For one thing, would we even know about if it did not serve corpo-fascist interests? It would get no news coverage. It would be marginalized, black-holed, ignored--like the anti-Iraq War movement, like the election reform movement. In other words, the corpo-fascist press would never promote a genuine peoples' movement. They would only promote what they know to be a fake one.

I have no doubt that there are SOME sincere if uninformed or rightwing people attached to the "tea baggers"--like there are sincere Christians, sincere anti-abortionists, sincere anti-gay marriage people. In fact, I heard some of these identical comments with regard to the Christian right during the Bush Junta. We should be "outreaching" to them, blah, blah, blah. We missed the point then, and we are missing the point now--and I think Chomsky is missing the point, which surprises me, because, he is, after all, the author of "Manufacturing Consent."

The point is that these rightwing 'movements' are USED, if not manufactured; they represent only a few people and the corpo-fascist media gives them a big trumpet way out proportion to their numbers.

Chomsky is right that the Democratic Party should be reaching out to, and organizing, shafted workers and small business people and so on--people who don't have a clue who they have been shafted by or how, but he is wrong that we should be organizing "tea baggers." It is a manufactured "movement." That is one of the reasons that it so bigoted and irrational. It is the corpo-fascist organization and promotion of the stupidest people in the country--a tiny minority. They are not even representative of "the 30%." They are maybe 2%, and, as such, the coverage they get is WAY, WAY, WAY out of proportion to their numbers.

Chomsky comes closer to the truth with his comment that the "tea baggers" have an odor of nazism. The Nazis were also operating in a blasted economic environment--worse than ours now, but ours is still bad and could get worse--and worked upon the discontent of a certain element of society that had been used to prosperity and were willing to believe that Germans are a superior race and deserved better. But that is not all that the Nazis were doing. They were stuffing ballot boxes. They were beating up voters and leftist activists. They were exacerbating the divisions among the center-left parties and making it impossible for the center-left to govern. They were taking every opportunity, and exploiting every weakness, to destroy liberal democratic government. And they were master media propagandists.

The parallels to Germany are not exact, and there are significant inherent differences between the U.S. and Germany and between then and now. Where I see a similarity is in the organized conspiracy to sabotage and overthrow democratic government through election fraud, media manipulation, false narratives, illusion and delusion creation and capitalizing on hard times--in our case, induced hard times--as well as a possible set up for civil disorder and fascist crackdown. I think the purposes are the same--rule by the fascist few--but the methods have grown much more sophisticated and the conspirators are very hard to see, in our case--unlike the Nazis, who were quite visible in most of their early activities (but not all--the Reichstag fire was probably their doing, in their strategy of creating mayhem and blaming it on the "communists," and they were probably engaged in secret "divide and conquer" tactics against the center-left government).

I can name one suspected conspirator. His name is Howard Ahmanson, the reclusive far rightwing billionaire who is the initial funder and major investor in ES&S, the electronic voting machine corporation that just bought out Diebold (aka, 'Premier') and now has a 70% monopoly of voting machines in the U.S. These voting machines are run on 'TRADE SECRET,' proprietary code, owned and controlled by ES&S, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Half the states in the union have no paper trail whatsoever and so the totals that the machines produce are not verifiable. The rest may have a paper trail but they only count 1% of the ballots against machine totals--a totally inadequate audit, given a 'TRADE SECRET' code system (the public is not permitted to review the code by which their votes are tabulated). Howard Ahmanson also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalecedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals.

THAT'S who is 'counting' most of our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code. The other voting machine corps also have rightwing/Republican connections but not as extreme as this (that I know of).

These 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines were fast-tracked all over the country during the 2002 to 2004 period, and, frankly, I think that the fascist putsch here--or fascist putsch part one--has already occurred, and that was to keep Bush-Cheney in office amidst revelations of torture and no WMDs found in Iraq--for four more years of hand over fist looting, culminating with the induced financial crisis of Sept 2008. And here, our story and the Nazi story really part ways. The Nazis built up a great manufacturing and war machine from an entirely broken country. The Bushwhacks did not do that and seemed--and continue to seem--more bent on destroying us than on building anything. Indeed, they seem like a positive wrecking crew. Were they/are they trying to re-create the blasted economic conditions that gave rise to Hitler? Is there a second fascist putsch to come--worse than the last?

I really don't know. But I think that any political analysis and proposed strategy that does not place the voting machines--and how they are run and who owns the 'TRADE SECRET' code--as the first subject for discussion and action, is whistling in the dark. It is utterly useless to try to "engage" a fake or even a real rightwing 'movement' when the views of that group--the views of 2% to 30% of the people--can easily--EASILY--override the will of the majority in the polling booth, by fraud.

We have to start, not with some mostly illusory thing that the corpo-fascist media is foisting upon us--the "tea baggers"--but with the very basics of democracy--who is counting our votes and how? It doesn't matter who, among sincere "tea baggers," we might convince. Their votes won't matter either.

So this is one identifiable person that I believe is evil, and whom I think is very likely part of a cabal of rightwing multi-billionaires who are calling the shots. They control the vote counting--with 'TRADE SECRET' code.

Our system is complex and its real rulers tend to hide behind the curtains. Complexities involve, for instance, apparent Democratic Party leadership collusion in the highly riggable voting system. They involve some kind of putsch involving the Supreme Court in 2000 (another rigged election). They involve Roberts and this ruling on corporate campaign money--the other great pollutant of our political system, money--big BIG money. And of course they involve the corpo-fascist media monopolies who act as a "copy and paste" operation for the rulers behind the curtain. Their narrative lines all sound pretty much the same: they hate and revile the same "enemies," promote the same kinds of ideas (getting to be a billionaire is good, everything and everyone else is unimportant), downplay U.S. military violence, up-play lesser, individual crimes, obsess on "celebrities," their lies and disinformation are all along the same lines, they marginalize or blackhole the same stories, and they all utterly, utterly fail to provide the sort of information that the citizens of the U.S. really need to form opinions about things, to speak out and to vote. Their manipulations and failures in these regards are simply staggering. They have completely failed to fulfill the dream of the Founders of a free press and its function in a democracy.

