused another sectarian un-civil war, with a puppet regime of “rebels” composed of groups having no more in common than opposing the former regime. But while the Libyan people will suffer more pain, in the long run the western powers, whether masked as NATO – financed almost totally by the USA – or being forced to bring in U.S. troops in a final death wish, will further weaken the empire.

Along with the material poverty that grows as private banking and minority wealth attempt to grasp even more power, there is a poverty of spirit at the core of a crumbling western system of public domination that benefits minorities at the ultimate cost of most of civilization and the natural environment itself.

The economics of seemingly endless recession, the politics of seemingly endless colonial wars and the anti-democratic rule of minorities are actually nearing an end. Whether humanity can bring about a democratic solution to our problems through organization that crosses national, ethnic and religious lines is a question not for the future but for this moment. If the global democratic urge doesn’t continue and succeed soon, there may not be much of a future for anyone, including those currently feasting on the profits of waste and warfare.

911: Imperial Self-Pity vs. Democratic Self-Criticism

2011-09-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

For the friends and family of 911 victims there can be no overcoming the horrendous destruction of that tragic day. Loved ones whose lives were brutally cut short by the attacks can never be forgotten, and the pain evoked by remembering them can never completely subside. Thus, it is entirely appropriate that the victims gather annually to share their love and grief with the world.

But the outpouring of national self-pity delivered by the U.S. corporate media can and must be overcome, for this is but a display of imperial self-justification that promises us only endless war and perpetual economic decline. Consider the following editorial in the Atlantic Monthly, a publication considerably less overtly nationalistic than the average news magazine in the U.S.:

The Atlantic Home
Sunday, September 11, 2011

The Meaning of 9/11
By Jeffrey Goldberg

What we saw on the morning of September 11, 2001 was evil made manifest. The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and tried to destroy the Capitol) claim to have been motivated by a theology of restoration -- a dream of restoring Islam to a position of global supremacy -- and by the politics of grievance. But something deeper undergirds these impulses: A compulsive need to murder one's way to glory. The stated goals of al Qaeda are flimsy excuses, meant to cover-up this ineluctable fact. The souls of men like Muhammad Atta and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Osama bin Laden are devoid of anything but hate, and murder is what erupted from these voids.

9-11 Ten Years LaterLet us stay on the subject of murder, because murder is the meaning of 9/11. Westerners are gifted in the art of slashing self-criticism, and so much of our discussion about 9/11 in the intervening years has centered on our failures -- real failures of intelligence and imagination that allowed the attacks to happen; presumed failures of foreign policy that gained al Qaeda sympathy among some Muslims; and failures in our response to radical jihadism, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanamo Bay, that are generally, though not universally, understood to have set us back in the war to defeat al Qaeda and its tyrannical and medieval ideology.

Self-criticism is necessary, even indispensable, for democracy to work. But this decade-long drama began with the unprovoked murder of 3,000 people, simply because they were American, or happened to be located in proximity to Americans. It is important to get our categories straight: The profound moral failures of the age of 9/11 belong to the murderers of al Qaeda, and those (especially in certain corners of the Muslim clerisy, along with a handful of bien-pensant Western intellectuals) who abet them, and excuse their actions. The mistakes we made were sometimes terrible (and sometimes, as at Abu Ghraib and in the CIA's torture rooms, criminal) but they came about in reaction to a crime without precedent.

Legalienate Responds:

The 911 attacks were massively destructive but can we honestly call them "unprovoked," as Goldberg does? According to Al Qaeda they were retaliatory strikes for longstanding U.S. crimes against Arab and Muslim countries, crimes which have only accelerated since 911. If it was wrong for Al Qaeda to kill 3000 civilians on 911, why was it right for the U.S. to kill thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians with its foreign policy in the decades leading up to 911? Consider U.S. support for Israel torturing and murdering Palestinians since 1948, the destruction of Iranian democracy and the imposition of the Shah's dictatorship from 1953 to 1979, Israel's invasion and demolition of Lebanon in 1982 on a surge of U.S. arms shipments, the slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis in the 1991 "turkey shoot" called Desert Storm, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians subsequently killed by U.S. economic blockade. The list can go on and on, but can we really believe that such policies are somehow not evil and don't invite retaliation? No, we cannot.

Is murder the meaning of 911, as Goldberg claims? Al Qaeda felt itself to be at war with the U.S. due to the imperial abuses listed above. Is the killing of civilians in wartime the equivalent of murder? Maybe it is on paper, but in reality the slaughter of civilians is what modern warfare is all about. The high-tech weapons so enthused about in Pentagon media releases almost can't help but kill large numbers of civilians, in spite of pious rhetoric about their "precision" capabilities. However precise their targeting capacities may be, whenever they are used large numbers of civilians die, only to be dismissed as inconsequential "collateral damage." How many wedding parties have we blown up in Afghanistan? One is too many. The point is that if 911 is murder, so were the long series of brutal aggressions carried out by the U.S. and Israel in the years preceding 911. And the aggregate civilian death tolls from those imperial interventions make 911 look like a misdemeanor, rendering Goldberg's claim that it was "a crime without precedent" quite ridiculous.

Furthermore, the notion that Westerners, Americans in particular, "are gifted in the art of slashing self-criticism" is patently absurd. Americans are deeply indoctrinated to believe that direct self-accusation of imperial crimes committed by American leaders is a form of treason. We are permitted to refer to our leaders' "mistakes," "ignorance," "naivete," "confusion," and "blundering idealism," but we must never accuse them of criminal conduct, no matter how many innocent people they slaughter, nor how flimsy the pretexts they use for justification. In point of fact U.S. leaders are considered good by definition in the U.S. corporate media, which does everything it can to prevent the American people from finding out about the crimes of state funded by their tax dollars. As a result, coming across a healthy, self-critical conscience in the U.S. is about as likely as finding a healthy fish in Lake Erie. As long as the public mind is contaminated by corporations like those that bring us Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the BP Gulf disaster, and the Fukushima triple meltdown, it cannot be otherwise.

Goldberg is correct in stating that self-criticism is indispensable to democracy, but his claim that we are overindulging this alleged trait in the West, especially in the U.S., is ludicrous. For it is the almost complete absence of self-criticism that characterizes U.S. political discourse. What passes for intelligent commentary in the U.S. mass media is little more than political gossip, and the "patriotic" grandstanding indulged in by political candidates reflects nothing more than the sound bites and bumper sticker slogans crafted by their corporate masters.

For all intents and purposes U.S. democracy is as dead as the avalanche of cliches that corporate America has used to bury it. Sustained and penetrating criticism of our political and business leaders is the only thing that can revive it.

See also Legalienate post from March 22, 2008 for a review of Osama bin Laden's indictment of U.S. policy.

Friends of the Girth

2011-09-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

The new support group for obesity liberation formed by retired wrestlers, unemployed chefs and junk food addicts, announced a campaign to counter the present drive to end America’s alleged weight problems. The group’s founding statment says:

“We believe it is absolutely necessary to maintain physical substance given the lack of any mental substance in this nation, and it is a patriotic duty for intellectually malnourished Americans to overeat as often as possible, to buy extra small garments that wear out quickly and keep our clothing industry profitable, and to sit and watch TV for hours and destroy our furniture to be replaced in our planned obsolescence economy.”

The president said he admired their patriotic fervor and hoped they would only overeat foods with low fats and that their diets would result in high profits .

from the Legalienate news bureau...all the news that fits, we print.

Comedian Katt Williams vs. The Aztec "Nation"

2011-09-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

Comedian Katt Williams recently insulted a Latino man in a Phoenix audience by parading an "America, Love It or Leave It" mentality and telling Mexicans who object to their treatment in the U.S. to "go back to Mexico" if they love it so much. Williams ended his rant by singing the American national anthem and chanting "USA, USA, USA."

The corporate media is characterizing Williams' remarks as racist, though they are actually nationalist. And the Mexican reaction has been largely nationalist as well. It's a conflict of nationalisms, not race.

Although such commentary becomes more predictable now that the U.S. has its first African American president, it's simply absurd for a black man in the U.S. to end up singing the national anthem and chanting "USA, USA" in the country that enslaved his ancestors, especially on land that was forcibly taken from the people he is singing to. Basically, he's endorsing the superpatriotism of the American Legion. And what for? Blacks are 55% of the two million plus prisoners in the U.S., nearly five times their proportion of the general population. Does that sound like they are fully credentialed members of the "land of liberty?"

Williams started off his rant saying that "it appears to me" that Latinos enjoy living in the U.S. Of course, the same was said of slaves in the old South, always singing and dancing, and ever ready to laugh at a good "darkie" joke. That means they were happy, right?

The reason Mexicans are in the U.S. to begin with is because President Polk sent troops to invade Mexico in 1846, and the U.S. later annexed almost half the country in a successful effort to take California (especially) and the Southwest. Mexican nationals living in the newly colonized lands were forced to choose between expulsion and re-nationalizing themselves as American citizens. As the saying goes, they never crossed the border; the border crossed them.

In more recent years "free trade" destroyed communal agriculture south of the border, forcing millions of displaced farmers to choose between starvation and illegal immigration. If you're faced with that choice, you're not going to swim for Fiji: you're going to enter the U.S. That has nothing to do with loving the U.S., and it is hardly contradictory to resent the U.S. while seeking to better oneself economically working within it. So Williams' attempt to portray this as hypocritical is off base.

Williams said that Mexicans "should have fought for" California if they loved their land so much. The fact of the matter is that they DID fight for it, but lost to vastly superior force. This does not imply any lack of love for their land or culture. Furthermore, by similar logic we could blame blacks for slavery. Why didn't they fight the slave traders and successfully resist enslavement in the first place? I guess they didn't love Africa enough. And by Williams' logic, we should have deported African Americans in the 1960s who grew Afros, donned dashikis, and shouted "I'm black, and I'm proud," while studying Swahili instead of correcting their non-standard "black English." How ungrateful could they be?

Yes, Williams is just a comedian, but his ideas enjoy broad currency and do a lot of damage. What's funny about that?

Second Volume of Obama Memoirs Stuns The World

2011-08-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

"Dreams from My Meth Dealer" Reveals Tortured Path From "Hope" to "Obummer"

by Michael Smith
Legalienation News

Marking a bold departure from conventional campaign tactics, Barack Obama has released a searingly honest memoir on the eve of his presidential re-election drive. The profoundly moving, frequently lyrical narrative relates the extraordinary story of a gifted African American overcoming seemingly insurmountable racial obstacles to reach the White House, where, in an act of sheer genius, he gives away trillions of dollars to oppressed Wall Street firms while demolishing half a dozen countries abroad in the course of picking up a Nobel Peace prize. Dramatic and fast-paced, the action leaves the reader not only breathless, but penniless.

In spite of this unprecedentedly spectacular record, the author is reluctantly forced to accept that he has disappointed many who believed in his calls for "hope" and "change" in 2008. With touching affection and unusual candor he reveals that much of the credit goes to his meth dealer Carlos "Corky" Rosales, whom he befriended at a fraternity house orgy when he was a student at Occidental College, and who, unbeknownst to the general public, has been a constant companion and adviser to the president for the past two-and-a-half years. It was "Corky" who revealed that all true Democrats are GOP lapdogs.

This inspiring insight soon consigned Karl Rove to the rank of political amateur. Thrilled by the fantastic surge in opium production under the Karzai government, Rosales quickly saw the need to expand the Afghanistan war into Pakistan. "You can't go wrong with a war for drugs," Rosales told Obama at his Inaugural Ball. "Profits soar, impoverished masses are doped and pacified, and annoying civil liberties are stripped away from a public hopelessly paralyzed by fear." Whether one is a liberal or a conservative, life doesn't get much better than that.

It was also Rosales who urged Obama to stage an "end" to the war in Iraq. "Public opinion can't hurt you if the public has no idea what is going on," Obama quotes Rosales as saying. "So declare peace and move on. The media will stop covering Iraq, and the war will cease to exist in the public mind, which means it really is over, except for the bloodshed."

Extending tax cuts for the rich while cutting Social Security and Medicare were also abiding "dreams" of Rosales, who seethed at the injustice of caring for the elderly while billionaires were left without the resources needed to become trillionaires. "What kind of society condemns its billionaires to lectures on civic duty, to an endless round of fair play and limits, to a life devoid of hope or meaning?" Thus spoke Rosales at the 2010 retreat of the National Association For the Advancement of Rich People. A man noted for his compassion, Obama wept.

A book to be both read and treasured, the chapter titles alone are worth the retail price ($599.95 from Predatory Books). For example:

Chapter One: The Virtue of Moral Collapse: Does a Castrated Man Really Need a Spine?

Chapter Two: Healthy Profits, Sick Patients: So What's the Problem?

