Distortion Unlimited: Syria, Fukushima, and Labor

Political satirists have been driven to despair once again as Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama prepares to militarily attack his seventh country in less than five years in the name of protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction.  The case for a Syrian sarin gas attack is based almost entirely on Washington insistence, not empirical confirmation, and constitutes the usual self-serving pretext for U.S. imperial war that large sectors of the world are increasingly disgusted by; but Obama is determined to "lead" by submitting to one ridiculous neo-con fantasy of an "evil dictator"after another.  And naturally he overlooks Washington's own long tradition of using weapons of mass destruction, from white phosphorous to depleted uranium to Agent Orange to atomic bombs, and that's just the short list.

The farce is made doubly ridiculous by the effort to assure an imperial-war-weary U.S. public that not a single U.S. soldier will enter the Syrian fray with "boots on the ground," so that American casualties will not grow.  But isn't this an absurdly self-interested preoccupation for the leader of a "humanitarian" intervention to have?  If Assad is truly exterminating civilian populations with poison gas, including children, shouldn't Americans be gladly willing to risk their lives to rid the world of such hideous policies? What cause could be more important?

Washington's reluctance to ask for Americans to sacrifice gives the imperial game away.

The reality is that the American people are highly skeptical of intervening - and justly so - because just a decade ago the neo-cons told us we had to invade Iraq to stop another "evil dictator" (Saddam Hussein) from employing weapons of mass destruction, and it turned out he didn't have any.  Secretary of State John Kerry tries to characterize this skepticism as mere "fatigue" with the costs of war, but in fact it is a response to being continually lied to.  In other words, the American people aren't tired of war, they're tired of being played for suckers.  For the likes of John Kerry the answer to that problem isn't to start telling the truth, it's to tell slicker and more murderous lies.  After a "distinguished" career serving imperial propaganda, he is well up to the task.

The whole ridiculous "debate" about the need to "draw a line in the sand" and defend "the norms of civilization" is sheer adolescent fantasy.  The United States is far and away the world leader in designing, producing, selling, and employing advanced weapons systems that have killed millions of people around the world since the end of WWII, so it has no moral standing to be judging anyone else. And if sincere advocates of civilized conduct want to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction from the world, the first enemy they will have to confront is not Syria, but the United States, especially its bloodthirsty neo-con cabal.

Meanwhile, in Japan the clean-up of the triple-meltdown at Fukushima is finally being taken over by the government - just two-and-a-half years after the radiation-spewing disaster occurred.  The utility TEPCO has proven completely incapable of containing the contamination, and this week it admitted that radiation levels near one leaky plant were 18 times higher than previously indicated -  and sufficient to kill a human being in just four hours.  While pushing to reopen reactors in Japan and sell more of them abroad, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated that "a fundamental solution to the problem of contaminated water" (a highly radioactive underground lake could spill into the Pacific Ocean) was to build a mile-long underground wall of ice around the intensely radioactive reactor cores.  Piece of cake.  Keep in mind that it's non-contaminating solar energy that's said to be impractical.

It's high time we phased out nuclear power, which obviously cannot be made safe.  Its waste is not just carcinogenic, but mutagenic, which portends ultimate destruction of the genetic integrity of all species exposed to it.  And the experts in risk assessment - insurance companies - refuse to insure any commercial nuclear plant against the possibility of reactor accident, such as have now famously occurred at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, with no doubt more on the way.  The energy that was promised to be "too cheap to meter" has turned out to be too hot to handle - literally.  Let's cut our losses and abolish the industry, not later, but now.

Labor Day has come and gone while the deplorable state of U.S. labor remained unremarked on.  Kevin D. Williamson wrote in NationalReview.com that, "The main problem of the poor in the United States is not that they are worked too hard but that they do not work at all."   With all due respect for the problems of unemployment, this is nonsense.  Who does Williamson think is cleaning airplanes, office buildings, homes, and cars?   Who is waiting on people in hotels and restaurants?  Who takes care of pre-school children while their parents are working?  And what wages do these jobs bring?  It takes a minimum of reflection to arrive at the answers, but the propagandists of "free market" fantasy aren't paid to reflect.

The rest of us know that labor works more and more and earns less and less, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans care.