We have not just one overwhelming problem in our political system. We have overwhelming problems everywhere you look. So I think it's wise, in this circumstance, to focus on some of the actual mechanisms of power--such as the voting machines. Until we solve that particular problem, our efforts at reform will be in vain. And remember, this 'TRADE SECRET' code, funded by a man who apparently believes that homosexuals should be executed, controls the choice of candidates in the primaries as well. We need a big citizen movement to get rid of these machines and restore vote counting that everyone can see and understand.

I just want to mention one statistic. Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the Iraq War (Feb '03, all polls). I had to do a special study of opinion polls during that period to find that out. The IMPRESSION we got from the corpo-fascist media was that more or less everybody was goose-stepping to Bush. It was not true. The great majority opposed it. Our will was ignored and defied, and a year later, our true choice of presidents was ignored and defied, to keep that war going and to loot us some more. The Republicans should be in utter disgrace and ruin because of what they have done to our country; yet they are promoted on the corpo-fascist 'news' as if nothing happened, as if the years 2000 to 2008 had vanished. The war criminals still run free, prosperous as ever--with not a peep out of the press about that or anything else important. And they highlight this 2% group that wants to stop health care reform. And now they're even talking about privatizing Social Security again--an idea so extreme and so utterly stupid that it should be laughed out of congress and off TV.

And the hell of it is that we cannot verify the elections of any of these congressional characters who promote these extremist views. We cannot verify ANY election in half the states in this country, and verification in the other half is only theoretical--99% of the actual votes are never counted. We cannot verify Obama's election--though I think he was elected (by a larger margin that we know--somewhere between 5% and 10% larger--they shaved his mandate). This is an intolerable situation, ripe for devious manipulations ('election' of 'Blue Dogs' instead of Pukes) and outright election theft.

Best to look into this--and join an election reform group--than to worry about "tea baggers." The real "tea baggers" have yet to come forward and, when they do, you will know they are the real article because their first issue will be the voting machines.

This massacre in La Macarena, Colombia, is breaking news—with some details not yet confirmed—and it is so disturbing, that I hesitated to post it in GD. But the questions that it raises about U.S. government and military policy in Colombia, and the possibility that U.S. forces participated in this massacre, are very important and need wider currency than the Latin American Forum, for discussion by Democrats, progressives and other DUers.

I have formulated two questions (at the bottom of this post) for DU discussion. I have my own opinions about U.S. policy in Colombia and Latin America—which are quite evident, below. This does not mean that I am not open to other perspectives. I will try to keep my lip zipped in the comment section--except for questions of fact that I might be able to answer—in the interest of encouraging open discussion and perhaps even the beginning of some solutions.

Here is the story as it appeared at the CIPCOL site, and as I posted it in the Latin America Forum. (CIP is the Center for International Policy*):

-------------------------

Peace Patriot
Original message Sat Jan-30-10 05:51 PM

U.S. 'integrates' with ally Colombia on mass murder: 'an infinity of bodies' found (d. 2005-2010)

Found this at BoRev in the comments: http://www.borev.net/2010/01/more_terrible...

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January 28, 2010

Miami’s El Nuevo Herald and Spain’s Público have run stories in the past two days about a shocking find in La Macarena, about 200 miles south of Bogotá.

Residents say that after it entered the strongly guerrilla-controlled zone in the mid-2000s, Colombia’s Army began dumping unidentified bodies in a mass grave near a local cemetery. The grave may contain as many as 2,000 bodies.

---

Público reports:

"Since 2005 the Army, whose elite units are deployed in the surrounding area, has been depositing behind the local cemetery hundreds of cadavers with the order that they be buried without names. …

"Jurist Jairo Ramírez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, accompanied a delegation of British legislators to the site several weeks ago, when the magnitude of the La Macarena grave began to be discovered. 'What we saw was chilling,' he told Público. 'An infinity of bodies, and on the surface hundreds of white wooden plaques with the inscription NN and dates from 2005 until today.'

"Ramírez adds: 'The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace.'"

http://www.publico.es/internacional/288773...
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El Nuevo Herald reports:

"A spokesman of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) in Bogotá revealed to El Nuevo Herald that a mission from that institution’s Technical Investigations Corps (CTI) has already gone to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of 'a large number' of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.

“'We became the site for the depositing of the war dead,' declared Eliécer Vargas Moreno, mayor of the municipality. …

"Residents of La Macarena interviewed over the phone by El Nuevo Herald, under the promise that their identities would not be revealed, expressed their suspicion that among the bodies are relatives who disappeared during the last four years. They denied that the bodies are those of guerrillas and asked for the chance to prove it.”

http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/amer...

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Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office will make its first excavations at the site in mid-March. While we are not jumping to conclusions, we will be watching this case closely.

La Macarena, the site of the grave, has been a very important site of U.S.-aided military operations. In this area, the U.S. government supported and advised the Colombian Army’s 2004-2006 “Plan Patriota” military offensive, and since 2007 (the U.S.) has supported the “Plan for the Integral Consolidation of La Macarena” or PCIM, part of the new “Integrated Action” framework (LINK) that is now guiding much U.S. assistance.