Chapter Three: Affirmative Action For Dummies: Why a Black President Had to Lead the Rape of Libya

Chapter Four: Jewish Apartheid in the Promised Land: Dr. King's Dream Fulfilled

Chapter Five: Don't Worry, Be Happy: How Killing With Pilotless Drones Insures a Great Future

Chapter Six: Protecting Against Terrorism: Why I Need To Assassinate Americans For Their Own Good

We Are The Core of The Problem

2011-08-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

The breakdown of global economics dominated by capital is more apparent with each local crisis. Even Israel has seen Jewish citizens demonstrating against the inequality of what they think is their own economy, just as all over the world people are rising up against injustice seen as unique to their nations. Of course, Israeli Jews demonstrating against an economy which has become more unequal for them are missing the point that what was previously so fair to them was derived at the expense of the Palestinians who still suffer unfairness and inequality that date back earlier than the current crisis. Even further back than 1948, the official birth of the settler, apartheid Jewish state.

And, it should be added, at the expense of the American taxpayers who not only finance Israel’s military power and fight its wars but pay for a government frequently operating more in Israel’s than America’s interest. In fact, even as signs of a crippled political economy loom so large, 82 members of the American government embarked on a tour of Israel paid for by sponsors who insure their continued role as an Israeli Knesset within the American congress.

Nevertheless, the continued actions around the world, both peaceful and violent, make it clear that the system under stress and causing breakdowns is not confined to any one nation or area of the globe.

Here in the USA, as public service programs are being savaged while great wealth increases its share of national income, the 2012 presidential campaign is already in full swing. Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been banked by candidates with hundreds of millions more being raised among their wealthy employers. This, while a majority of Americans suffer declining status in every aspect of their lives, is indication of both inequality and immorality in the political economic system. But it may still be a while before we all understand that the system conducting assaults on working majorities for the benefit of wealthy minorities in the USA, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Egypt, England and more, is the same one that is killing people and fomenting strife in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and more.

Under the control of mind managers who teach us individuality and self esteem in the face of social disaster, it must begin to sink into even the most set upon that we suffer from a common and not unique-to-ourselves disorder. It is global capitalism, the private profit/public loss system making rich people much richer, poor people much poorer, the supposed middle less middle, and putting the earth itself under more stress than at any time in recorded history.

The Bipolar performance of a financial market with ever more rapid and rabid mood swings accompanies a crazed military policy killing more people every day while alienating more old friends, creating more new enemies, and pushing everything closer to disaster. Still, the bipartisan political process pits one set of corporate capital’s servants against another, both competing for power but only to maintain a system that needs to be radically changed for the salvation of the human race.

The over extended empire’s attempts to destroy Libya joined with previous assaults in Iraq , Afghanistan and other places is taxing the imperial dominators to the point at which collapse, if not sudden, is certainly a near future possibility. People are straining against the irrationality of having to struggle for survival while a tiny minority lives in luxury beyond the dreams of ancient despots. The sooner a democratic tendency such as finally seems to be operative in many places takes hold everywhere the better for humanity, but the USA is not only still far behind the pack but suffering political forces working to further impede its progress.

The USA is at the center of this flailing monster and its people need to take control from the minority only concerned about acquiring more and more wealth at the cost of less and less hope for the majority’s future. Democratic action is needed to end the bloody wars, create public banks, invest our massive public wealth in jobs that put people before profit, and transform our energy base from fossil fuels and other synthetics which pollute to abundant biological sources which can strengthen society in cooperation with nature. While growing numbers of Americans favor such moves, the power structure reflects none of that impulse unless it can create a private profit for some that always means a public loss for most.

Negative signs of collapse are increasing but positive reactions have a greater chance at success than ever before. Coordinated democratic action needs to end the divisive battling among a global majority which has been boxed into being a group of minorities in order to keep it from seeing its common interest and predicament. Human survival is not simply the concern of members of minority groups, people of alleged color or no color, those who choose to marry or stay single, have babies or adopt, or speak different languages.

Food, clothing, shelter and the niceties of life do not exist for the exclusive consumption of special individuals but for the continuation of the human race. The longer we allow minority control of our environments both social and natural, the closer we will come to failure as a human race. The present crisis will continue and get worse until we react as global citizens and demand, and achieve, global democracy. If that seems beyond us, we can at least begin the easy part and create a truly democratic transformation here at the center of the global problem.

Monoculture’s Multicultural Discontents

2011-08-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

The economic religion of Consumptive Inequality has entered what some of its parishioners call a Great Recession while non-believers see it as a recurring cycle, this time in perhaps more deadly fashion than any since the 1930s. The global economy is in turmoil with the only debate being whether it can survive with major reforms or needs to be radically transformed, or else. That we are in a state of crisis can only be denied by employees of ruling power who claim that capitalism is the will of the deity that governs the functioning of free markets. That these markets have as much to do with freedom as peace has to do with war is at the root of the problem.

The signs of distress are focused on the electronic global market where hundreds of billions of imaginary dollars are gambled in a casino where owners of capital dictate what ordinary people will pay for consumer goods of survival and whether they will do so by incurring massive debt or falling into poverty. The daily lived realities of billions of human beings are abstractions for political and media manipulators who keep people occupied with trivialities , distractions and immaterial theatrics. But no matter how much is disguised by mind managers in the employ of corporate capital, the national mental health crisis center atmosphere produced by profit and loss economics in normal times is presently becoming more like a global insane asylum.

Weapons are produced in abundance with trillion dollar budgets while millions of people are unemployed, homeless and hungry for lack of money; animals receive top quality medical attention while millions of human beings are without any health care at all; mass murders are called humanitarian intervention, and all this and more are causing many to react in outrage against authority with peaceful demonstrations if they can afford it, or violent rebellion if they cannot.

Among the key areas of social stress is the global immigration issue, a factor of capitalist economics normally treated as far removed from political economic consideration but reduced to matters of racial and ethnic bigotry or tolerance exercised by individuals and small groups.

The system’s pursuit of profit by breaking down national barriers for immaterial financial speculation has also led to an increase in the flow of material human bodies across borders, thrown out of one depressed area and into another . A condition common to the 19^th and 20th centuries has become highly exaggerated in the 21^st, bringing with it social explosions more related to political economics than any shortcomings of individuals. That is hardly the way it is treated, more often being played as a matter of good vs. evil, with supporters of alleged good or evil both being unwilling or unwitting pawns in the political game.

The social ruptures brought about by economically captive populations tossed from one country to another is only one aspect of the upheavals being experienced in almost all walks of life. Even the comfortable classes are encountering forced changes in their lifestyles by problems usually identified by individualist monoculture as their own personal difficulties or the fault of isolated groups of relatively powerless people. The social dilemmas of forced as opposed to voluntary cultural mixing are numerous and should be obvious, but they are shielded by charges of bigotry hurled by victims against those even more victimized. This serious social problem has, like so many others, lately assumed even more deadly outcomes.

The divisions among people strengthen the hand of ruling power and unless they are seen as problems of a system and not one or another group of people victimized by that system, minorities will retain control and majorities will continue to pay a terrible price. A recent terrorist episode in Europe offered a tragic example of what can happen when this problem of capital is placed on the shoulders of its subjects and blamed, almost exclusively, on their ignorance, bigotry, stupidity or lack of refinement.

The murders in Norway unleashed a flood of confusion and theoretical conspiracy mongering from media and political figures. First with knee jerk condemnations of suspected “Islamic” terrorism before any facts about the assailant were revealed, then with simplistic cries against right wing “Christian” hate criminals when some of those facts came to light. The crime was horrible, the lives lost tragic, but the general reaction by alleged analysts possibly worst of all.

Except for the humane show of grief on the part of the Norwegian people and that nation’s refusal to be driven into paranoid American style reactionary policies - the kind that fed the diseased mind of the mass murderer – there was nothing to be proud of in the general response.

We have hardly approached confronting the real problems highlighted by this act of madness. It was treated as something terrible, but explained as either the work of conspiracies organized by seemingly godlike powers unknown to mere mortals, or as a deadly act provoked by uncomplicated forces reduced to overtly racist conservatives aligned against covertly racist liberals. Life is not that simple, and capitalism seems even more confusing than life itself when seen from the perspective of the conservative right, the liberal left or the muddled middle , especially when those political blocs operate from the mind set imposed by capitalism itself.

The Norwegian killer held an all too common notion that the world is becoming dominated by Islam, that Europeans or “white” people are an endangered species and that something identified as cultural Marxism is at the root of the problem. Despite his ignorance of both Groucho and Karl, his confusion about political realities should not label him a fool since these charges are echoed by many of the alienated and despairing in a rapidly changing world over which they have little or no control. They accept whatever explanation from authority that seems somewhat in line with their experience and lash out at scapegoats offered them by their consciousness controllers.

Given the crude and often cruel rationalizations that pass for analysis of reality from most political leaders, the idiocy of some racial , fascist or religious fanatic theory can almost sound reasonable by comparison. But it is hardly a Marxist world we live in; it isn’t remotely as funny as Groucho’s and hardly as intellectually critical as Karl’s. That is, except in the minds of those mentally bludgeoned into accepting hysterical gibberish about government being communist by nature , capitalist servant Obama being a socialist, or gay marriage and abortion representing attacks on masculinity called for in the Communist Manifesto.

Contrary to the manipulated mass ignorance that makes reality the enemy of common sense, we live under the global domination of private capital, and its perverse lust for profit is forcing social and natural systems to the limits of their endurance. Misguided or purposely misguiding analysis of the Norwegian’s motivation only helped strengthen the forces which drove him to dementia, but more important are driving the system of global capitalism and the earth itself to a near breaking point.

The Norwegian expressed Islamophobic bigotry which has been treated as a sign of his and his kind’s bigotry when it clearly expresses a state of mind created by western governments which not only show contempt for Islam but commit mass murders of Islamic people which continue to the present moment. He also used the term “multicultural” which represents negativity and social dissolution not only to him but to many who would never act as he did. But that same recently created word has positive meanings for others, often for idealistic and humane reasons though sometimes employed to bring about the exact opposite ; division among majorities to further assure their domination by minorities.

Perception perverts create language confusion to further balkanize people so that common interests are difficult if not impossible to act upon, which is what keeps those minorities in power.

This both positive and negative term – depending on who uses it and how it is used – has different meanings to different sectors of the population. But few of those differences really have anything to do with ethnicity, religion or race, except when used by political propagandists. Ultimately, they describe separations among people that have less to do with ethnicity and race but far more to do with wealth, power, weakness, and poverty.

There is a vast difference between the multiculturalism that might be described as ;

Dining on Asian food, dancing to Latin salsa, listening to African-European jazz, enjoying international ballet, attending universities with globally diverse student bodies of affluent speakers of a common language , living in second and third generation communities of middle and upper middle income people of mixed ethnic and religious background, marrying and building families in such communities …and;

Living in communities experiencing a massive influx of foreigners forced out of their countries by political economics to become cheap labor and serve market forces here and in the process innocently disrupting life in those communities, attending underfunded schools crowded with students from even less privileged backgrounds often speaking foreign languages, watching a familiar neighborhood become an almost alien place where shops and people are of another culture and language with which you have little or no understanding, and absorbing social expenses seeming to exclusively benefit foreigners.

The first positive form shows growth in consciousness and unity of the human race, especially when the humans have a common ground – and income level - on which to expand that consciousness. The second is negative, hardly willed or volunteered for by those who practice it but instead forced on them while creating overcrowded communities with language , cultural and economic barriers that provoke inhumanity and further alienation in an already alienating environment.

We need to understand the vast social gap between those experiences of immigration and the fact that we have not done so should be obvious. Not just in the horrible crime perpetrated by the Norwegian or the ugly episodes of intolerance directed towards immigrants in the USA and Europe, but in that millions of people in the USA and Europe are susceptible to at least some of what he believed because:

they are the ones who show the loss and absorb most of the costs in the immigration business, while capital and its professional servant class reap the profit and consume most of the benefits.

Those who own or are invested in the mills, factories , farms and services which employ the sometimes desperate and always cheaper labor of the foreigners do quite well with immigration, thank you. And the professional class that serves them and can afford to employ - and often must employ in order to maintain its status - an army of house cleaners, child care workers, gardeners and day laborers also benefits. And when the immigrants are illegal, and therefore even cheaper labor, the benefits are even greater for the profiting segment.

But those who live in the communities which without any social planning or preparation become overcrowded with people speaking a foreign language and living a foreign culture sometimes at cross purposes with their own are on the loss side of the ledger. As are those native born entry level workers – the majority not among the college educated minority - who are forced into competition for manual labor and lower skilled jobs with a population able to work at even more minimal wages than they.

Present global economic realities are such that even college graduates have trouble becoming employed in the fields in which they were schooled and are often forced to take lower paying work in order to survive and not totally burden their families. In this economic environment, the plight of the majority which is facing far more trouble in the marketplace can only be overlooked if we are interested in committing social suicide.

The reactions to problems caused by immigration are often labeled as racist or nationalist and sometimes they are, but those completely sheltered from the social costs or directly benefiting at others expense should be very careful about using such labels. They sometimes reveal a bigotry as narrow and intolerant as what it supposedly stands against. It helps create more political division and a stronger right wing, since those who do not enjoy immigration’s direct benefits but bear its indirect costs are susceptible to conservative arguments, especially when liberals treat them with disdain or contemptuous disrespect.

