Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 09/04/2010 - 10:16pm
Les Leopold in the Huffington Post responded to the Republican "blame the victim" economic talking point that the reckless and unmotivated American working and middle classes are responsible for their own unemployed/walking-on-thin-ice economic situations in spite of the savaging of the U.S. treasury by corporate pirates.
During 2009, the worst economic year since the Depression, the top ten hedge fund honchos averaged $900,000 an hour (that's $1.8 billion each per year). And they did it only because we saved their butts from total collapse. Now it's payback time. The bankers owe the American people hard cold cash, not just the promise of a great trickle down in the distant future.
Leopold points out that these shameless and destructive (to everyone else) opportunists are not only denying responsibility for crashing the economy but are insisting they are now being unjustly threatened by even the slightest suggestion of regulation. To me this seems as outrageous as a gang of rapists demanding a thank you note from their victim. Leopold:
Incredibly, Wall Street executives are howling over every proposal to limit their profits or, god forbid, stick them with part of the bill for all the damage they've caused. They refuse to admit that they've done anything wrong. In fact they feel victimized. They seem to believe that skimming billions from our financial system via taxpayer bailouts is a good thing for everyone. Can they really believe that if we just left them alone, new jobs would flow like wine?
"“They hate our Freedom” was all it took to convince the people of this county that brown people 5,000 miles away in caves with box cutters defeated the NSA, CIA, and United States Military, and ten years of evidence has yet to dissuade them from their delusional belief. The ignorance and hate emanating from the @Park51 Community Center ‘controversy’ demonstrates conclusively that just as it was ten years ago, still no evidence is required to demonize an entire race or religion of brown people because American White people ‘feel’ violated based on their self-delusion and lack of historical knowledge. The whole world is expected to capitulate to American unreasonable and outrageous demands because the people are too ignorant and fearful to know the truth of anything."
"The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate slavers’ intention..."
"The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate slavers’ intention." If you read on in Noxid's article, you will discover his desired "conversation" involves the real truth behind 9/11. Right now I would settle for a conversation that simply grazes the reality of the massive wrongs perpetrated in our name by our leadership.
I yearn for a national conversation that is willing to begin to explore and process the scope of immoral, illegal and exponentially expanding violence committed by the United States in the name of democracy and security, which has more to do with imperialist aggrandizement and craven cronyism. A conversation with a citizen majority not in a moral coma. Citizens with potential for rationality and empathy, not in what Richard Kim in the Nation estimates is an unreachable eighteen percent that sports tinfoil caps in full-blown racist paranoia.
You may well remember this poem from your high school days (if you are of a certain age) and it is something to which those in a liberal education environment were exposed. It seems somehow to have been lost in the rush to follow curricula perhaps considered more modern, which is a great shame. The poem in its simplistic power is easy enough for ten year olds to take in the ramifications of its message..
This marvellous animation, a real blast from the past, is the 1964 animated version of the poem, created by Les Goldman and Paul Julian. Herschel Bernardi is the narrator. The film was a co-winner of the Silver Sail award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1964.
The story is quite simple as it the somewhat dated animation techniques (which do give it a real flavor of its time and place however). A hangman who arrives in a small town and begins to execute its citizens one by one. As each citizen is led to the gallows, the rest are afraid to object out of fear that they will be next. Ultimately there is nobody left in the town apart from the Hangman and the poem's narrator. The narrator is then executed by the hangman as there is no one left who will defend him.
The poem is about about acquiescence to the state when it begins to oppress others. Some though that Ogden was referring to The Holocaust, others yet thought that he was delivering a metaphorical critique of McCarthyism. If he indeed wrote about anything specific it is not necessary to know the absolute specifics as we must interpret the work for our own time. With that in mind, the poem has lost none of its powers.
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Earlier this morning Glen E Friedman got a call from pal Russell Simmons asking for help on a new project to send a message about the current Ground Zero Mosque hullabaloo.
Glen and Russell collaborated similarly some years back on what is now known as The Liberty Street Protest [more photos, and previous BB coverage here & here]—massive antiwar signs housed in the windows of Russell's apartment, which is literally across the street from Ground Zero.
This new visual protest today occupies those very same windows. It addresses all who believe that the First Amendment and freedom of religion applies only to them.