(my emphases)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303
*About CIP: http://www.cipcol.org/?page_id=2
Discussion: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

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For those unfamiliar with the recent U.S./Colombia military agreement, here is a good description of the agreement and its context:

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”…the US Air Force document, dated May 2009, confirms that the concerns of South American nations have been right on target. The document exposes that the true intentions behind the agreement are to enable the US to engage in ‘full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies…and anti-US governments…’

“The military agreement between Washington and Colombia authorizes the access and use of seven military installations in Palanquero, Malambo, Tolemaida, Larandia, Apíay, Cartagena and Málaga. Additionally, the agreement allows for ‘the access and use of all other installations and locations as necessary’ throughout Colombia, with no restrictions. Together with the complete immunity the agreement provides to US military and civilian personnel, including private defense and security contractors, the clause authorizing the US to utilize any installation throughout the entire country - even commercial aiports, for military ends, signifies a complete renouncing of Colombian sovereignty and officially converts Colombia into a client-state of the US.”

(my emphases)
http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/11/breaking...

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If you can stand to read dry, Rand corporation-type descriptions of “robust” USAID/Pentagon programs that relegate the rotting corpses of thousands of innocents into a ‘black hole’ of non-existence, here is just such a report, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on the U.S./Colombia plan for the La Macarena area. It is worth reading because it will help you see the situation through, say, the eyes of someone like Donald Rumsfeld, filtered through and purified by Washingtonspeak. It’s important to understand how Washington planners view phenomena such as the FARC guerrillas, peasant farmers, coca production, poverty, state power and so forth, in order to understand how it is possible for U.S. taxpayer money to end up drenched in the blood of innocents.

http://csis.org/files/publication/090602_D...

Here is a much better and very informative read, from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) about the new U.S./Colombia military agreement, the negative reaction to it in Latin America and the general situation including the U.S./Colombia ‘war on drugs’ and war on the FARC guerrillas and on civilians. I don’t endorse everything it says, but it is more “real” than the above: http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_15/issue...

The discovery of some 2,000 bodies “of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders,” in a mass grave of recent venue in Colombia, is disturbing enough, in itself. But the CIPCOL article suggests the further horror, for the people of the U.S., that the U.S. military may have had a part in the massacre of civilians. And it raises serious questions about the USAID-Pentagon-Colombian “Plan for the Integral Consolidation of La Macarena.”

CIPCOL describes La Macarena as “a very important site” of past and current U.S./Colombia “integration” of forces—a phenomenon that is going to be greatly escalated with the increased presence of the U.S. military at seven or more military bases in Colombia, potential U.S. military use of any and all civilian infrastructure, and the doubling (at least) of U.S. soldiers and U.S. ‘contractors’ (to about 1,500 personnel) with full diplomatic immunity for whatever U.S. soldiers and ‘contractors’ do in Colombia. This agreement also means that U.S. planes and pilots, U.S. ships, U.S. high tech surveillance and weaponry, will be at the disposal of the Colombia military.

According to Amnesty International, 92% of the murders of union leaders in Colombia have been committed by the Colombian military (about half) and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half). Many thousands of union leaders, community organizers, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists, peasant farmers (campesinos) and others have been murdered in Colombia over the last decade in what can only be described as the political “cleansing” of Colombia by rightwing forces. In addition, 3 MILLION campesinos have been internally displaced, mostly by military and paramilitary terror, and hundreds of thousands of those have fled across the border into Venezuela and Ecuador, creating huge refugee and border security problems for those countries.

Colombia—a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth--has received $6-7 BILLION in U.S. military aid over the last half decade or so. I have seen a figure for the new military agreement of $4 BILLION more for Colombia, and I do not believe that this includes the costs of new U.S. military operations at seven or more military bases and other facilities all over Colombia—a total of over $10 BILLION U.S. taxpayer dollars. Also I’m not sure if this $10 billion price tag includes covert operations and items such as $10 million/year from the USAID which provide the civil cosmetics for military occupation of the targeted regions (described in the CSIS document, above). Obama’s 2011 budget apparently reduces aid to Colombia by 20%, but it will still be $500 million (half military, half not) just for the next year.

See: http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/n...

The original justification for the expenditure of this huge amount of money was the U.S. “war on drugs.” The Bushwhacks expanded the justification to formally include the FARC guerrillas--an armed leftist insurgency comprised of Colombian citizens that has been fighting the Colombian government for over 40 years. The Bushwhacks thus added Colombia’s civil war to the burdens of U.S. taxpayers, enabled the Colombian military to wipe out the political opposition in targeted areas and greatly expanded the probability that the U.S. military is engaged in killing Colombians.

“Insanity,” as Albert Einstein once said,”Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

This perfectly describes the U.S. “war on drugs.” It is a failed program which has barely put a dent in the illicit drug trade, while hugely exacerbating the violence and crime on both sides of this “war.”

It has failed because it is, literally, a war, complete with guns, tanks and mass murder--and war cannot solve social problems. The drug trade continues unabated, and is more militarized and lethal than ever, on all sides.

Similarly, more killing cannot, and will not, stop the FARC guerrillas, who have been in rebellion against the Colombian government for more than four decades. The armed resistance to the Colombian government—internal resistance, resistance by Colombia’s own citizens—is a symptom of great social ills, which cannot be solved by more killing. The killing—if massive—can temporarily bury the problem in some places. It will arise again.

Expanding the U.S. military involvement in this civil war is a terrible, TERRIBLE idea. It pits the U.S. not just against the FARC guerrillas but also against ALL local opposition to the Colombian government—the PEACEFUL opposition: those who are trying to organize unions, those who are seeking social justice, small farmers (generally the best organic food producers) and other social and political groups. These are the people whom the Colombian government apparently wants to exterminate along with the FARC guerrillas. Their actions clearly indicate that what they want are “pacified” areas, occupied by the military (theirs and ours), where the rich and the corporate can do whatever they damn please.

Several times the FARC guerrillas have tried to negotiate a peace settlement. The most recent effort was sabotaged by the Colombian and U.S. militaries when they dropped a load of U.S. “smart bombs” on the temporary camp of the FARC’s peace negotiator, Raul Reyes, in March 2008, just inside Ecuador's border, killing Reyes and 24 other sleeping people. Reyes was arranging the release of FARC hostages, in a bid for peace. The U.S./Colombia bombing/raid ended all hope for peace, and almost started a war between the U.S./Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela—both of whom have long borders with Colombia that are continually destabilized by Colombia’s conflict.