It is the class that profits which is most likely to gain quick appreciation and respect for the work ethic, cooking, music and other positive aspects of the newer people, and they do so not by living with them but by commercially enjoying the “upscale” benefits of immigrant contributions to the parent culture, after the assimilation and rise in economic status of those newer citizens. Rest assured that hardly anyone who employs immigrant labor, in the USA or in Europe, whether on the farm, mill , factory, or in the home, legal, illegal, documented or undocumented, lives anywhere near the foreign population. They are segregated, by ethnicity, language and especially class. It has always been so and since the new waves of immigration, even more so.

Migration is as natural to humanity as evolution and it spread our race all over the world from our origins in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago. How we got there in the first place is a matter beyond our present consciousness and is for religious theory, fantasy and conjecture, but the facts are there for all but racial supremacists, racial separatists, and the other brain dead among us. We are all descended from people who came from Africa ages ago and gradually moved to other continents, but the silly if well meaning slogan that claims “we are all immigrants” denies geographic and cultural roots developed over the ages in which that process took hold. It also denies the modern immigration patterns and capitalist political economics at their roots. Dubbing all of us as immigrants hardly fits the reality of those who are several generations native to a country, nor the massive immigration which much of Europe and the USA have experienced over the last thirty or forty years.

An earlier process saw newcomers often treated in discriminatory and sometimes even brutal fashion until they had, by a second generation if not sooner, assimilated and become full citizens speaking the language and observing the customs of the adopted land. But as a result of global economic and political crises which have grown more serious in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, more recent waves of immigrants were often arriving in greater numbers and with sometimes even greater cultural differences. These newcomers were not only dumped into newly transformed-into-ghettos enclaves, but rarely given or offered entry to the parent culture, thereby keeping them locked into their own while locked out of the colonial fatherland except when serving it as cheap labor. When these “strangers in a strange land” were not all European or Judeo-Christian westerners, but from the east and Islamic world, age old bigotry and trivialization of arab and Muslim culture combined with more modern forms to further reduce them as human beings.

After the 911 American reaction to fight a creation of its own called “international terrorism” while actually waging undeclared war on Islam, that animosity bred by generations of disrespect grew into full blown hatred. Populations totally ignorant of the religion or the culture were moved into the worst bigotry by being given examples of isolated horrible acts – often provoked by historic colonial brutality – as being indicative of global plots to make the world obey Shariah law. Sources of division and programmed animosity ranging from government to mass media to pressure groups which stood to profit from maligning Islam have all played a role though we are expected to believe such bigotry came out of a social vacuum of hateful individuals practicing racist politics they somehow recently invented. On their own.

In this atmosphere of social bigotry created by institutionalized forces of division and contempt for human beings, pointing fingers at individuals or fanatic minorities as the source of the problem amounts to identifying a worker at a lumber mill as being responsible for corporate capital’s defoliation of the forest.

These movements which cause foreigners to remain separate and alienated while bringing profits to the upper classes of the societies in which they have become chattels of commerce, create losses for communities which have never had any voice in deciding to take in new neighbors. The immigrants are destined for social alienation by virtue of the inhuman economic processes which force them out of one homeland and into another alien land. As are the people in the communities where they are settled, who have had nothing to say about the changes they must undergo for the benefit of others above them in the economic pyramid.

Immigration does not happen because of national referenda in which the citizenry comes together to invite in new populations, with plans for their housing, education, health care and adaptation to their new homeland. It is a slapdash, often corrupt process in which people are simply units of commerce, dumped on one another in the time honored fashion of the old industrial - newer financial system of profit and loss, with profits accruing to even smaller groups than in the past, with losses absorbed by even greater numbers. The immigration process is at the root of both benefits and costs and needs to be understood, and not simply blamed – as are most problems – on individuals, small groups, and occasionally, isolated states, as is presently the case in the USA.

When the supposedly liberal state of California sealed its borders from illegally entering workers from Mexico due to its own problems at absorbing the social costs, those workers switched to the Arizona border to gain access to jobs in the USA. The problems of new populations that caused California to close its doors became the even greater problems of Arizona. With a much smaller population, tax base and bankroll, that state, already conservative but with many Spanish speaking people and Latino oriented history – as California, it was once part of Mexico - became more socially strained, leading to what might well be expected; outbursts of intolerance, such as had led to California’s “liberal” action, but also calls for control of a burgeoning population, increased social expenses, overcrowding and underfunding, as in most every other case of uncontrolled illegal immigration to benefit some commerce and damn most of the public .

The identification of the state as some isolated practitioner of evil enabled the rest of the country, or that portion with its collective mind nestled into a lower part of its collective anatomy, to look down on Arizona and completely disregard the system responsible for throwing people out of their homelands and dumping them, first on California, then on Arizona. Profit margins at the businesses and upper middle class centers of immigrant labor remained secure. And people in general became more insulting and disrespectful of one another. Multiculturalism? Or Multidivisionalism?

It’s as if the profits accruing to capital all over the nation by virtue of immigrant labor have all centered in one state, leaving the bigotry, class separations and heartless poverty suffered by tens of millions of Americans hardly worthy of thought when “good” people can direct their hatred and animosity at: Arizona!

Further contradictions find people, as in Arizona, supporting laws to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country illegally, while some government and business officials scream at how adversely that would affect the economy. The established legal, governmental authority supports illegally entering the country and those citizens who wish to use the law to protect themselves find it works in exactly the opposite way. But this madness is not at all unusual. It is the foundation on which our entire political economy rests, however precariously at present. This legal system and its constitution is predicated on protection of property and profit first, even with the ten amendments added by early American radicals. They weren’t quite radical enough to foresee a neo-liberal world of late capitalism. Had they been so there might not be as much opportunity for people to commit crazed acts, provoked by an environment that so readily invites irrational behavior.

The negative ramifications of this system’s crisis are apparent across the world, with austerity demanded by imperial rule exercising restraints on meager public services that threaten the profit margins of a wealthy minority. This while majorities see their livelihoods vanishing, their debt increasing, and poverty across the globe rising at epidemic rates. With total economic warfare being waged by the minority rich against majority workers and the poor, it should not be a surprise that there are outbursts of rebellious rioting on the part of masses who feel set upon, or acts of violent madness from other confused, alienated and despairing subjects of the system.

The capitalist banking mafia and its professional servant class are attempting to guide it through a period of extreme turmoil by inflicting more suffering on many so that a relative few can maintain their profits at everyone else’s loss. In this context, reducing the act of a Norwegian murderer - who despite his intelligence and thoughtfulness is likely to be judged a maniac by capitalist law - to a sinister plot organized by secret cabals or simply provoked by racial bigotry while the most sinister political economic plot of all goes unquestioned amounts to social insanity more menacing than this individual’s descent into madness. But that seems to be the present mainstream consensus, with few questions asked of and few collective responses to the political economics behind these massive forced migrations and reactions to them by extremist groups inspired by a western tradition of bigotry, colonialism and slaughter.

Except for some to indulge in name calling of those who protest by ignorantly identifying capitalism as socialism or who blame victims rather than their victimizers, while the name callers naively claim abstract humanism and actively support capitalism by practicing class bigotry in dealing with those absorbing the cost of their benefits.

People do not rush to America and Europe because they find the weather pleasant and the people charming. It is economics that primarily force immigration, which has always been the case and is the foundation of capital’s cheap labor force and ability to divide and conquer workers. When European colonialism broke down many of its former professional subjects moved to Europe, leaving their nations with an extra burden of replacing an educated class while trying to build from a base already ravaged by having its natural and social wealth stolen. As the crisis in global capital grew more fierce, greater numbers were forced out of homelands suffering increased wars and breakdowns and the population of non-Europeans expanded rapidly, with newer immigrants being less educated, more in need and further estranged from their forced new cultures.

This has fed the right wings in Europe even more than in the USA, where the problem is serious but not quite as great among people more easily assimilated since large parts of America were once Spanish speaking – before being taken from Mexico, which was previously stolen from its people by Spain – and also more closely related to Christian culture. There are still harsh and often ugly problems of discrimination and scapegoating but not anything as divisive as the climate of inhumanity in some parts of Europe. There, the western history of domination and colonization which reduced what came to be called Latin America to a sub-division of the empire, finds an even more glaring and dangerous division between the Jewish-Christian world and Islam.

In our collective ignorance we are easily manipulated into believing all manner of ridiculous tales of Islam’s warlike plans to take over the world. From slack jawed morons to college professors – too often the same people - this kind of simplistic belief is not only entertained, but widely broadcast and not just over the internet. Main stream cultural and political leaders of the west operate from an intellectual gutter that makes it almost laughable to identify one or another individual racist or fascist and claim “they” are the root of the problems of intolerance towards Islamic people.

We would do well to remember, or learn for the first time, that Islam once controlled the world, that it has contributed greatly to the progress of humanity both through science and art, and while it has also been guilty of war making and empire building, it is no different in that than what we call western civilization, and in fact has often done a more benign job of ruling subject peoples.

The fact that there are elements within Islam that hate the west, have fanatic beliefs about it and would like to destroy its influence on their culture can be frightening if contemplated in a social vacuum. But considering history and the reality of foreign policies and what they have done and are doing to Islamic countries at the present moment would help greatly in ending those threats, and also in ending the mass migrations of people leaving their own lands because of the economic blight cast upon them by outsiders.

In the same way and as part of the same economic process , American domination of Latin American politics and industry has brought great profits to corporate capital but left much of that area in or near poverty. People who escape poverty and unemployment to move to another country are not welcomed by the working class already dealing with its own problems of survival, and frequently capital uses these divisions to not only make greater profits from a cheaper work force, but to divide workers into ethnic, racial, sexual and religious minorities that have little hope of ever uniting and acting as a class with common interest as long as such divisions are kept uppermost in their minds and bodies.

The strains forcing individuals and nations into even more subservience to private banking are global in nature, with daily hysterics about economies about to “default” if government spending isn’t cut sharply. In the USA this criticism of spending mostly involves billions in human services with the trillions spent on imperial warfare and military welfare hardly seen as the massive entitlement program they have become. In such an environment of daily acts of immorality being perpetrated by elected officials of a supposed democratic state, it should not be shocking that racism would raise an ugly head. But the immediate application of the label to cover other deeply rooted social problems is a ploy of those who would maintain rather than change the system.

Racist bigotry in a nation founded on cruel subjugation, massacres and ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants and the commercial kidnapping and brutal enslavement of a large segment of the African population should hardly be surprising, though some seem to “discover” it as the sole cause and response to present aspects of stress undergone by the society. While we conduct wars that kill tens of thousands in the Islamic world, make refugees of thousands more and destroy their nations, some find personal hate criminals in those who believe in and repeat the worst , most vicious lies about the religion and the people. This is equivalent to being shocked to find that water is wet or that there is sand in the desert. Racism is in the bone marrow of America and flows through its cultural veins but to attribute all reaction to communities that find new crowds of foreign people understandably alienated to their new surroundings as “racism” is an ignorance and bigotry almost as damaging as the more overtly evil substance of our national foundation.

The economic blight currently descending over the nation has affected blacks far more than whites and even Latinos, and this while a supposed “brother” resides in the “white” house. It is not only rather late and misguided, but close to blatant stupidity to see racism as a problem only of certain evil individuals or groups and not what it is: an institutional disease that will not be cured as long as people are manipulated into blaming others for a social malignancy. And the socio-economic disease is even worse for blacks – thanks to our history of racist slavery – but is a bipartisan, non sectarian destroyer of families, individuals, communities and nations all over the world, without regard to skin tone, religion, choice of sex partner or style of dress.

Whether in America or Europe, it should not be treated as social aberrations or racism when natives react in a negative way to an influx of foreigners who do not speak the language, share the culture or in many cases have any desire to live in the new nation in which they have been economically imprisoned. It is the perversions of political economics that throws people out of their homelands and dumps them in foreign areas to become profit making scapegoats for capital.

What liberal forces too often identify exclusively as racial intolerance and conservatives ignorantly call cultural attacks by alien people may be manifestations of those things in part, but much more the contradictions of a system thriving on chaos and human division in the creation of profits for a few at the loss of millions.

Those who think themselves culturally superior because they accept immigration and warmly welcome newcomers frequently do so because they are part of the society which greatly profits from the cheap labor that immigrants represent. Hardly the result of a nation warmly extending its open arms to new people with offers to adapt them as quickly as possible to a new culture, foreigners not members of a professional class who leave their homelands and come to new ones for reasons of economic and social hardship are thrown into communities filled with their own country folk. They are all but forced to continue their foreign presence, with language, culture, worship and all other social realities maintained in order that the “welcoming” culture derive the greatest profit at the least cost.

“Christian extremism” is a reality but also a favorite label for right wing loonies and it was quickly applied – once Muslims couldn’t be blamed - to the Norwegian, but his , and frequently their support for Israel somehow escapes the label “Jewish extremism”. This despite the fact that much of the islamophobic disinformation and hate messaging comes from a well financed propaganda machine of Jewish groups protecting Israel by spreading the most vile and often incredible lies about Islam, the people who practice it and their social beliefs. There is widespread acceptance for maligning evangelical Christians for being Zionists but much less for the much more powerful Jewish groups which are as fanatic in their support for Israel, and far more influential in American politics.