A 48-page reprint of Smedley Butler's 1935 booklet War Is A Racket. Foreword by Cindy Sheehan. Each copy is autographed by Cindy and includes a free download link of the audio recording in a digital MP3 file format. Order here: WWW.WARISARACKET.NET
The retail company Target just gave over $150,000 to buy ads supporting a far-right Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota.
That's bad enough. But the stakes are much higher than one candidate and one company. If we don't push back hard, this will just be the tip of the iceberg. Other corporations will learn that they can pour money into elections to buy the outcome they want. So we're sending a message to Target's CEO that we won't shop there if Target continues spending money on elections.
... The spate of knee-jerk legislative expansions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 trauma — the USA-PATRIOT Act — has actually been exceeded by the expansions of the last several years — first secretly and lawlessly by the Bush administration, and then legislatively and out in the open once Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006. Simply put, there is no surveillance power too intrusive or unaccountable for our political class provided the word “terrorism” is invoked to “justify” those powers.
[snip]
Not only has nothing like that occurred, but Congress has twice brushed aside the privacy and abuse concerns about the Patriot Act highlighted by the DOJ’s own report and long raised by Senator Russ Feingold. They did so when voting overwhelmingly to extend the provisions of that law unchanged: first in 2006 by a vote of 89-10, and again this year — with the overt support of the Obama administration — when it once again extended the Patriot Act without even a single added oversight protection. Even after The New York Times in 2009 twice revealed substantial and serious abuses in the very warrantless eavesdropping powers which Obama voted to enact, the administration and the Congress show no interest whatsoever in imposing any added safeguards. The logic of the Surveillance State is that more is always better: not just more powers, but in increasingly unchecked form.
[snip]
Not only has Obama, in the wake of this massive expansion, blocked any reforms, he has taken multiple steps to further expand unaccountable and unchecked surveillance power. For the last year, the Obama Justice Department has been trying to convince federal courts to extend its warrantless surveillance powers beyond even what the Patriot Act provides to encompass private email and Internet browsing records, a position which would allow the FBI and other federal agencies to acquire email and browsing records of American citizens — including those who are not suspected of any wrongdoing — without any warrants or judicial supervision of any kind. With defeat in the courts appearing likely, it was recently revealed by The Washington Post that the administration is agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include such Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by NSLs
... They are now termed "advise and assist brigades" by the administration, and the press dutifully reported this new term in their stories.
No wonder the press missed it. They can’t be expected to take dictation and fact-check it too.
Normally, misleading text and headlines are so commonplace they just don’t bother one like they used to. But this is Iraq. And I’m worried that the American public may be misled into thinking that all we’ll have over there a month from now are a few clerks and supply officers. The public might wrongly perceive from a false-fact like "all combat troops gone" that the light they’re seeing at the end of this horrific tunnel is fairly strong, when maybe it’s not that strong and it’s pretty far away.
What the administration has done (and the press would know this if they’d simply do their collective job) is rebrand the Iraqi mission with an new tag-line (“New Dawn”), and re-label six fully-combat-capable brigades with new, kinder and gentler titles. That’s basically the story. Here’s the February memo from Gates to CENTCOM giving the go-ahead to roll-out the kinder/gentler new mission tag-line that we’ll all going to hear so much about.
The New Dawn mission tagline and associated public relations effort doesn’t fit well with the word “combat”–and actually the American people have had their fill of the term too. So no accident that the administration has simply renamed six (or so) brigade combat teams as “advise and assist” brigades. The units may have received minor personnel changes, but otherwise are in no way different from existing combat brigades in Iraq. Indeed, some or maybe all of them are already deployed and functional under our current “Operation Iraqi Freedom” mission. The only thing that has changed is the name.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 8:36pm
I don't know if you could adequately say BP and the Obama administration have jumped the proverbial shark on their latest preposterous assertion that 3/4 of the leaked well oil is now benignly GONE with the balance benignly going.
One might get away with saying they've poisoned said shark (and perhaps all sharks in its family ... maybe to extinction). To "jump the shark", however, implies a serious escalation into the realm of the outrageous. It seems the corporate-cronied political elite since the beginning of the Bush administration has been continuously providing a bipartisan assembly line of what anyone with a conscience could call "high crimes and misdemeanors." Everything from the enabling of war crimes to blatant corporate extortion and bribery. They have steadily managed to turn this United States into a moral dead zone, as saturated with corruption as our lower border is with BP oil and toxic dispersant. Jumping the shark or simply and horrifyingly continuing S-O-P?