As described in the COHA report, this new U.S./Colombia military agreement was negotiated in secret from the Colombian people, from the Colombian legislature and from all of the other leaders of Latin America. Several Colombian legislators objected. And most of Latin America’s other leaders were angry at the lack of consultation and notice, and are greatly concerned about the U.S. military occupation of Colombia.

In other reading, I have also learned that Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, when he met Barack Obama last spring, particularly asked for U.S. help to end Colombia’s civil war. President Obama’s answer seems to be this U.S./Colombia military agreement, which will escalate Colombia’s war on its own people, and expand U.S. military involvement in that war.

My opinion of this general situation is that the U.S. “war on drugs” is insane (Einstein definition) and extremely corrupt as well, and that the U.S. involvement in Colombia’s civil war is a potential huge, Vietnam-scale disaster in the making, should the corporate/war profiteer forces in this country decide to use Colombia as a “lily pad” for a war against the leftist democracy movement that has swept the region, with the oil rich countries of Venezuela and Ecuador (adjacent to Colombia) as particular targets.

The U.S. did this before, in the 1980s, using Honduras as the “lily pad” for U.S. aggression against Nicaragua and other countries. This could be much bigger and much worse, and even more costly in lives, money and good will in this hemisphere. The current Washington line that the U.S./Colombia military agreement is merely a matter of “a few hundred U.S. military advisers” has a very haunting ring, indeed.

This atrocity in La Macarena raises two important questions about U.S. policy in Latin America—besides the questions about U.S. military involvement and other forms of complicity in the massacre itself. I would like to know DUer’s thoughts on these questions:

1. What is the U.S. doing in Colombia? Why are we increasingly involved in another country’s civil war? Why have we sided with the fascists in that civil war—who have committed far more atrocities than their adversaries (by every objective account, including Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights Commission)?

2. With many Latin American leaders seriously questioning the U.S. “war on drugs” and some countries altogether banning it, as ineffective and a militaristic menace, why is the U.S. still pushing it, and pushing it hard?

Please feel free to discuss these matters from any perspective that you like. My views are well known. What am I missing? What am I not seeing? What is the U.S. doing in Colombia? Who or what is served by this massive U.S. intervention? Should a domestic insurgency in Latin America be folded into the U.S. “war on terror”? Do you agree/disagree that the U.S. should not be aiding an oppressive government in killing its own citizens? Is there anything good to be said about this policy that is not outweighed by the bad (and the very bad)?

And what can we--who are paying for it--do about it—if anything?

May 1, 2001: Gary Condit meets with Dick Cheney at 12:00 noon. One of Gary Condit's mistresses, Chandra Levy, disappears in the early afternoon hours.

May 3, 2001: Condit, leader of the "Blue Dog" Democrat coalition, votes in favor of Bush/Cheney's first tax cut for the rich, in a highly controversial and close vote, in which only ten Democrats, Condit in the lead, break ranks to vote in favor of this awful measure.

Chandra Levy's disappearance prompted my interest in Condit's politics. He was a California rep. I thought that the "Blue Dogs" had gone the way of Bull Connor and George Wallace--Dixiecrats, bigots, Southern "ol' boys." Condit helped reconstruct this rightwing faction, which has now grown large enough to block all progressive legislation in Congress, and to further the interests of global corporate predators and war profiteers.

There were many irregularities in the investigation of Chandra Levy's disappearance. Among them was the failure of any investigative agency and of the entire corpo-fascist press corps to ask any questions of Cheney or his staff about that May 1 Cheney-Condit meeting--not even to verify that it took place (--it had been listed on Condit's schedule for that day, which Condit had released in June). This failure was reported in Newsweek two months later (late July/Early August), in which Cheney aides are quoted as saying that no one inquired about that meeting. There, in a news magazine, three months after Levy's disappearance, was the first confirmation that the meeting in fact took place. The aides averred that it was a short, routine political meeting (about 20 minutes) with two aides present.

"Blue Dogs," in my view, are the sleazy darlings of the Bushwhacks--the vacuous, amoral errand boys of the "military-industrial complex"--the poofy-haired poodles of the super-rich--the manicured mannequins of the destruction of our democracy, the theft of all our wealth, the lawless murder of a hundred thousand innocent people in Iraq, the torture of thousands of prisoners and the ripping up of our Constitution. I therefore find this painting of a "Blue Dog"--innocent in itself, as a work of art, by a Louisiana painter, inadvertent symbol of the original Louisiana "Blue Dog" ol' boys)--offensive as an avatar at DU. The "Blue Dogs" are the enemies of the American people. In my opinion, most, if not all, of the them were (s)elected by Diebold and ES&S--two far rightwing e-voting corporations which now control our election system with 'TRADE SECRET' programming code--to fool the voters into believing that they were voting for change.

Every time I see this avatar, I think: Gary Condit. And I think of the ugly, naked, brutal power of Dick Cheney that reigned in Washington DC in spring 2001, as if a huge, devilish tornado had swooped in--so powerful that no one--not the FBI, not the DC police, not a single reporter of the corpo-fascist 'news' establishment--dared to ask him a single question about that meeting, on the day of Chandra Levy's disappearance, during her very disappearance hours--not even to ask if the meeting took place.

I just wanted you to be aware of this, Freddie Stubbs, that your avatar speaks to me of the most profound corruption that has ever engulfed our nation's capitol, and our nation.