It should give Judeo-Christian westerners at least a moments pause to wonder at why Islam is depicted as a menace when it does not allow the collection of interest – hey, could that be why? -, while the holy of holies of the west - the religious banking industry - not only thrives on that practice but reduces nations and people to war and poverty in its forced collection. And it is bringing the world to a crisis from which it may not survive due to the exorbitant interest rates and incredible debt charged and collected by western minorities from global majorities which may one day act as a unified force to end that practice for all people and not just Muslims. Hey, could that be the menace?

Those who claim the old or new testament bibles for the foundation of their faith might benefit from studying those books more closely and also read the Koran before repeating lies about Islam, while claiming to be democratic civilizations which throw people out of their homes for lack of interest payments when they are not blowing them out of those homes in wars which earn even more interest for private capital. In fact, given the historic killing power of what is called Judeo Christianity, humanity should probably be grateful that there aren’t as many Jews as there are Christians or there might not be any of us left. But while we search for the truths possibly offered by one religious belief system or another, it is far more important that we confront the system that we must deal with in the material world if we are to continue as a human race with hopes for a better future and not one of tragic failure.

The political economics at the root of international banking and finance are the same one driving capital’s obsessive pursuit of private profit accumulation and are what humanity needs to control before its future is threatened as a race and not just one nation or people. That economic force and its political structure are the problem we must deal with, and one of its manifestations which is used to separate us is the enormous social and human costs of unwilling mass migration. The only relationship between foreign travel and positive cultural mixing and forced immigration and cultural segregation is the economics that provide only a minority with the first opportunity and far too many with the second. We need a different world to provide the first kind for more people and to end the second kind for all people. No people should be forced out of their homes, their homelands or their native habitat, but this practice will continue until it is stopped by democracy, or by total calamity.

If we do not deal with all aspects of contradiction between a system of private gain at public loss, we will surely face calamity.

Another world is possible, necessary and essential. It will be multicultural in the most positive sense, but only under a democratic control which is the antithesis of monocultural capitalist control. To reach and create that world, we’ll need to stop blaming reactions to forced migrations on its victims, and work to end all manner of forcing humans to do anything against their natural will to survive. Voluntary travel is the only kind we should all aspire to practice and enjoy in the creation of humanistic multiculturalism, as opposed to the forced perversion currently threatening to explode along with the system which causes it.

MACRO BALLS + MICRO BRAINS = USA

2011-08-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

US asks China to explain why it needs aircraft carrier

AFP – Wed, Aug 10, 2011

The United States said Wednesday it would like China to explain why it needs an aircraft carrier amid broader US concerns about Beijing's lack of transparency over its military aims.

"We would welcome any kind of explanation that China would like to give for needing this kind of equipment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters when asked whether the carrier would raise regional tensions.

China explained that it felt the U.S. should "gung phuque yo mamasan, rouneye..."

BULLETIN: Assad Demands Obama Step Down

2011-08-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Syrian president Bashir al Assad has called for U.S. president Obama to step down, saying "it is obvious this man has lost control of his country, its economy, his party and his wits. For the good of his people and humanity itself, he should return to his life as a bond salesman at Goldman Sachs".

Global markets continued dropping at the news.

from the Bulletin Room at Legalienate, where news arrives from the places that major media avoids...

READ THESE ASTOUNDING REVIEWS!

2011-08-16T16:04:00.001-07:00

“Legalienate is easily the most brilliant, insightful and hilarious blog in the internet universe”

The unpaid staff at Saloon.com

“There has never been as original and righteous a site for regressive, reactionary, revolutionary and radical thinkers in my fifteen minutes of experience on the internet”

Multi billionaire investor Warren Buffoon

“Scott and Smith are the Abbott and Costello, the Laurel and Hardy, the Leopold and Loeb of political commentary in this or any other century”

FaceLook Owner Benjamin Netonyoohoo

LEGALIENATE…the story of a meteoric rise from comparative obscurity to complete oblivion enjoyed by the most incredible blog in the history of bloggery…

Soon to be a major Hollywood production from the makers of “Attack of the Vampire Moths” and “ The Real, True, 100% Factual Saga of 911 and the Mossad, Bush, Cheney, Mogen David Conspiracy”…

with Brad Pitt as Mike Smith and Angelina Jolie as Frank Scott…

advance tickets available by sending money to: Legalienate…

just send money, any amount will do…

and support international capital…

and vote for Obama…

and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye…

Public Opinion: Down With Omnipotence

2011-07-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

The latest says that 41% approve of Obama's performance in office, a rating that is definitely falling, but still too high for a man who has attacked six countries in two years while picking up a Nobel peace prize. Why hasn't the Nobel committee committed suicide yet?

Seventy-two percent of Democrats still think Obama is doing a good job. If the high approval Bush used to get from Republicans was evidence of their stupidity, then Democrats today are suffering from outright idiocy. Where's the outrage?

But let's keep things in perspective. Only 51% of the people approve of the performance of God, which means that the trend line is definitely down for all-powerful figures that one can do absolutely nothing about.

In other words, people are steadily surrendering illusions . . . good!

Poverty - Bad and Getting Worse

2011-07-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith

I worked in a day care center for three years but ended up taking a job in a kennel because it paid better.

-----Former day care worker Denver, 2003

I can tell you that . . . as a black woman who’s been dealing with this forever, it can make you get crazy. Being poor all the time can make you crazy.

-----Crystal, a fifty-year-old health care labor organizer, New York City, 2006

Evil exists. I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher could call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don’t so they don’t need to use it to help people - that is my idea of evil.

-----South Bronx schoolboy to author Jonathan Kozol

Poverty flourishes while the economy continues to "recover." Sound familiar? It should, because we've been seeing the same phenomenon since the Reagan years, although not always with such a broad cast of victims. In some areas of the country sheriffs deputies are deemed poor enough to qualify for WIC (supplemental food for women, infants, and children), while in others food banks report that teachers are showing up for free food.

Less surprisingly, according to a new report from the Center for Housing Policy, a security guard cannot pay the average costs of a mortgage or lease. The study shows that the most common jobs in the service sector of the economy are incapable of generating sufficient income with which to pay the cost of living. Among those jobs are gardener, janitor, office worker, and security guard. Fast food workers, agricultural workers, home help aides, hotel cleaners, retail clerks, and many other categories of workers are in similar straits. In the 1950s, one in three American workers held manufacturing jobs, which, though physically demanding, generally paid fairly decent wages and provided health-care insurance, unemployment insurance, and a guaranteed pension. Today, only one in ten workers has such a job. And those workers find that their jobs are increasingly outsourced.

Currently the average price of a house in San Francisco is $550,000, in New York and San Jose $425,000, in Honolulu, $400,000. The national minimum wage, the lowest in half a century, stands at $7.25 an hour. In other words, if you work full-time at the minimum wage and save every dollar you earn for 30 years, you'll be within range of buying a home for yourself in New York or California or Hawaii. If President Obama fulfills his campaign pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011 (he's got five months left of 2011), which is very unlikely, your house might only cost you 20 years of full-time labor.

Poverty, as usual, amounts to death on the installment plan. A typical poor person’s diet consists of oatmeal for breakfast, and potatoes with gravy and tortillas for dinner. Lunch is a luxury, so don't develop an "entitlement mentality." A varied diet of tasty and nutritious foods is simply impossible for the poor, who find that austerity overrules balanced diet, with food stocks boiling down to potatoes, beans, rice, gravy, bread, dried milk, and Kool-Aid. Fresh fruits and vegetables are as rare as insight from President Obama.

Thanks to the automobile and oil industries, entire communities, lifestyles, job choices, and consumption patterns were built on a foundation of sand: cheap and plentiful gas supplies. Now that gas is no longer cheap, people stranded far from mass transit are forced to prioritize spending on gasoline and vehicle maintenance ahead of food. Without a vehicle and fuel to run it, one cannot gain or hold employment, shop for groceries, or get to the doctor's office. So people spend their last dollars filling (or partially filling) their gas tanks while their empty bellies growl in protest.

While there isn’t mass starvation in the United States, there is certainly a vast amount of chronic hunger, the kind that does not immediately kill, but leaves its victims lethargic and prone to illness, depression, and rage. Keep this in mind the next time you hear a politician urging you to "support our troops," as many of today's hungry are military personnel and their families.

Meanwhile, big business is awash in gargantuan profits (nearly 13% a year), major corporate CEOs got a 23% raise last year, and most working Americans are seeing their incomes stagnate or decline, even though productivity has risen steadily in recent years. Census Bureau numbers show that the median household income for working-age households fell, in 2007 dollars, by $2,010 in the years from 2000 to 2007, that is, BEFORE the crash of 2008. This is the only economic cycle on record in which real income for American workers has fallen.

Why is this happening? According to JP Morgan Chase, the steady decline of American wages and benefits is due to capital cannibalizing on wages, a phenomenon that accounts for fully 75% of the boom in corporate profit margins. "To state this more simply," Chase recently told its private banking clients, "profits are up because wages are down."

And they will stay down as long as unions remain weak or nonexistent (only 7% of the private sector is unionized), and no politically decisive labor bloc organizes itself against corporate money and power.

We're down, and they're stomping on us. It's time to counter-attack.

Sources:

Abramsky, Sasha, "Breadline USA - The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It," (PoliPoint Press, 2009)

Dodson, Lisa, "The Moral Underground - How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy," (New Press, 2009)

"Economic Recovery Misses Latinos," The Opinion (Spanish edition), July 27, 2011

Sklar, Holly, "CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You," July 25, 2011, www.commondreams.org

Meyerson, Harold, "Corporate America's Chokehold on Wages," Washington Post, July 19, 2011

Recession Still Over! Even More So Than Usual!!

2011-07-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

U.S. to Close 800 Computer Data Centers

Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 725 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20503, United States

The federal government plans to shut 40 percent of its computer centers over the next four years to reduce its hefty technology budget and modernize the way it uses computers to manage data and provide services to citizens. Computer centers typically do not employ many people to tend the machines, but analysts estimate that tens of thousands of jobs will most likely be eliminated.

Yes, and wars typically do not employ many people but tens of thousands are usually eliminated as their result. Yay?

They Get What They Pay For

2011-07-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

President Obama top recipient of News Corp. donations

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Barack Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. The transparency watchdog noted that Democrats received 51 percent of contributions while Republicans received 49 percent, despite the firm's highly publicized links to the GOP, such as a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association in August.
"Obama being listed as the company’s top recipient might surprise some people because of its highly publicized involvement with his political rivals, like Sarah Palin who was the vice presidential candidate in 2008 and reportedly still under contract with Murdoch-owned Fox News as a paid commentator," wrote Sunlight's Ryan Sibley.

Riddle

2011-07-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

They are the most important members of our family.

They are gluttons, devouring gas, oil, corn, sugarcane, and anything else that comes their way.

They own our time: bathing them, feeding and sheltering them, talking about them, and opening the way for them.

They reproduce faster than we do, and are ten times as numerous as they were half a century ago.

They kill more people than do wars, but no one condemns the murders, least of all the newspapers and television channels that live off their advertisements.

They steal our streets. They steal our air.

They laugh when they hear us say: "I drive."

-----Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors

Sad, Sad, Sad...What Have We Come To?

2011-07-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

July 19, 2011, 8:31 amInvestment Banking

Goldman Sachs Disappoints With Earnings of $1.05 Billion

By SUSANNE CRAIG

Shannon Stapleton/ReutersThe Wall Street entrance to Goldman Sachs.

8:45 a.m. | Updated Goldman Sachs reported profit of $1.05 billion on Tuesday, a weak showing that reflected the firm’s costly move to reduce risk and cut back trading activities.
The performance of the investment bank, which has largely shed the legacy of the financial meltdown, points to the new reality on Wall Street. Amid regulatory and economic uncertainty, Goldman is struggling to lift its earnings power to precrisis levels.

Earth Shaking Bulletin!

2011-07-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

The union of self appointed very important nations has recognized the Tea Party as the official government of the USA and has ordered the Obama regime to vacate its office immediately or face bombing and propaganda attacks until it does so.

Representatives of the Democratic party, the ACLU, NOW, the congressional Black Caucus and AIPAC have entered into private negotiations which they claim will ease hostilities between the two sides. But a spokesperson for the union says the talks are only to make clear that the self appointed very important nations will tolerate nothing less than Obama’s immediate stepping down.

“He can find sanctuary in Kenya or Israel,” said the representative from Venezuela, as those from China, Russia, Brazil and India nodded their heads in approval.

A formidable group of opponents to the very important nations has begun to form and expressed its undying devotion to the American government, the free market and holocaust movies. These nations, so far including Palau, outer Bimbomia, inner Micronesia and middle Psychoneuralgia, have vowed to see the struggle through to a peaceful outcome or they will declare holy war against whoever or whatever might then bail them out with financial aid after hostilities.

Stay Tuned as Legalienate correspondents, in the tradition of major media, learn more and reveal less.

A Nod to the British On The 4th of July

2011-07-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Our recently concluded Independence Day celebrations glossed over important history associated with the Fourth of July.

Americans like to state that establishing our independent nation was all about freedom. But whose freedom - and at whose expense?