Source:

"The Week," September 13, 2013

   

Washington Poison Gas Attack

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Washington Poison Gas Attack

The administration seems to be surpassing previous regimes in bloody hypocrisy as it feigns shock and awe at alleged crimes committed in Syria. After we have been told that more than 100 thousand Syrians have been killed in a civil (?) war mostly the responsibility of outside forces capitalizing on legitimate internal concerns, we are supposed to believe that shooting, stabbing, decapitating, bombing and burning are all tolerable forms of slaughter, but chemical weapons are shockingly inappropriate forms of murder. What’s a civilized nation do?

President Boobama works to make the previous pinhead look smart by comparison as he first steps into diplomatic excrement by proclaiming that use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” established by more polite mass murderous practices of the west. After first receiving word of this red line crossing from unimpeachable sources called “rebels”, all of these information sources operating from the safety of countries outside Syria, further evidence was provided by the international medical team of hypocrisy calling itself doctors without morals, or borders. These totally trustworthy information comfort stations are joined by top secret american government spies and informants unknown to anyone but our democratic rulers, and all this combines with saber rattling warheads frustrated by recent low death tolls caused by our direct intervention in blood-letting profit-making.

 No less than the so-dumb-he-lost senator McCain has been lusting for war with or without alleged chemical weapons since the Syrian bloodletting began and he now seems close to assuming surrogate presidency as the better educated but just as dumb president moves closer to carrying out the orders of those even more deranged than he or McCain.

 But not to worry, our debt limit will soon be raised so we can afford new murders in the Middle East as we cut budgets for social services at home and comfortably await Armageddon or the next act of real and not alleged terrorist attack when one of our super drones is “returned to sender” just as we charge new purchases at the mall. Be happy, go shopping?

The March on Washington and the End of Jim Crow

James Baldwin flew all the way from Paris and was not allowed to speak.  John Lewis had his speech altered for wondering why the U.S. government could indict civil rights activists for civil disobedience in Albany but couldn't find legal authority to bring violent racists to justice, or even just stop appointing racist judges to the bench.  His censored text pointedly inquired:  "I want to know - which side is the federal government on?"

The Kennedy Administration vetoed these words.  Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle, the Catholic prelate of Washington, concurred, refusing to deliver the invocation if the speech wasn't changed.  Dr. King firmly advised the much beaten Lewis to go along with the censorship.  Other dignitaries complained about words like "masses" and "revolution."  Lewis reluctantly agreed to read a watered-down version of his speech while two Kennedy aides stood by ready to pull the plug on the microphone should he revert to his original text.

It's safe to say that James Baldwin would have been even more critical of the government had he been allowed to speak, convinced as he was that the civil rights movement was actually "the latest slave rebellion."  But most critical of all was undoubtedly Malcolm X, who dismissed the event as "the farce on Washington," to wit:

"The Negroes were out there in the streets . . . .They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington . . .That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution."

"It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in . . . . these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, 'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.' And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'm telling you what they said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it.' They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're running ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'"

"This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it . . . became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. . . ."

"No, it was a sellout, a takeover. They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown." 

The U.S. civil rights movement emerged from the official hypocrisy of (allegedly) fighting racism abroad (with a segregated military!) during WWII while maintaining Jim Crow at home.  In the wake of foot-dragging on the Supreme Court's desegregation  decision (1954), the hideous murder of Emmett Till (1955), and the siege of Little Rock (1957), militant disaffection and non-violent moral witness burst forth with stunning suddenness and unprecedented depth.

In Greensboro, North Carolina black students sat-in at department store lunch counters, exuding and demanding the dignity that was their due.  In Monroe, North Carolina Robert Williams called for black "armed self-reliance" years in advance of Black Power and fought off white terrorists in furious gun battles that led to his flight from the country as an FBI fugitive.  Escaping by means of a modern-day Underground Railroad to Canada and then Cuba, Williams broadcast scathing denunciations of "rump-licking Uncle Toms" and "Ku Klux Klan savages" via "Radio Free Dixie" from his sanctuary in Havana.  

In Alabama and Mississippi, pacifist "Freedom Riders" toughed out savage beatings at the hands of racist mobs to integrate public transportation.  Meanwhile, activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee faced down clubs, bullets, bombs, and jail in the deepest strongholds of the Klan, winning the franchise for all Americans a century after Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda advantage the Kremlin was reaping from such events, the Kennedy administration moved belatedly and reluctantly to support the black freedom movement. While peaceful protesters were beaten and jailed, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch, FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but did nothing to protect the lives of black Americans.  Concerned about his support in Congress, President Kennedy moved to shore-up his Southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent "pinks, radicals and black voters" from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering "a bunch of niggers on a voter drive."  