El Salvador, though they just elected their first leftist government since the horrors of the Reagan era in Central America, cannot do otherwise than to bend to the will of John "death squad" Negroponte, Otto Reich, Jim DeMint, John McCain and the other Bushwhack powers who are still calling the shots in Washington DC. That is the tragedy of this news story. Those reigning powers will overthrow El Salvador's democracy, as they just did to Honduras, if Mauricio Funes, El Salvador's new president, does not bend over. He also recently made the decision--at their behest--not to join the ALBA trade group, organized by Venezuela and Cuba, with Nicaragua, Ecuador and other small countries as members, and which has many advantages for small countries, in barter trade and collective economic/political clout. If he does not follow Bushwhack orders, the rightwing death squads will start beheading, shooting and torturing leftists in El Salvador, as they are now doing in Honduras. Thus, these rancid powers are attempting to break the back of the new leftist independence movement in Latin America, starting with the weakest, most vulnerable countries.

To me, it is just more of the same. We vote, and nothing changes.

And those who betrayed us--those who destroyed the party of the "New Deal," the party that won WW II and ended Nazi tyranny, the party of labor rights and civil rights, the party of the progressive tax, the party of hope for the poor, the "Big Tent" party, the party that best represented the interests and views of the American people--have a name, "Blue Dogs."

This analysis is so good, and so right on, that I am quoting its opening sections in their entirety:

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Nicaragua, ALBA, and Intellectual Betrayal

January 19th 2010, by Toni Solo

People in Latin America have frequently found themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated ultimately by the United States Southern Command, the State Department and related US government bodies. That was true in Central America in the 1980s. It has been the case in Colombia for many years. On a smaller scale it is happening now in Honduras. Shortly, they may well find themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated by NATO.

2009 marked the transition via a practically seamless continuity in US government foreign policy in Latin America from one gangster US government administration to another. The international intellectual and information-media manager classes have failed to report assertively and adequately the US government's escalating war on the peoples of Latin America. For overstretched US military forces, anxious to apply pressure to perceived enemies in Latin America, resorting to NATO's mutual defence Article 5 - as they have in Afghanistan - is an attractive option. With its new military bases in Colombia, the US government can readily provoke an incident as they did fifty years ago in the Tonkin Gulf.

The Venezuelan government recently expressed concern about the intentions of the US government in relation to its bases in the Dutch Antilles- Aruba and Curacao. Holland is a member country of NATO. The well known NATO war games known as Plan Balboa posited unequivocally a joint NATO operation against Venezuela. Despite this, leading US intellectuals like Noam Chomsky dismiss the chances of a US government-led aggression against Venezuela. (1) Their failure of imagination only makes sense in the broad economic, political and propaganda context of the Americas.

US economic context

US domestic economic collapse and stagnation seems increasingly to be provoking a militarist US foreign policy in regions around the world. The domestic economic collapse is very clear. The US economy - still losing many tens of thousands of jobs each month (even official figures acknowledge over 2 million jobs lost since December 2007) - needs 100,000 new jobs a month to maintain employment equilibrium. Unemployment in the US is unlikely to recover from current Depression levels – the U-6 unemployment measure is currently over 17% - until 2015 at the earliest. Ignoring the employment crisis, from July 2007 through 2008, the US authorities – the US government and the Federal Reserve – along with allied governments and their central banks, sought to make good the liquidity problems of their vital private sector partners among the major financial companies by stoking inflation.

They hoped to protect bona fide banks and the so-called shadow banking sector from the imploding real estate bubble. For a while, that strategy shored up failing strategic financial partners – US government supported entities, US Primary Government Securities Dealers and their parent companies (2) as well as the giant, world-wide American Insurance Group (AIG). (AIG on its own has been the beneficiary of over US$127 billion dollars in US government (i.e. taxpayer) support. That is ten times Nicaragua's annual budget). In the end, the inflationary binge, culminating in July 2008 with oil at US$147, failed to make good the bankrupt US financial sector.

In the subsequent phase of the crisis, from July 2008 until March or April 2009, Western Bloc governments, central banks and major financial institutions coordinated action that helped encourage global investors and speculators to buy more US Treasury bonds instead of stocks and commodities. That deflationary dynamic dramatically strengthened the US dollar on the international currency markets. It rapidly depressed commodity prices and stocks. The abruptness, incredible size and sheer volatility of market movements frightened US legislators into bailing out insolvent financial institutions.

This phase of the crisis involved a massive redistribution of wealth from the majority of taxpayers in the United States to a corrupt plutocrat elite. Once their rescue by government was guaranteed, the elite's indispensable accomplice institutions – principally the Primary Government Securities Dealers and their parent companies - returned to the international casino of currency, commodity and stock markets, reinforcing their gambling reserves with many billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. By the end of 2009 US banks were paying out record bonuses to staff, while, in the rest of the economy, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies soared to levels unprecedented in recent history.

Economic crisis : militarist foreign policy

A very strong correlation exists between that blatant domestic intervention by the US authorities to rescue the country's financial and insurance sector and militarist US government foreign policy. In Colombia, increased direct intervention via seven new US military bases now follows billion-dollar military funding for the US government's narco-terror ally, President Alvaro Uribe. In Mexico, Felipe Calderon's usurper government, a few years behind, follows in Uribe's footsteps. Via Plan Merida, the US government is funding intense militarization of Mexico's narcotics wars, just as it did in Colombia from the late 1990s onwards.

In Colombia, more than US$5 billion has been spent in recent years so as to deliberately fail to end the “war on drugs”. Narcotics are the economic base of Uribe's political, army and paramilitary allies. Narcotics profits are also a vital component of the US dominated international financial system. UN Office on Drugs and Crime head, Antonio Costa, has asserted that as much as US$325 billion in narcotics profits helped to fund major international banks through their liquidity crisis in 2008 and 2009. (3) His apparently startling announcement covers up the reality that international off-shore tax-havens routinely channel hundreds of billions of illicit funds every year into the international financial system.