The British outlawed slavery in 1772, and in the related parliamentary debates talked of extending the ban to their colonies. American slave holders were alarmed and appalled. The great British Tory Samuel Johnson noted the hypocrisy in their protests. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

Black slaves weren't the only ones with reason to favor continued British rule. For if the British had won the revolutionary war, the indigenous nations of North America would almost certainly have fared better than they did on the receiving end of unrestrained settler colonialism, which quickly reached genocidal proportions. The British Parliament wanted the colonies to remain a coastal enclave, because small colonies are easier to control, while the American colonists wanted to establish a vast new empire. And they did, wiping out millions of indigenous people in the process.

Our "sweet land of liberty" is soaked in the blood of countless innocent victims, who did their best to teach us the difference between liberty and license. Have we learned the lesson?

Time will tell.

Samuel Johnson quoted in James Boswell's, "The Life of Samuel Johnson," p. 425

Interest Group Flattery vs. History

2011-07-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

Governor Jerry Brown has signed a bill making California the first state in the U.S. to require lessons about gays and lesbians in public schools. The Democratic-majority Legislature recently passed the bill requiring public schools to include the contributions of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender in social studies curriculum.

"History should be honest," the governor said in a statement Thursday. "This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books."

California law already requires schools to teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor. The Legislature over the years also has prescribed specific lessons about the Irish potato famine and the Holocaust, among other topics.

Revisionist history certainly has a rightful place in correcting the distortions imposed by orthodox historians. Here, for example, is an excerpt from widely accepted U.S. history about half a century back, before "political correctness" forced its dogma of racial equality upon us:

"God wanted the white people to live alone. And He wanted colored people to live alone. . . . The white man has always been kind to the Negro . . . Negro people like to live by themselves. Negroes use their own bathrooms. They do not use white people's bathrooms."

No sane person would want to see racist narratives like this restored to a respected place in U.S. history textbooks, which is not to say that the problem of racial bias has been completely overcome in our nation's public school curriculum. Far from it.

So Governor Brown is right, history SHOULD BE honest. But when will the state approve curriculum depicting the U.S. role in overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and supporting the bloodiest forms of authoritarian rule - all in the name of "democracy"? If the word "never" is on the tip of your tongue, ask yourself how committed the state can ever really be to honest history. Not very.

Still, slightly less dishonest history is better than nothing, IF that's what we end up with.

Heterosexists are already asking why sexual orientation needs to be brought into school in any subject other than sex education. They keep their sex lives private, or so they claim, and they don't care to watch others "flaunt" what they do or don't like in the sack, and certainly don't have any interest in knowing what various historical figures did in bed. In short, sex is as private as anything can be, and should be kept that way.

Of course, this is perfect nonsense. Heterosexuality is the only sexuality considered "normal," and it is constantly glorified, especially in advertising and marketing, which consumes trillions of dollars a year in the United States. A woman's value is relentlessly portrayed as residing exclusively in her physical attractiveness and her willingness to go to bed with men. Sexuality private? You've got to be kidding.

Furthermore, sexuality is hardly confined just to the bedroom, nor does the new law call for discussing what people do in bed. It calls for recognizing the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered, presumably OUTSIDE of the bedroom.

One could, of course, argue that sexual orientation is a purely personal characteristic of no more significance than hair or eye color, and therefore undeserving of a place in the curriculum. But that stance is difficult to square with the longstanding denigration and hatred of sexual minorities. If it's simply a personal matter, why does it engender such frenzied insecurity?

It is the oppression of minorities that makes their history far more than merely personal. But if gays and other sexual minorities are never explicitly mentioned, how can students learn about the SOCIAL issue of sexual stigmatization?

Any member of a sexual minority has to deal with the widespread presumption of their deviance in the bedroom, so it's not true to say that one's sexual identity has nothing to do with what one does or doesn't do elsewhere. In the case of demonized minorities, it has everything to do with their behavior everywhere, because the dominant society's rejection of them always calls for a reaction. If the full range of consensual human sexuality were warmly embraced, it might be possible to treat sexual identity as a merely personal matter, but we're obviously a long way from realizing this ideal, so we should get used to the LGBT community "flaunting" its differentness. There is no other way for them to survive.

Should historical treatments extend beyond the issue of stigmatization? This is more problematic, and is likely to usher in an absurdly kaleidoscopic chaos of identity group flattery. This might be marginally better than what is being taught now, but it will still be a long way from the honest history Governor Brown says should be the rule.

Until we can honestly depict the NEGATIVE contributions we have made to history - war, propaganda, exploitation, robbery, etc. - our school textbooks will be more mythological than historical.

Source:

"Marin educators offer mixed reaction to landmark gay education law," Marin Independent Journal, July 14, 2011

Michele Bachmann, Obama, and Slavery, Old and New

2011-07-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

It's easy to portray Michele Bachmann as ridiculous, since she is ridiculous, although her anti-intervention stance vis-a-vis Libya is preferable to Obama's absurd rationalization of the NATO war. According to him, it's not even a war, because technological slaughter from the skies requires no boots on the ground, and without infantry there isn't really a war. Isn't he clever?

Obama recommends "smart" wars, as opposed to the "dumb" wars of the Bush era, now happily left behind while our Nobel Peace prize winner attacks one country after another with no hint of U.N. or Congressional authorization. If Obama represents intelligence, I'm no longer afraid of the designated idiots like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann recently created quite a stir by signing a political statement that included the following claim: "Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," the opening statement reads.

As Stephen Colbert pointed out in his July 12 satire, black children born in the slavery era were blessed to have not just African American parents, but also a biological father, who incidentally OWNED them. That, says Colbert, is clear evidence of fathers being INVESTED in their children.

Liberals and conservatives alike have a touching concern for the welfare of black families, which makes one wonder why they never get around to investigating the devastating impact the prison industrial complex has on them. Of course, the theory is that prisoners (of whatever race) are in jail solely because of their criminal conduct, and therefore deserve to be there. Unfortunately for this theory, however, the truth is that reported crime has fallen for the last 40 years, while prison construction has boomed, which makes it difficult to claim that the astonishing growth in the U.S. prison population is a response to crime. More plausible is the idea that blacks and other despised minorities have been declared economically superfluous and are locked up as a means of social control. Many, most, or all of them may be guilty as charged, but that's not why they're in prison.

Contempt Is Natural; Relax and Enjoy It

2011-07-16T17:10:00.000-07:00

"They piss on us, and the newspapers say 'rain.'"

------Anonymous graffiti, quoted by Eduardo Galeano

Democracy Begins At Home

2011-07-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

When major media echoedObama’s “winding down” military operations in Afghanistan it merely repeatedViet Nam era lies . As that war became so costly that it could only becontinued at bargain rates, the USA removed some of its troops and turned themajor killing responsibility over to the Viet Namese. “Changing the color ofthe bodies” enabled mind managers to proclaim that hostilities were “windingdown”. They actually continued for several more years until defeat was soimminent we were forced out before cracking the nation’s social and financial structure.

Now, we’re toldthat troops who weren’t there when Obama took office would soon come home,leaving more troops there than before he was elected and switching the policyto automated robot killings. This drone assassination technique has had greatsuccess at murdering innocent people when an errant robot hits families havingdinner instead of cults plotting terror. Is this change we can believe in orthe imperial status quo pursued under a multi-cultural president? We can onlyshudder at how long it may take a hacker to turn one of these things around andsend it back to its point of origin.

As murderous peace continuesin Iraqistan and the depressingrecession continues ending at home, the president of nimble talk and spinelesswalk proclaims change in policy towards Israel; he will separate his scrapingfrom his bowing. This is wildly lauded by those desperate to find something topraise in a failed regime which owes its future to the nearly imbecilicopposition. When Netanyahu treats the American congress like an AIPAC meetingand that congress behaves as a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate Israel,Americans need to wonder why they put up with such nonsense and how much longerit will be tolerated by the rest of the world, if not nature itself.

The Libyan slaughtercontinues as the European hit team trying to perpetuate the white man’s empireare running into the cost of warfare as their societies show signs of crumblingfrom within. Workers fight savage cuts to public spending while their privatelycontrolled governments kill Libyans to maintain their former control of Africa.Under Khadaffi, the latest in a demonized line of leaders of former colonies, Libya became a prosperous country with the highest standard of living on thecontinent. It has played a major role in attempting to organize the former Europeandominated region into an independent member of what passes for an internationalcommunity controlled by very few nations and even fewer banks. Whilehagiography may overdo his virtues, the delirious propaganda about the Libyan leader should come from people wearingpropeller beanies and drooling on themselves. Unfortunately, they look liketypical class servants to power as they spout incredible tales of terror thathave less relation to reality than do the ravings of a Fox TV commentator. The revivalof a Reagan era script that called Khadaffi a madman bent on global destructionshould clarify the foreign policy of presidents as allegedly different asarch-conservative Reagan and arch-liberal Obama: There is no difference.

The system is thesame, whether represented by a speech reading flunky from the old all-whiteschool or a speech reading flunky from the new half-white academy.

The global rule offinance capital has brought the system closer to collapse than it ever wasunder industrial-productive domination. Whilethe devastation of environments owes its beginning to the profit accumulationlust of private capital, production at least created commerce that benefitedsome, though always at the expense of others. Nevertheless, the rising materialstatus of a growing middle class in many nations could help cover the blight onglobal conditions that were the cost of this advance. But under financial ruleprofiteers greatly decline in numbers as their obscene wealth grows, inequalityincreases and those formerly able to enjoy some benefits of material productionare reduced to buying the goods and services of survival on credit. This contradictionbetween a shrinking minority that expands its wealth at the expense of agrowing majority that pays for it with debt and poverty is leading to socialexplosions.

Outside the castlesand casinos of affluence masses are beginning to create the most dangerousthreat minority rule has ever faced: democratic majorities threatening to takecontrol of political, economic and natural environments. Nothing terrifies theimperial rulers more and present vicious attacks on pubic spending in thedeveloped states and on disobedient regimes in the developing ones are signs oftheir terror.

Citizens of the USAare threatened with more devastation of what pitiful social services remain inorder to assure growing wealth for a minority and continued wars all over theworld. Even supposedly untouchable programs like Social Security are menaced bya president afraid he may be thought not pragmatic enough to be refinanced byhis masters. But his disgraceful performance is exactly what they hired him togive.

In Europe, Africaand across the Arab world social desperation is bringing on an arousedpopulation demanding transformational and not simply rhetorical change. Thelevel of desperation here in the USA has hardly reached a point of total socialbreakdown, but if the conscious desirefor democracy doesn’t come soon and create a majority out of minorities, itwill. Motivated humanitarians who try to reach Gaza with compassionate lettersof support would be better advised to descend on Washington DC with letters of contempt.Attention needs to be focused on the imperial center from which not only Israelbut the entire axis of domination originates. It is long past time for theAmerican people to take action, and that action should begin and end right herein the USA.

email: fpscott@gmail.com

More Shocking Bulletins!!

2011-07-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

MSNBC Suspends Mark Halperin Indefinitely for Obama Remark

SNBC has suspended political analyst and Time magazine writer Mark Halperin indefinitely over a remark he made about President Obama Thursday morning.

"Mark Halperin's comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable," said MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines in a statement. "We apologize to the President, the White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air."

Appearing on "Morning Joe" this morning, Halperin, senior political analyst at Time and MSNBC and co-author of the 2008 election opus "Game Change," sought to characterize the president's demeanor at a press briefing the previous day. The term Halperin used to characterize the president is vulgar, as the partial transcript shows:

"Are we on the seven-second delay?" Halperin asked.

"We have it. We can use it. Go for it. Let's see what happens," co-anchor Joe Scarborough replied.

"I thought he was a dick yesterday," Halperin replied, sending the hosts into a brief moment of panic.

Legalienate's Washington insiders claim he meant to say "prick ".

Shocking Bulletin !

2011-07-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Israel Intercepts Gaza Flotilla, Discovers Plans For Extermination Of All Jews In Israel!

After boarding a ship called “ the arrogance of hostility”, Israeli agents discovered files containing plans for the destruction of world Jewry, beginning in Israel. These were headed for Hamas leaders and were written in the original German but with fluent Arabic translations provided. Blueprints for gas ovens and instructions for ethnic cleansing were detailed.

Reaction in the free world was instant as all aid for Palestinians was cancelled and immediate bombing of Gaza was scheduled. “We cannot stand by and watch such indiscriminate brutality after the lessons we learned in World War 2” said the American president. Congress and former presidents, even one previously critical of Israel, all lined up in support of instant annihilation of Palestinians and any other Arabs who may have been party to this sordid plan.

Stay tuned for further details!

Also, write if you find work…

and hang by your thumbs.

The Law: A Nuisance

2011-06-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

We can't obey international law because it conflicts with maintaining a "favorable investment climate" for business and a favorable racial environment for Israel. We can't obey financial laws because plundering Wall Street firms are "too big to fail." We can't obey state and local laws seeking to restrict employment and residency to those legally authorized to enjoy those privileges, because business wants to drown the New Deal social contract in illegal labor that can't command decent wages and benefits the way legal workers can.