Yes, Jim Crow finally crumbled, but not before inflicting a century of lynchings, and the federal government only very cautiously abandoned its Dixie allies due to intense and sustained popular pressure.  Thus, the dismantling of legal discrimination heralded the growing realization that racism was not simply an anachronism of the ex-Confederate states, as many liberals had supposed, but pervaded the entire nation.  In his first northern campaign (1966) Martin Luther King was shocked by the virulence of Chicago prejudice, where ghettoization had achieved an informal apartheid every bit as formidable as legal segregation and the Citizens Councils.  At the peak of civil rights success, devastating riots in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, and Newark made the national character of American racism dramatically plain while serving notice that its abolition demanded something more than programmatic change.  By decade's end the rhetoric of liberal inclusion and the tactics of marching, singing, and sitting-in gave way to the angry rhetoric and armed apostles of Black Power, who echoed Malcolm X's demand for freedom "by any means necessary."

100 Years Ago: Woodrow Wilson

In 1913 progressive candidate Woodrow Wilson won the White House, inspiring hopes that a new direction from the Republican years (Taft, and before him Teddy Roosevelt) would soon make itself felt, much like in the Clinton and Obama years more recently.

As with Clinton and Obama, Wilson proved to be a disaster.  Innocent as a child, he never doubted, always believed, taking direction from what he took to be a monarchical God steering history to the fulfillment of Grand Designs.  From the perspective of this Almighty, the hierarchies of sex, race, and property were among the eternal verities demanding to be upheld. Wilson did his best to see that they were.

He restored segregation to official Washington and reversed longstanding practice by appointing white ministers to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  (He later invaded and occupied both countries). During his recent tenure as president of Princeton University,  he had upheld a policy of non-admittance of blacks, which was unique among Ivy League institutions at the time.  To Wilson, this was a simple matter of biological destiny.  He attributed the purging of blacks from voting rolls and public offices in the wake of Reconstruction not to racism, but to the “inevitable ascendancy of the whites.”

He considered women good company, so long as they were physically attractive, but he felt they should know better than to soil themselves with public affairs.  Far better that women remain “in their own sphere,” where their “deeper sensibilities” and “finer understanding” could be turned to proper account.  The unnatural ones that put themselves forth as public speakers provoked a “chilled scandalized” feeling in Wilson, who considered it self-evident that female intellectual accomplishments lacked merit.

On issues of class, he was a fierce proponent of the Open Shop (no unions), and regarded the 1877 and 1894 railroad strikes as proof that labor unions were "special interests" that incited violence.  On the other hand, President Grover Cleveland's crushing of the 1894 rebellion with federal troops was public interest bloodshed. 

He felt that the best of all possible worlds was a conservative, corporate America governed by a benevolent elite. (Sound familiar?) Although he considered transparent government a virtue, he condemned efforts to expose corporate behavior as “socialistic” subversion.

Hailing a “New Freedom,” Wilson imposed segregation on federal offices, let a suffrage bill languish in Congress for seven long years, and destroyed a vigorous American socialist movement by plunging the country into the bloodiest war in human history (WWI).

“I honestly thought segregation to be in the interest of the colored people as exempting them from friction and criticism in the departments...a number of colored men with whom we have consulted have agreed with us...”

----Woodrow Wilson to Oswald Garrison Villard

“Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government.”

“In the Treasury and Post Office Department colored clerks have been herded to themselves as though they were not human beings. We are told that one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work had consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years.”

-----W. E. B. DuBois to President Wilson

 

 

Euro Zone Economy Grew 0.3% in 2nd Quarter, Ending Recession

American workers earning $8.00  an hour enjoy 0.3% raise to $8.02, ending  poverty.

U.S. Embassies To Stay Closed All Week Due To Chatter Threats over terrorism threat

Taliban, Al Quaida and majority of American citizens  call for online chatter about destroying  Wall St.

Qaeda Messages Prompt U.S. Terror Warning

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August 2, 2013

WASHINGTON — The United States intercepted electronic communications this week among senior operatives of Al Qaeda, in which the terrorists discussed attacks against American interests in the Middle East and North Africa, American officials said Friday. 

 

The messages were found on their FaceBook page!!!!