The US has now signed an agreement to install seven military bases for its military forces on unprecedentedly humiliating, quasi-colonial terms for Colombia's sovereignty. The targets of that military escalation are not Alvaro Uribe's narcotics allies but the undefeated anti-government Colombian guerrilla movements, the democratically elected governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, and, too, Brazil, the main rival to US regional dominance. The US government is provoking this deliberate regional destabilization in pursuit of political and economic outcomes beneficial to US and allied corporate interests.

In Central America, the United States government effectively facilitated the June 28th military coup against President Manuel Zelaya, subsequently treating Zelaya on equal terms with the coup leaders and deliberately undermining the continental anti-coup-regime consensus. By means of the electoral farce in Honduras of November 29th, the Obama government has sought to legitimize the coup, recovering and securing a base from which to apply pressure against other countries in the region. US government targets for destabilization in Central America are the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the centre-left government of El Salvador, based on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and even the centrist government of Alvaro Colom in Guatemala, a member of the Venezuelan-led Petrocaribe regional cooperation programme.

Of those target countries in South and Central America, Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua are all members of the ALBA economic and development cooperation community. The ALBA countries have made dramatic improvements in terms of capital investment, current account liquidity and social improvements. Nicaragua and Bolivia have eradicated illiteracy in just three years. Throughout the ALBA bloc, greater access to better health care has been prioritised successfully.(4) ALBA's associated, less comprehensive, Petrocaribe (5) framework provides increased energy security and food security to around 90 million people in over 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

ALBA's fundamental principles of solidarity and complementarity and the absence of conditionality have resulted in very significant economic and social gains for the bloc's member countries. For example, Nicaragua's trade with Venezuela – mostly in agricultural produce - reached over US$110 million in 2009 and is expected to double in 2010. ALBA countries have supplemented relatively modest capital investment from traditional partners in North America, Japan and Europe, with funding from Brazil, China, Russia and India as well as partners like Vietnam and Iran.

For the US and its allies among the Western Bloc countries, the expansion and success of ALBA and Petrocaribe represent two undesirable trends. Political and economic elites in North America and Europe fear and resent the relative decline in their regional influence as Latin America – with ALBA leading the way – develops broader and deeper relations with Western Bloc rivals like China, Russia and Iran. They also fear regional moves towards integration which in practice permit the combination and consolidation of economic and political power by relatively small countries, previously easy to dominate in isolation, but now, united, more ready and able to resist Western Bloc rich-country coercion.

So in Central America, the US is applying heavy pressure on El Salvador's social democrat President Mauricio Funes who has responded by insisting El Salvador will not join ALBA. Regardless, the FMLN revolutionary political party, with which Funes came to power, is integrating its municipal authorities into ALBA's programmes. Under US government pressure, Honduras will most likely withdraw from ALBA**, despite being unable to afford the dramatic drop in economic resources that move would bring. As part of its anti-ALBA offensive, the US government is readying its regional resources for the Presidential elections scheduled in the region over the next two years.

(Some paragraphs on upcoming elections in Latin America, thence to these important points...)

Western Bloc propaganda – the three big lies

Elections in the region occur within the much broader propaganda and perception management theatre of the US government's war against Latin America's impoverished majorities. As in any propaganda war, the main themes are very few and are repeated endlessly, regardless of contrary facts. Those main themes are adapted to fit the requirements needed to render plausible US government aggression against countries that resist regional policy in Latin America of the US and its allies. They are:

---the US government and its allies promote democracy, stability and economic prosperity

---the “war on drugs” requires significant US military presence and large amounts of US aid;

---conversely, the governments of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and of other ALBA bloc countries destabilize the region, are undemocratic, incompetent, corrupt and involved in narcotics and/or terrorism.

These absurd propaganda claims are entirely counterfactual. As in all the most effective propaganda, they are very simple lies, frequently and incessantly repeated via every possible medium. Even a cursory look at the reality of US regional policy in Latin America reveals how (thoroughly) mendacious this propaganda really is.

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*(The coup Congress in Honduras didn't wait for the martial law-'elected' new government to take power (Jan. 27), but has already canceled Honduras' membership in ALBA, which had been so strongly supported by Honduras' labor unions and so beneficial to poor workers, and which President Mel Zelaya had initiated. Honduras joining ALBA was one of the main reasons for the coup, because ALBA membership bolsters the political power of Honduras' extremely poor population. The other main reason was for the Pentagon to secure the US military base in Honduras. The US military base at Soto Cano, Honduras, was used to refuel the plane that carried kidnapped President Zelaya out of the country. When this happened, I at first thought that there had been some kind of Bushwhack-mole insurrection in the Pentagon, and at the US embassy in Honduras, against President Obama and his state policy of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America. But it now appears to me that the Sec of State Hillary Clinton was in on it, and so also, very probably, President Obama. In any case, IF Obama has good intentions in Latin America, he has no power to implement them. His culpability, or lack of power, is also confirmed by the US/Colombia military agreement, by which the Pentagon is basically setting up Colombia like it did South Vietnam, circa 1963.)

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I want to emphasize all three points mentioned above --the egregious lies on which US policy in Latin America is based. I agree with the author that their purpose is war. I also agree with this statement of the author: "International corporate media religiously and cynically repeat the main US government propaganda motifs on a daily basis." I have often descried the complete loss of objectivity on this matter of every corporate news organization in the western world, as well as two purported public news organizations, NPR and the BBC.

LIE: That the US government promotes democracy in Latin America. It is doing the exact opposite.

LIE: That the US government promotes stability and economic prosperity in Latin America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

LIE: That any US military presence at all is required by anything in Latin America, let alone the failed, corrupt, murderous US "war on drugs." The US has no interest--zilch, zero, zip--in stopping the drug trade. (So what is this big US military build-up in Colombia and in the region FOR?)

LIE: That Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and other ALBA countries are "undemocratic, incompetent, corrupt and involved in narcotics and/or terrorism." All egregious, provable lies.