So what laws can we obey?

Who Knew?

2011-06-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

Breaking news
Wednesday June 22 2011

Fed acknowledges economy in soft patch

The US Federal Reserve kept monetary policy frozen after its June meeting as it acknowledged that the economy has run into a soft patch.

It will get hard as soon as the viagra, cialis and levitra presidential campaign money kicks in.

Plantation Nation

2011-06-17T12:25:00.001-07:00

“Back during slavery there were two kinds of Negros. There was that old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negros got too much out of line, he held them in check. He put them back on the plantation.”

Malcolm X

America seemed to achieve a great victory when Obama was elected president, both overcoming its wretched racist history and sending a positive message to humanity. But if Malcolm were alive he might point out that an African-American running the plantation for his masters does not change anything but the skin tone of the person serving those masters.

Accepting such cosmetic change when our “plantation” needs radical transformation may be too costly a price to bear.

Our economy inflicts greater loss on the majority while a minority sees its profits rising. Public service is under vicious assault as corporate capital, private wealth and foreign interest – Israel’s often placed far above our own – attempt to reinforce the crumbling structure of minority wealth by weakening the foundation under everything else. And presiding over this imperial plantation is a 21^st century model of Malcolm’s house Negro, keeping the global field hands in line.

Often a verbal fumbler when thinking on his feet, Obama’s ability to “give good speech” makes many react to him with uncritical praise. Some of his detractors call him a socialist, a Muslim or an alien, depending on the depths of their stupidity or racism. But his employment seems assured given the dreadful opposition offered by corporate capital’s other ruling party, though there has been growing criticism from former supporters as conditions move from bad to worse.

While too many Americans accept hyphenated national identity, the president’s Kenyan father makes him truly African-American. But millions born here and wearing that label are more deeply rooted in the USA than most other Americans. They should not tolerate being reduced to a divided and conquered minority, and at this point in history neither should the rest of us. We ought to reject outdated and imposed divisions that diminish our mental capacity into permanent subservience to ruling power. That social malady finds us supporting a “white” house occupant as agent of the majority while he maintains a system that profits a minority at our expense.

The symbol of democracy at the top is no different from finance capital’s congressional servants who, like puppets on strings, applauded the Israeli president when he addressed what might as well have been his Knesset. Their excitement was for AIPAC campaign contributions which assure maintenance of a racial supremacist state that threatens our future and would vanish without our financial and military support.

Our government - with rare exceptions - serves financial masters who buy it in election sales that are sham performances of democracy. It is employed by an oligarchy laughing all the way to the bank it stocks with our money which it then loans to us at exorbitant interest rates. That’s part of the perpetual economic scam of a system that always enriches an idle minority by robbing the working majority.

We should all be “ people of color ” turning beet red in shame at having been repeatedly manipulated and swindled in the interest of these masters. They use outside menace and inside divisional diversity to set people against one another as their profiteering shreds the social and environmental fabric to leave us naked against the elements of harsh reality. That reality cannot be tolerated any longer, here or in the rest of the world.

Libya, a nation long critical of western domination and the “house” Arab regimes which support it, is being destroyed under the guise of freeing it from a despot. Sound familiar? The atrocity of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan threatens to last longer than all 20^th century wars combined. Iran continues to be fanatically demonized and European capital is attacking its people with undisguised fury. As trillions are spent on death and destruction that brings more misery and terrorism, an imperial world leader rhetorically offering positive change is negatively furthering the status quo of war, nuclear power and the wealth of his masters.

Many of the minority living in the symbolic master house at the top of the economic pyramid are doing lavishly well. The rest of us are the overwhelming majority that lives in an environment under growing and race threatening assault. Democratic control needs to be taken by the power of the people in that field of humanity. House servants of capital, no matter what ethnic, racial or sexual hyphenation they wave like a flag, are working for their wealthy masters and against democratic interests.

The sooner we drop divisional nonsense that says the skin tone, sex or beliefs of people makes them somehow different humans, the sooner we will begin solving our problems. Minority masters have put those ideas in our heads and their house servants reinforce their propaganda. We need to cure ourselves of a mental illness that assures physical failure for civilization. Peaceful prosperity cannot be achieved under the present distribution of humanity’s wealth, which goes primarily to a minority at everyone else’s expense. This government serves that minority. The workers in the symbolic field need to “get out of line” in Malcolm’s words, reject servants of their masters and take that house of government for their own. The changes that would bring about will impact far beyond the symbolic nature of a speechmaker for the housemasters and extend to being a change maker for the USA and beyond.

Conceived Online, With Tweeted Sperm?

2011-06-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

June 8, 2011, 5:11 pm

Weiner’s Wife Is Pregnant

By MICHAEL BARBARO and ASHLEY PARKER

Charles Dharapak/Associated PressRepresentative Anthony D. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, in January.

Representative Anthony D. Weiner and Huma Abedin are about to make news of a different kind: they are expecting their first child.

Excellent News For Comedy Writers

2011-06-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

June 6, 2011, 9:41 am

‘Culture Warrior’ Rick Santorum Jumps In

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

12:02 p.m. | Updated Former Senator Rick Santorum made it official on Monday, announcing first to ABC News and then to a crowd at the courthouse in Somerset, Pa., that he would join the field seeking the Republican nomination for president.

Obama Talks Sense After Head Surgery

2011-05-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Aides Stunned, Panicked Wall Street Calls For "Returning" President to Indonesia

Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
May 19, 2011 6:47 a.m. EDT

(LNB) -- Following emergency surgery to correct faltering mental capacities, president Barack Obama is "finally talking sense," according to a team of neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins.

"It may be hard to believe, but he's really lucid and rational" said his chief neurosurgeon, Dr. Ding Dong, who performed the 7 1/2 hour-operation to replace the part of Obama's skull that had rotted away from years of exposure to neo-liberal ideology. "He woke up from surgery and said new nuclear plant construction didn't make sense in the midst of a Chernobyl-like meltdown in Japan."

The president told reporters that he was "very grateful" to have a working brain, which his doctors predicted would "almost certainly" help him overcome an apparently self-inflicted lobotomy that had rendered him incapable of rational thought while the nation he was entrusted to govern careened from one national disaster to another over the past two plus years.

"The brain is in good position, the president is thinking critically, and everything looks great," said Dr. Dong. "We expect the nation's business to be on a rational footing in a very short time," he added.

These remarks provoked panic on Wall Street, with major investment houses calling for the president to be "returned" to Indonesia. "The last thing we need is a president who can rationally order the nation's priorities in accordance with the Constitution's call to promote the general welfare," said Bernie Rosenthal of Neurosis Production Unlimited, a trillion dollar a year marketing firm. "The effort to bring this treasonous project to fruition is the clearest possible proof that Barack Obama is not an American citizen and therefore not really president," he added.

Aides initially attributed the president's uncharacteristic rationality to the lingering effects of a new anesthesia, but when Obama continued to exhibit incisive common sense throughout the day, they were alerted to the surgery's complete success. Over lunch the president said that Israel's policy of locking the Palestinian people in a giant outdoor prison would "hardly have won the approval of Dr. King." Later, he proclaimed it "nonsensical" to give trillions of dollars worth of aid to swindling investment firms while Main Street "languished in economic disaster."

The president ruined his original brain reading stacks of position papers written by corporate PR flacks and "Israel forever" fanatics. As he gradually lost the power to reason, he gave away the store to plundering corporations and dispatched U.S. military forces to carry out pointless slaughters in one country after another.

Like patients with gunshot wounds to the head, Obama ended up with an extreme inability to reason. Before replacing his brain, his neurosurgical team cut a hole in his head to relieve the pressure caused by the enormous buildup of stale rhetoric inside his softened skull. Dr. Dong said an internal drain, called a shunt, was inserted into Obama's cranial cavity to carry excess verbiage from the brain to the abdominal cavity, where it can now be disposed of by normal elimination processes. Dr. Dong called the procedure an "intellectual laxative."

------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Stale Bread, Brutal Circus

2011-05-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

With the western imperial system in grave condition its population needs constant mind game manipulation to help ruling minorities maintain control. Recent Bread and Circus spectacles have featured a marriage of royal entities from an alleged democratic nation, and a hit squad performing a mafia job and depicted as heroic for their work. This served to briefly occupy the minds of people who should be considering far more serious matters.

A marriage continuing a tradition of socially acceptable incestuous families brought some temporary escapist entertainment to souls otherwise dealing with work, rent, or unemployment. Despite the rarely mentioned contradiction of genetic royalty in a system of democratic equality, the lovely bride and less lovely groom were hailed and farewelled and will probably not be heard from again until a divorce or other scandal. But the hit job on a famously created demon will have repercussions and though useful as a propaganda tool for those in power, questions have been raised which will hopefully lead to more exposure of material reality by “ the American street" .

Without arrest, trial or even its pretense, the alleged mastermind of the 911 terror attack was, we are told, killed at a hideaway where he had evaded military un-intelligence for ten years. The ineptitude that allowed the 911 disasters to happen was further exemplified in the sloppy work of murdering the supposed arch-villain mastermind, and its breathless uncritical reportage followed by macho posturing of government officials of all races, creeds and sexes. We should not be surprised at the legal injustice since the president, a supposed constitutional expert, previously revealed his Bush-level ignorance in pronouncing Bradley Manning guilty without trial, so why not the foreign monster? Media in its dutiful role as stenographer and cheerleader for power had long depicted Osama as the archfiend who directed the 911 attacks, despite no evidence other than his publicly expressed hatred for those brutalizing his people. How could citizens exposed to constant manufactured fictional news be expected to question the killing of this villain? And yet many among them did just that, proving that Abraham Lincoln - who, like another alleged archfiend, Gaddafi, “killed his own people” - was correct: Americans may be ignorant, but we are not stupid. Of course that excludes our leaders, who are maintained in their stupidity only by our controlled ignorance.

The storied bravery of a hit squad encountering a madman using a woman as a shield and firing at will soon revealed that Osama wasn’t armed at all. The only resistance encountered was from his unarmed wife, who was bravely shot by the assaulting mob. While a performance of gruesome public joy was arranged, we learned that the corpse was buried at sea, and no photos would be revealed to the public. This will invite more skeptics to believe that Osama was already dead, had never been alive in the first place, or was a secret triple agent of the Mossad – CIA -3 Stooges conspiracy. But whatever level of informed or surreal belief is entertained by skeptics, the crime was clear to anyone able to pierce the plastic curtain of disinformation that turned a serious situation with implications of further terrorist threat into a grotesque glorification of murder and vengeance for a crime with which Osama likely had little if any direct involvement.

The Islamic fundamentalists at the core of 911 terror may be a tiny minority, but whether manipulated or not they represent a growing majority of the global population that is saying, one way or another: enough is enough, we refuse to live under your boot heels any longer and we demand control of our own lives.

The murderous assault on another media created villain in Libya was momentarily placed on the back pages while new legends, fables and outright lies were being presented as news of the world. A nation which once had the highest material quality of life on the African continent is being reduced to a bombed and bleeding victim of western aggression, while the conservative right and the liberal left in America join in bipartisan patriotic applause at this humanitarian justice. If genetic royalty is part of democracy, why cant mass murder be an expression of peace?

What has been romanticized as an Arab Spring may only be a seasonal hint with real democracy still on the horizon, but it is unmistakable as a trend. With growing solidarity among Palestinians and their global supporters, the western imperial response to signs that Usrael domination is nearing its end has led to feverish actions in nations where regimes which may have legitimate opposition have been transformed, especially in Libya, into bloody civil wars by euro-western manipulation and intervention. But the Arab tyrants who suck up to the west, sit on billions of dollars and rule their subjects with an iron hand, are allowed to subdue their roused populations with violence unquestioned by this “democracy” and its fellow travelers who call themselves liberals or progressives.

There may be short-term success for the military power of the empire, but in the long term its political economic contradictions will come crashing down. The profit and loss financial domination of the world by private capital, far more deadly than any royal family or individual dictatorship, is ultimately making it impossible for the continuity of the human race and its foundation: mother earth. More distractions via bread and circus spectacles should not and cannot impede the work of humanity to bring about another world, which is not only possible but absolutely necessary.

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes

2011-05-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding

By Samuel Crowell
Nine-Banded Books, 2011, 370 pp.

Review by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

Reading Samuel Crowell's, "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" is a little like stumbling across a rational mind in an insane asylum years after being taken hostage by the inmates. Following prolonged immersion in clashing dogmas, the dispassionate use of evidence and logic to arrive at a sensible conclusion comes as a jolting but thoroughly pleasant surprise. And Crowell's modesty in stating that conclusion tentatively, knowing that genuinely rational inquiry will and should be superseded by later efforts, is an equally refreshing departure from polemical norms.

Drawing on establishment and revisionist authors, along with a careful scrutiny of German source documents, Crowell deftly evaluates contending claims arguing that Nazi "gas chambers" were (1) weapons of extermination (2) disinfection chambers (3) bomb shelters designed to protect against aerial gas attacks. Aligning eyewitness testimony with the material and documentary record, he sketches out the basis for a rational opinion, putting readers in a position to make their own judgments, without first requiring that they join in partisan warfare. Thanks to this effort we no longer need choose between delusional orthodoxy and strident dissidence, but can simply weigh evidence. This should come as a relief to everyone, while hopefully expanding the number of readers who can move beyond ritual denunciation and actually take the gas chamber debate seriously.