Dahr Jamail and Erica Blumenfeld comment on this latest, colossally improbable, upbeat, officially unchallenged government and corporate media announcement of the status of the BP oil cleanup:
"A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow themselves to be used to transfer the propaganda, like the New York Times, “The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.”
"The Times was accommodating enough to lead the story with a nice photo of a fishing boat motoring across clean water with several birds in the foreground."
"This message was disseminated far and wide, via other mainstream media outlets like the AP and Reuters, effectively announcing to the masses that despite the Gulf of Mexico suffering the largest marine oil disaster in US history, most of the oil was simply “gone.”"
Federally-backed program aims to help outsourcers in South Asia become more fluent in areas like Java programming—and the English language.
Despite President Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.
Submitted by Dan Bacher on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 2:18pm
Chesbro calls for 6 month delay of North Coast MLPA process
by Dan Bacher
Citing concerns about how the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) is being implemented on the North Coast, Assemblymember Wesley Chesbro (D-Arcata) announced on August 9 that he is calling for a six month delay in the implementation of the MLPA on the North Coast.
Chesbro, the chair of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, has asked California Resources Secretary Lester Snow to delay the controversial process for at least six months to “ensure that environmental protection is balanced with traditional access rights.” Chesbro made the request in a recent meeting with Snow, according to a news release from Chesbro’s office.
Opposition to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s MLPA Initiative by a diverse array of groups has mushroomed into the largest grassroots political movement of any kind on the North Coast since Redwood Summer of 1990.
On July 21, over 300 people, including tribal members from 50 Indian nations, immigrant sea urchin industry workers, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, seaweed harvesters and grass roots environmentalists, peacefully took control of a meeting of the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force in Fort Bragg in defense of tribal gathering rights and against the MLPA’s domination by oil industry and other corporate interests.
“I have met with Resources Secretary Lester Snow and strongly urged him to slow down the process and that no action be taken by the Blue Ribbon Task Force for at least six months to allow more time to develop a plan that protects marine life and balances the access rights of traditional user groups,” Chesbro said. “I am confident that given enough time we can develop a workable solution between the fishing community, North Coast tribes and environmentalists.”
“When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001.”
He goes on to point out:
“Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.”
[snip]
“Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't Washington bombed those countries?”
Blum takes on the “safe haven” rationale:
“Indeed, what actually is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.”
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 08/07/2010 - 8:13pm
Yo, head-buried-in-sand Americans!!! The Iraq War is over!!!! Let yourselves enjoy a long-awaited exhalation.
Well, half of one. There is still that other war.
However, this sure sounds like a big deal. Obama is telling us in that deliberate, endearingly self-effacing (i.e., slickly cautious and calculating) way of his that he has fulfilled a great promise.
What a relief! The news media can pump up the national esteem a bit on this one to help compete with the insanely irrational tea party and racist right drumbeats. As we round the corner to midterms, Dem government officials, military operatives and pundits can posture "Iraq victory" before the BP- and war-battered vast, struggling, myopic majority of citizens.
Are you beginning to feel the election term climate change? I know I am. The ever increasing and novel sunlight of attention from Obama and the Dem politicians as we enter another teasing and ultimately cruel "Lucy and the football" season? Why, the House Reps are willing to come galloping back from their summer vacations to vote funding for cop and teacher jobs! Fancy that? How absolutely swell of them!
This is the time when our Dem leadership will pretend it seriously cares about us. Will point out to us what rabid rat bastards the Republicans have been (no argument from me), and try to convince us that their being non-rabid rat bastards is so much better than the alternative.
As if obscene amounts of corporate-lobbied bribe money poking out of their briefcases, pockets of phenomenally expensive suits or up from bra cleavages did not long ago cause our real needs to be planted somewhere on Pluto. (You know, like single payer, Medicare-for-All health care. Like a non-bonus baby, big enough stimulus for real Main Street people.) Pluto I say, ... which is appropriate. Not even taken seriously as a planet any more.