The author goes on to use Nicaragua as her main example of the application of this "Big Lie" to Latin America. It is an eye-opening analysis, which reveals the same kinds of black holes where information should be that we find in corporate media hit pieces on Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, for instance. Name a leftist government that is doing well by its people, where the previously excluded poor majority now has a voice in government, where poverty and illiteracy have been reduced, and where government leaders are challenging US-enforced corporate rule, and you will find the same set of lies and slanders.

Just one more quote from this amazing article, regarding the "infinite feedback loop" of corporate 'news' disinformation, because it cites a particular falsified factoid about Honduras that really stuck in my craw:

---

"The apparently innovative intellectual managerial media process that one sees at work in all the ALBA countries is an infinite feedback disinformation loop. Fake news is fabricated by unrepresentative political cliques and individuals like Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his family, who control major news media in Nicaragua. That fake news is then taken up and distributed by the international corporate media.

The international distribution networks eventually recycle the fake news concoction back to the country it came from and thus reinforce the original fabrication. Neocolonial Left alternative media not infrequently collaborate in that process as was clear in the immediate aftermath of the Honduran military coup. The totally false description of Manuel Zelaya as a leftist populist trying to fix his re-election was almost ubiquitous." --from the article (my emphasis)

--

The lie that President Zelaya of Honduras was trying to extend his term office was repeated over and over and over again by the corporate media, way, way beyond the point at which they should have known that it wasn't true. All they had to do was READ the short resolution that Zelaya proposed for a vote of the Honduran people to know this. I found the repetition of this lie throughout the media amazing, despite all that I've come to know about the corporate media over the last ten years--on war, on stolen elections, on everything else. They are not even bothering to give the appearance of objectivity any more. They just LIE! It was a provable, demonstrable LIE, and they damn well knew it.

So, bear all this in mind the next time you read a corpo-fascist 'news' article about Latin America, or witness their use of our public airwaves for selected cuts of 'news' from Latin America. You are being lied to every day in every way.

I have yet to see a BBC report on the provable, fact-based, and quite astonishing accomplishments of the Chavez government in Venezuela, such as the 45% increase in high school and higher education enrollment (1999-2006), cutting poverty in half, cutting extreme poverty by 70%, low unemployment, and five years of sustained, sizzling economic growth (over 10%) with the most growth in the private sector (not including oil) (2003-2008), nor Venezuela's low debt, good credit rating and high cash reserves, indicating excellent management of the economy. But I have seen hit piece after hit piece from the BBC, following the corpo-fascist 'news' monopoly model, of highlighting every problem they can find in Venezuela, and, when they can't find anything, making shit up, and NEVER MENTIONING THESE POSITIVE STATS about education, poverty, employment and good economic management. The "narrative" is that Venezuela is going down--and all the corpo-fascist, so-called journalists, BBC included, have gathered round to kick its head in, stab it with broken beer bottles and leave it for dead.

Well, here's another bit of BBC mob violence, answered by Tamara Pearson, who frequently writes for www.venezuelanalysis.com . She does a good job of demolishing the BBC. Take the matter of "garbage" (her opening shot)...


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A Quick Response to BBC’s Article, “Venezuela’s economy in further slide”

January 20th 2010, by Tamara Pearson - Venezuealanalysis.com

There are few things more condescending and arrogant than a journalist who arrives in a foreign country, walks around briefly in its streets, and from a few superficial observations, believes they can make a judgement on the entire economic situation of a country, as well as the social movements and hopes of millions of members of that country. In yesterday’s article “Venezuela’s economy in further slide”, BBC journalist Robert Plummer admits it’s been a long time since he set foot in Venezuela.

His article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/846496... ) is an un-contextualised, gloomy surface skim of a list of things apparently going wrong right now in Venezuela, creating the impression of a dirty, downtrodden country wrecked by economic crisis and bad governance. Ironically, he writes it at a time when the rest of the world really is suffering such a calamity.

He begins by remembering a honey moon stop over trip of his to Caracas in 2002, and suggests that little has changed since then. Caracas has “bags of rubbish piled up”, pro and anti Chavez graffiti, and shops that are “less well-stocked than before”. Oh horror.

It’s hard to know whether these bags of rubbish are part of the simple rubbish collection system here (where rubbish is put out in the street on certain days of the week to be collected), or if its something else, but it is worth pointing out that the current government has invested in a range of large bins, big containers, and small garbage trucks. And for a bit of balance for the BBC who purports to like the stuff, the UK is the fourth highest producer of industrial waste, whereas Venezuela does not make the list of the 33 highest waste producing countries. The UK also produces 34.85 million tonnes of rubbish per (year), ranking it 5th in the world, and giving it a per capita production of roughly three times that of Venezuela, with 7.3 million tonnes yearly. (my emphasis)

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I want to rip into the BBC headline itself--"Venezuela’s economy in further slide”--which is a lie. First of all, the entire world is in an economic slide, due to "first world" banksters and their massive malfeasance and looting. This crashed the price of oil last year--cut it in half--which is 50% of the Venezuelan government's revenues. Despite this horrendous world economic crash, Venezuela landed on its feet, with low debt, good credit and $43 million in international cash reserves, coming off of five years of sustained high growth. What this means is that Venezuelans experienced only a slight bump in unemployment, for instance--from about 7% (very low for Latin America) to about 8%--and NO cuts in social services. Inflation--the inevitable result of five years of sizzling, worker-friendly growth--stayed pretty steady in the 25% range--about half the rate of previous administrations (which at one point had produced 100% inflation), and the economic growth, low debt, good credit and high cash reserves enabled the Chavez government to voluntarily devalue the bolivar--long needed and expected in financial markets--a devaluation which they were able to structure so that it affected essential products (like food) least and luxury imports most. The voluntary devaluation was an indication of government economic managers' confidence in the economy. They projected a very conservative budget for 2010, based on only $40/barrel for oil--it is already higher--and growth of only 0.5%--it will likely be higher--with continued full funding of social programs. This gives them great flexibility in budgeting over the year, along with the debt financing flexibility of high cash reserves.