Crowell's work contains not a trace of anti-Semitism. He makes no attempt to whitewash Nazi racial policy, which he characterizes as a "shameful and disgraceful chapter in Germany history," even if "we assumed revisionist theses to their maximum extent." The important consideration, he notes, is that "we would still be dealing with about a million dead European Jews, who died as a direct result of Nazi persecution, plunder, forced labor, deportation, and yes, mass killing." As for his personal beliefs, he says, "they remain what they have been for thirty years or more," that "there certainly was a Holocaust in the sense that Nazi Germany persecuted and massacred many Jews," with the likelihood "that this massacre ran into the millions." Philosemitic crusaders, please take note.

A self-declared "moderate revisionist" who clearly values the standards of rational investigation, Crowell avoids exaggeration, misrepresentation, and self-righteousness. He shows no reluctance to admit when a conclusion is debatable or when the evidence is open to varying interpretations; and he is able to perceive shortcomings in the views and tactics of those who share a revisionist stance - and even some merit in those who do not. This adds credibility to his analysis, and marks him as a rare breed of intellectual who actually does what he is supposed to do: face up to facts and plausibly explain them. It is truly sad that on such an important topic his open-mindedness is all but unique.

Alarmed by the banning of revisionist thought in Europe, Crowell originally took up Holocaust research in order to rescue intellectual freedom from the Holocaust witch hunts of the 1990s, ironically doing so under an assumed name (he fears for the safety of his family). He correctly points out that the censorship crusade against revisionism represents nothing other than "the censorship of historical investigation itself," and notes with considerable relief that it appears to be losing steam. After years of beatings, fire-bombings, heresy trials, and book shreddings, designed to suppress what is openly regarded as a species of historical blasphemy, one can only hope and pray that this judgment is correct.

Due to a lack of corroborating physical and documentary evidence, Crowell is skeptical of the mass homicidal gassing thesis, classifying it as a "conspiracy theory," which he defines as "a small group of people operating, as it were, invisibly, causing things to happen and covering the traces of their activity." He finds this an implausible line of thought, because "there is no material evidence to support the theory," i.e., no forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers. Such an argument "demands the belief in unseen or invisible agency, which is able to accomplish its work without leaving behind clear material traces of its misdeeds." Crowell finds people who take such ideas seriously reminiscent of "those millenia of humans who attributed terrible events to demons, devils, or other invisible supernatural beings."

Crowell's analysis is particularly apt in critiquing the "convergence of evidence" model borrowed from evolutionary biology, in which multiple strands of facts allegedly "converge" on a conclusion. But as Crowell notes, "no competent historian works that way." For if historians have corroborating documentary evidence for a conclusion from a high-level document, they look for further substantiation from mid and low-level documents in order to avoid an argument with anomalous gaps. On the other hand, if they have merely eyewitness confirmation or a vague corroboratory reference, they search for higher level evidence before drawing hard and fast conclusions. The difference between this approach and conventional Holocaust historiography is striking. As Crowell notes: "The absence of evidence for gassing in a continuous hierarchy is a serious problem, just as an evolutionary biologist would be dumbfounded if he or she found entire geological strata in which there was no evidence of life at all. That is the proper analogy for the magnitude of the problem faced here."

Equally helpful is Crowell's excavation of the devastating impact of the Nuremberg Trials on subsequent Holocaust research. What scholars have been able to access about the Holocaust are a selection of documents from the German archives that were gathered and used for the express purpose of convicting the Nazi leadership in the first five years after World War II ended. Later the judgment of the International Military Court was declared unchallengeable, and criminal penalties were applied to those who publicly questioned the court's findings. This means that the same documents, along with a prosecutorial interpretation of those documents, have remained fixed for over sixty years. As Crowell notes: "This never happens in normal historiography."

The strength of Crowell's book is also its weakness. He stays riveted on "gas chambers," refusing to be drawn into broader issues or concerns. He explicitly rejects the notion that revisionist theses on the Holocaust carry with them implications for Israel, whose problems, he says "have nothing to do with an aggressive recounting of the suffering of the Jewish people in World War Two."

But this observation entirely misses the point. For the so-called "mother question" in the Middle East has never been how to solve Israel's problems, but rather, how to deal with the impossible problems created by Israel. And central to those problems is the political capital the Jewish state has made out of what Crowell calls the Canonical Holocaust. Indeed, it is unlikely that a Jewish state could ever have been founded on Palestinian Arab lands, much less won license to commit permanent ethnic cleansing against them, had it not been for widespread belief in the extermination of European Jewry in gas chambers and cremation ovens, a uniquely horrible destiny, if true. But if that story is fatally flawed, as Crowell's careful research suggests it is, then world leaders' ritual deference to a presumed unique Jewish victimhood (especially on the part of U.S. leaders) may very well prove impossible to sustain, as may the justification for maintaining Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. And if U.S. support on these scores ever wavers, it is difficult to see how Israel will be able to stave off the radical transformation it will have to undergo in order to remain part of the Middle East. Whether it continues to exist in name or not, it will no longer be the state the world is familiar with.

Imperial Brain Damage: The Week in Review

2011-05-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com

The political assassination of Osama Bin Laden predictably triggered an orgy of media imbecility among U.S. pundits. The hit by heavily-armed Navy SEALS in the dead of night at a Pakistani military compound in Abbottabad was routinely described as "daring," though only a lone courier appears to have fought back, which makes it difficult to see much courage at work. But trust the U.S. media to praise to the skies any U.S. military effort to kill for an allegedly greater good (always), no matter whose national sovereignty is violated, how many innocent bystanders are killed, or how little legal or moral authority for the act is presented. "Justice has been done," intoned a clueless President Obama, who has attacked six countries in just over two years in office, without a shred of convincing legal or moral justification for any of the interventions. (The six countries are: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer waxed psychoanalytic, saying that Americans could at last overcome the sense of pessimism and failure they "felt - but rarely acknowledged - in not being able to apprehend bin Laden for so long." Our country continues to face "huge challenges" in Afghanistan and Iraq, the editors went on, but with Bin Laden dead "it's easier to envision a day not too long from now when the wars are over, the troops come home, and optimism reigns."

It's difficult to know where to start with this. No sane person could possibly anticipate that the endless series of U.S. sponsored wars dating back to the colonial era are about to come to an end. As noted, Obama has attacked six countries in barely half a term of office, a rate that, if sustained, would yield 20 or more interventions should Obama last eight years in the White House.

Incidentally, the "huge challenges" we face in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently do not include presenting a credible reason for being in those countries in the first place. The Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over to U.S. authorities after 911, but Washington turned them down. And most of the world is very well aware by now that the Iraq war was launched without even the pretense of a justification.

As for why it would be good for "optimism" to reign over the U.S.A., where twenty-five million people are out of work, a quarter of American mortgages are under water, a third of the American people are without savings to fall back on, and where there continues to be no sign of economic recovery three years into the Great Recession, the Inquirer's editors unfortunately do not indicate. Suffice it so say that the conclusion is something less than self-evident.

Meanwhile the Kansas City Star editorialized that America's resolve to pursue our enemies to the ends of the earth sends them an important message, to wit: "If you do what bin Laden did, the United States will find you no matter where you hide, no matter how long it takes." Apparently, the Star's editors have forgotten that Muslim terrorists of the Bin Laden variety do not fear death, and actually welcome martyrdom, which makes intimidation a poor strategy. Unfortunately, the U.S. media have the attention span of a two-year old, and regularly forget what it is most important to remember.

Shannen Coffin in NationalReview.com said that Bin Laden was tracked down partly because of U.S. torture policy. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003, "he was resistant to any form of interrogation, conventional or otherwise." But waterboarding and "other enhanced measures" made him more "compliant," and interrogators were able to deduce from his responses clues about the whereabouts of Bin Laden's courier.

Oh, happy day! Torture works after all. The fact that Bin Laden's death does nothing to make anyone safer, and in fact, has U.S. authorities redoubling their efforts to prevent expected terrorist revenge attacks, is beneath our contempt to notice. We're celebrating, after all, and we want no more of "pessimism" pointing out the cost of our suicidal recklessness.

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post weighed in with the judgment that for too long Obama has displayed a "counterproductive sensitivity for the sensitivities of the Muslim world," by deferring to U.N. approval (When? Where?). But by sending in a commando team to assassinate bin Laden, "whether or not Pakistan or anyone else liked it," Obama has broken free of the wimp factor.

In point of fact Obama has shown utter contempt for Muslims in Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His sending in an assassination squad to kill Bin Laden is simply more of the same. There is nothing "manly" in this, and U.S. punditry's cheerleading for militarist machismo is a deadly plague leading the world to incalculable destruction. Only a juvenile delinquent could see anything to be happy about here.

Louis Klarevas in NewRepublic.com at least got a point half right: "Decapitating al Qaida will not stop those who feel it is their duty to strike against the U.S. and its assets in the name of bin Laden's twisted version of Islam." Right. The issue is not Bin Laden, but the adherents of his and similar ideologies, who can be counted on to strike back for this latest attack, killing yet more innocents. ["Terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge him," said CIA Director Leon Panetta.] Why should more Americans die for Israel and U.S. Empire? And why should we be happy about a foreign policy that invites those deaths?

In any event, it is an open question as to how "twisted" Bin Laden's version of Islam is. Is it more "twisted" than Obama's Zionism, now laying waste to what remains of historic Palestine? Or more twisted than his Christianity (sorry for the repetition), which somehow allows his conscience to rest easy as he sets records for pilotless drone attacks, a particularly cowardly form of "warfare"? One very much doubts it. As usual, U.S. hypocrisy is boundless.

David Barno in the New York Times said that Bin Laden's killing reminds his followers that the U.S. is "a power to be reckoned with," which they were apparently unaware of when the U.S. was merely reducing one Muslim-dominant country after another to rubble. It is apparently inconceivable to the pundit class that a limitless willingness to kill does not make the U.S. respected in the world. Quite the contrary.

Juliette Kayyem in the Boston Globe commented that our government's formerly "excited" posture vis-a-vis terrorism has transformed itself into "resolute calmness" (an improvement?). The new watchword is, "Secretly kill. Publicly chill." Uncharacteristically, the Department of Homeland Security didn't even issue a new alert this week, since no new specifics about future attacks were uncovered to "warrant freaking everyone out." This is supposedly evidence that we're now better at coping with the "nature of the world we live in."

Secretly kill, publicly chill? Is this woman serious? Such comments bespeak a level of dissociation from reality that should make Ms. Kayyem certifiable. And we're better at coping with reality in the wake of killing Bin Laden? While the newspapers shriek that we "got our man" and citizen mobs besiege the White House with vulgar chants of "USA! USA! USA!"

If this is sanity, what is madness?

Source:

Quoted material from "The Week, "May 13, 2011

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Osama Bin Laden - The Real Story

2011-05-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

How angry America gets when it attacks people and those people resist!

-----------Osama bin Laden, December 1998

How can they hope to be blessed with security while they are dishing out destruction, devastation, and murder on our people in Palestine and Iraq?

-----------Osama bin Laden, December 16, 2004

He dates his political awakening to 1973, when a U.S. airlift helped Israel turn the tide in the so-called Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria had overrun Israeli defenses and its vaunted Bar-Lev line at the beginning of the war, leading a stunned Tel Aviv to hint that it might resort to nuclear weapons if the U.S. didn't save the day for the Jewish state. When Washington's intervention helped deal the Arabs another bitter defeat, fifteen-year-old Osama stopped watching cowboy shows, refused to wear Western clothes (except at school, where it was required), and "would sit in front of the television and weep over the news from Palestine." [Lawrence Wright, "The Looming Tower - Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."]

The immediate cause of the war was Israeli "development" of the Northeastern Sinai, which involved the forcible removal of Arab farmers from their lands. U.S. support for Israeli annexation of large parts of the Occupied Territories and its refusal to respond to Anwar Sadat's peace overtures, made war inevitable. For bin Laden, it made sympathetic consideration of Western culture impossible.

It was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed 20,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians, that planted in bin Laden the seed of revenge. In a November 2004 video he recalled the carnage, the "blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents . . ." He longed to strike back. "As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying the towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine and would be prevented from killing our women and children. On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy."

A decade before the release of this video, bin Laden had been stripped of his Saudi citizenship (1994) for his continued harsh criticism of the Saudi royal family. He wrote a letter to the Chief Mufti, the foremost juridical authority in the Kingdom, calling his endorsement of the 1993 Oslo Accords an "astonishing juridical decree," a betrayal of the word of God and the community of the faithful. Like millions of other Arabs, bin Laden was anguished at the contemptuous treatment Palestinian Arabs continually received at the hands of the West, and saw no reason why it should continue.

Bin Laden's letter argued flat out that the Jews that came to Palestine were not indigenous to the region: "The current Jewish enemy is not an enemy settled in his own original country fighting in its defense until he gains a peace agreement, but an attacking enemy. The only proper course of action, therefore, was to wage jihad, both for the sake of God and "so that Palestine may be completely liberated and returned to Islamic sovereignty." The Oslo Agreement, which nullified Palestinian national rights, converting the PLO to a municipal authority, was a patent fraud: ". . . the alleged peace that the rulers and tyrants are falling over themselves to make with the Jews is nothing but a massive betrayal, epitomized by their signing of the documents of capitulation and surrender of the Holy City of Jerusalem and all of Palestine to the Jews, and their acknowledgement of Jewish sovereignty over Palestine for ever."

In a March, 1997 interview with Robert Fisk of the London Independent, bin Laden again made clear that Israel was a primary grievance. Referring to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia the year before, he said: "The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation, but as a result of American behavior against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon - of Sabra and Chatila and Qana - and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference." Sabra and Chatila was a 1982 massacre of over a thousand Palestinian refugees by Israel's Phalangist Christian allies in Lebanon; Qana was a U.N. base attacked by Israel in 1996, in which roughly a hundred Lebanese were killed; Sharm el-Sheikh was an "anti-terrorism" conference in which Bill Clinton accused Hamas and Hizbollah of terrorism but said nothing of Israel's far greater violence. Events like these merged Israel and the U.S. in bin Laden's mind. ""For us there is no difference between the American and Israeli governments or between the American and Israeli soldiers."

Four months after the 1998 attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which Bin Laden disclaimed responsibility for, he returned to the theme of the betrayal of Palestine: "Every time a king meets a president they say they have 'discussed the Palestinian issue,' but over half a century a clear picture has emerged: they have abandoned the mujahidin in Palestine. . . they have given a guilty verdict on those lions whose fathers and brothers have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, and persecuted . . . . I don't know what people are waiting for after this clearest of betrayals, and after the shameful way in which the Arab rulers have acted in the interests of the Jews or America."

An interesting side note on the Nairobi Embassy bombing concerns a young Arab questioned by F.B.I. investigator Stephen Gaudin. Identifying himself as Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed from Yemen, he shouted at Gaudin: "You want to blame this (bombing) on me? It's your fault, your country's fault for supporting Israel!" Livid at the death toll, he asked Gaudin: "Why did these people have to die? They had nothing to do with the United States and Israel and Palestine!"

In a statement faxed to Al Jazeera on September 24, 2001, bin Laden excoriated USrael hypocrisy in waxing moralistic on the issue of human rights while it was engaged in wholesale killing in Iraq and Palestine: "Until this point, a million innocent children have been killed in Iraq . . . As I speak, Israeli tanks and bulldozers are going in and wreaking havoc and sin in Palestine - in Jenin, in Ramallah, in Rafah, in Beit Jala . . . . and we do not hear anyone protesting or even lifting a finger to stop it." He insisted on reciprocal security or none at all: "I swear by God Almighty Who raised the heavens without effort that neither America nor anyone who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." The U.S. response came two weeks later, when the White House announced that it had asked the five major U.S. T.V. networks to censor footage of al-Qaeda. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice "urged all the American network chiefs not to screen videos of Bin Laden."

In a October 21, 2001 interview with Al Jazeera reporter Taysir Alluni in Afghanistan, bin Laden expressed outrage that President Bush and Colin Powell had promised in their first few months in office that "they would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem would be the eternal capital of Israel." Asked about the justification for killing innocent civilians, Bin Laden condemned Washington's selective and self-serving morality: "Whenever we kill their civilians, the whole world yells . . . . and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets. . . . What about the people that have been killed in our lands for decades? . . . Who said that our blood isn't blood and that their blood is blood? . . . More than 1,000,000 children died in Iraq, and they are still dying . .. . Everyday in Palestine, children are killed . . . . How is it that these people are moved when civilians die in America, and not when we are being killed everyday?" Near the end of the interview he returned to the constant killing in Palestine: "By what right are our families in Palestine denied safety? The helicopters hunt them while they are in their homes, while they are amongst their women and children; everyday the bodies and wounded are removed."

In an interview published in London's Al Quds on November 12, 2001, bin Laden explained that, "The United States and their allies are killing us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq," so "that's why Muslims have the right to carry out revenge attacks on the U.S.." He added that the democratic nature of the U.S. government implicated all Americans in such crimes. "The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government and that they voted for their president. Their government makes weapons and provides them to Israel, which they use to kill Palestinian Muslims. Given that the American Congress is a committee that represents the people, the fact that it agrees with the actions of the American government proves that America in its entirety is responsible for the atrocities that it is committing against Muslims. . . . The onus is on Americans to prevent Muslims from being killed at the hands of their government."

In a statement recorded for release to Al Jazeera in December 2001, bin Laden reiterated his claim that the 911 attacks were retaliation for the West's injustices against Muslims worldwide. Once again, he drew attention to Palestine: "Our terrorism against America is a praiseworthy terrorism in defense against the oppressor, in order that America will stop supporting Israel, who kills our sons."

In a letter to the American people on October 6, 2002, bin Laden posed the question, "Why are we fighting and opposing you?" He answered succinctly: "Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." He again drew special attention to Palestine. "The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. . . . The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased . . . The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years, years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction, and devastation." He rejected out of hand tortured Zionist justifications for taking control of the land: "It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah." Debate, he noted, is not tolerated, as "anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism." But the Zionist legend claiming justification for Israel "is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history," since "the people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites." Therefore, "it is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed," so "if the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this."

Living under elected government, he went on, "the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians." Better choices exist. "The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government, and even to change it if they want."

On the matter of violence, he observed that "If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush," (which Bush declared he was), "then we are also men of peace. America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands."

In a video dated February 14, 2003, bin Laden warned that "The current Zionist-Crusader campaign . . . is the most dangerous and rabid ever . . . He claimed again that al-Qaeda's violence was merely retaliation, since "we strike them (the U.S.) because of their injustice towards us in the Islamic world, especially in Palestine and Iraq, and their occupation of Saudi Arabia. He observed that the 60 states identified by President Bush as prime targets in his "crusade" against terror pretty much defined the Islamic world. "Is the Islamic world not around 60 states? . . . Did they not say that they want to change the region's ideology, which vents hatred against the Americans?"

In a statement broadcast by Al-Jazeera a month after the Madrid train bombings in 2004 bin Laden accused Washington of "persistently ignor[ing] the real problem, which is the occupation of Palestine," and decried the double standard that allowed U.S. leaders to "indulge in lies and deceit about our right to self-defense," which proved "they have no self-respect." "They show contempt for peoples' blood and minds through such deceit, but it only means that your blood will continue to be shed." He was not too blinded by passion to see the injustice being done to ordinary Americans: ". . . an important truth becomes clear, which is that we are both suffering injustice at the hands of your leaders, who send your sons to our countries, despite their objections, to kill and be killed." He identified a common enemy benefitting from all the carnage: "It is all too clear . . . who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who direct world policy. . . President Bush . . . the big media . . . the United Nations . . . These and others are groups who are a mortal danger to the entire world, the most dangerous and difficult of these being the Zionist lobby . . ."

Condemning the transparent fraud of Bush's talk of peace, he asked: "Why hasn't he spoken about the one who slit open the bellies of pregnant women in Sabra and Shatila . . . the 'man of peace' [Ariel Sharon]?" He reiterated that al-Qaeda violence was retaliatory: "We only killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and we only killed Americans after they supported the Jews in Palestine and invaded the Arabian peninsula. . . " He offered to make peace with any state that agreed to leave Muslims alone: "So I present to them this peace proposal, which is essentially a commitment to cease operations against any state that pledges not to attack Muslims or intervene in their affairs . . . It will come into effect on the departure of its last soldier from our lands."

Just days before Bush was re-(s)elected in November 2004, bin Laden released a video telling the American people that its security was in its own hands, that it could achieve safety by reigning in its lawless government. "We have been fighting you because we are free men who cannot acquiesce in injustice . . . Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours. Whoever encroaches upon the security of others and imagines that he will himself remain safe is but a foolish criminal. When disasters happen, intelligent people look for the reasons behind them, so they can avoid them in the future."

Bin Laden's determination to rectify the injustice of dismembering Palestine is apparently not going away. On March 20, 2008 a videotape reputed to be his was aired on Al Jazeera, in which he urged holy war on behalf of the Palestinians. "Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron."

The Sources:

"Bin laden accuses pope of 'crusade' in new tape," March 20, 2008 msnbc.com

Bruce Lawrence, ed., "Messages To The World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden" (Verso, 2005)

Lawrence Wright, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," (Knopf, 2006)

Alfred Lilienthal, "The Zionist Connection - What Price Peace?" (Dodd, Mead, 1978)

Anonymous, "Imperial Hubris - Why The West Is Losing The War on Terror," (Brassey's, 2004)

Robert Fisk, "The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East," (Knopf, 2005)

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George (illustrations by Matt Wuerker,) from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

Drones of Disaster

2011-04-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Having sent one of it’s most lethal drone weapons to Libya in the person of Senator McCain, the U.S. more firmly established its murderous bias in a civil war it has promoted and possibly helped organize. The frequency of propaganda reports telling of Kaddafi personally slaughtering great masses of “his own people” – as though anyone but Libyans would be suffering in a civil war - may indicate what passes for debate in ruling power circles:

Should we kill even more Libyans, or slightly fewer Libyans?

But the slaughter continues, with the mental state of the American people almost as great a victim as the future state of the Libyans. In truth, the struggle being waged concerns continued western financial domination of the world and not simply the localized murders at the behest of private international capital.

After the initial assault on consciousness, alternative sources of information helped slightly tone down the worst excesses of western mind management. But it continues to distort, misinform and lie about a situation bloodier because of western interference. When hostilities were apparent between the government and its opponents, instead of the United Nations operating in a peace keeping capacity and separating combatants, the puppet institution went in with guns blazing. The lie of atrocities prevented by western military intervention has become the truth of atrocities caused by western military intervention. A death toll previously alleged but with no evidence of its reality has become the reality of a death toll hardly reported at all, unless victims can be blamed on the personal identification that westerners have become habituated to: a demonic monster who is single handedly killing his people, and doing this while under assault from western powers and barely avoiding assassination. So far.

Left unreported by most media are murders of black Africans by the rebels, conveniently rationalized as the killing of mercenaries hired by the evil dictator to kill his own people. The fact of Kaddafi’s popularity among many black Africans not totally owned or controlled by western colonial powers is avoided and the racial hatreds of some Libyans for blacks isn’t mentioned at all. Of course, the half white American chief executive with an African father should not be expected to do anything but represent his system, and certainly not express critical thought let alone compassion for what some might call his paternal ancestors. His job is to maintain the domain of private capital, not change it, and this latest calamity may help more people to understand that fact and end their religious faith in his representing any form of change beyond the cosmetic.

While criticism of the Libyan attack is growing on the edges of society, the center seems totally disposed to kill more people and cover the atrocity with stories of ending another in a series of dictatorships, all with some things in common even if they took different paths to arrive at the same point. That being a desire to have a measure of public rather than exclusively private control of national wealth, whether that wealth was based on what comes out of the earth or, more important, what comes out of a bank.

While spreading stories of their pending slaughter, the rebels of Libya were somehow able to form a private bank, with the aid of their European puppeteers, as well as their own oil company. It must have been very difficult for them to accomplish this task while experiencing genocide and other media created assaults from the wicked dictator who had resisted such financial changes and in fact led his country in the opposite direction. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, the free world president of change we can believe in - assuming we believe in tooth fairies and the Easter bunny – asserted his leadership in making war in Libya in order to “maintain the flow of commerce”, said flow assuming the current of an economic tsunami in most of the world and resisted by growing numbers of earth inhabitants though hardly by their rulers. The president has let it be known that he will need billions to run for reelection and his owners are already at work collecting that sum and selecting suitably imbecilic opponents that even he can beat. Already, a particularly dumb billionaire has entered the race in order to make Sarah Palin seem intellectual by comparison and we can expect far more members of the opposition flat earth society to enter the race for superintendent of the collapsing structure. They have nothing to lose, but we face further calamity the longer this mob is allowed to stake out a future of more profits for them, with greater loss for mother earth and us.

Kaddafi’s shortcomings as a leader are or may be a problem for some Libyans, but they are none of the business of the western powers that are trying to destroy an independent attempt on the part of a nation once a member of the European slave and colonial class. The supposedly evil dictator’s popularity among many back Africans has to do with his attempts at unifying Africa and moving towards its independence from and equality with the fading great powers. That fading is a fact of life, but the faders are not going gracefully. They continue to endanger any notion of democracy and social justice as they behave like bloody maniacs, all the while claiming to support humanity, freedom and the dignity of the common people. We may be lucky that a judgmental and righteous old testament god does not rule or we might all be consumed in an enormous earthquake and holocaust that would leave nothing as evidence we’d ever been here. Luckily, that is not the case and we have the capacity to transform our world before it is destroyed by out of control forces. In order to do that, we have to stop believing myths about an alleged dictator in Libya, and most especially about an alleged liberator in the USA.