PVSDA, the state oil company, just paid off all of its debts! Standard and Poor just upgraded Venezuela's status on their Index to "stable." Most analysts consider the bolivar devaluation a positive move. What is there to criticize about the Chavez government's performance--economically, socially or any other damn way? Garbage collection is not what it should be? Street crime is still a problem? (Venezuelans are gun-lovers--and can you just hear the screams of the fascists if the Chavez government tried to do anything about that?) Let's see, what else? Whatever the corpo-fascist 'news' monopolies can pick at, they will--while ignoring FACTS that largely contradict their contrived "narrative" that Venezuela is, somehow, a mess. 45% increase in high school and higher education enrollment. Poverty cut in half. 10% economic growth for five years, before the Bushwhacks and the Blairites, and their banksters crashed the world economy.

Venezuela is educating its youth, while the US drastically slashes school budgets to pay for war and bankster bailouts and bonuses. Venezuela is feeding its people--even the poorest are getting good nutrition--and is now providing free universal health care to all--while in the US the elderly have to choose between medicine and food, and food banks cannot handles the influx of hungry Americans. Which economy is well-managed?

The self interest of these so-called journalists--whether of the Wall Street Urinal, or the New York Slimes, or the Washington Psst-CIA, or the BBCons, or the alphabet soup of corporate broadcast monopolies--in preserving their jobs by kissing up to their editors and owners, is blatant and disgusting. They are all telling the same lie, based on NO FACTS. And I don't know what's worse, seeing journalism and the truth so disgraced, or contemplating the naked greed and violence that is lurking behind the lies.

First and foremost...

1. THE VOTING MACHINES

Autorank (above) mentions fascist money and fascist media. Yep, those were the conditions necessary to inflict the final blow on our democracy: the fast-tracking of electronic voting systems all over the US, during the 2002-2004 period, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by a handful of far rightwing corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Not a peep out of the fascist media. Not a peep out of our Democratic Party leadership (except for Dean--and even he was not strong on this issue).

'TRADE SECRET' voting machines make it impossible to achieve the power and traction necessary to start reforming the fascist money and the fascist media. And they make it possible for a handful of far rightwing corporations to play our system like a piano--for instance, to permit a seeming "liberal" into the White House, so the fascist media can rip him to shreds and shift the blame for the MASSIVE crime of the Bush Junta onto "liberals," to destroy any last vestige of fairness in our system, and to write the "narrative" for reinstallation of the Bush Junta; or, for instance, to "balance" every real Democrat in Congress with two Pukes or their equivalent, "Blue Dog Democrats."

FURTHERMORE, the electronic voting putsch just got worse--far worse. ES&S just bought out Diebold and now has a 70% monopoly of the US voting system "market." ES&S is worse than Diebold as to far rightwing connections. Its initial funder and major investor is reclusive billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalecdon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals! THAT'S who is now 'counting' most of our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code!

This horror is still amenable to remedy because the power over voting systems still resides at the local/state level, where ordinary people still have some potential influence. The Anthrax Congress did NOT mandate e-voting; it just funded it with a $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle. Any local or state jurisdiction can reject the machines, if a citizen group can become organized, loud and powerful enough to demand it. This is what the phrase "tea-baggers" SHOULD HAVE BEEN APPLIED TO--throwing ES&S and all 'TRADE SECRT' voting machines into 'Boston Harbor' (so to speak)-- but the phrase got co-opted.

Speaking of Boston, I don't know what specific voting system they have, but, since New York just caved--the last bastion of resistance to the e-voting putsch--there is NO state in this country with verifiable vote counting. And bear in mind that three forces work together to steal elections: Fascist Money, Fascist Media and Fascist 'vote counting.' However these were manipulated in MA to produce a 'tea bagger' Senator from the bluest state in the nation, MA citizens should look first to the voting system: Can you even verify the count? Is that even possible? (Let alone, was it verified?)

Experts whom I respect say that a 10% audit (handcount of paper ballots against machine results) is the minimum necessary to detect fraud in a
"TRADE SECRET" electronic system. As far as I know, NO state in the union has such an audit. (Half the states do NO audit AT ALL; and even the best states do only 1%.)

Venezuela used electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they do a whopping 55% audit--five times the minimum necessary to detect fraud. That's why Venezuelan has universal free medical care and we don't!


2. THE LESSONS FROM THE LEFTIST DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT THAT HAS SWEPT LATIN AMERICA

Things were getting so bad for our global corporate predators and war profiteers in Latin America, with the election of genuine leftist governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay (!), Chile, and up the peninsula in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, that our desperate corporatists and the Pentagon had to resort to kidnapping the president, in the most vulnerable country (Honduras, a US client state), removing him by force, installing a rightwing junta and unleashing rightwing death squads against the rebellions population, in an effort to bludgeon the region into submission and to try start a "domino" effect to topple leftist governments wherever the USAID and the CIA can manage it. (They just succeeded in Chile, the least leftist of all of these governments).

What is happening now is the determined effort of corporate predators and the Pentagon to re-conquer the region. I won't go into all the details here (but I would say look to the Colombia/US military agreement that will be coming to Congress, to get the picture). Instead, I want to backtrack to the lessons from this leftist movement, that might be applicable here. (How you hold on to your leftist revolution, once you've won many elections, is another question).

Perhaps THE most important factor of all was the decade of work done on Latin American election systems, by many groups and people--the Carter Center, the OAS election monitoring group, local civic groups and grass roots social movements. The second most important factor was those grass roots social movements--basically, local community and union organizing--which challenged the "Tweedle-dee/Tweedle-dum" 2-party lock on all political power. And the third most important factor was thinking big. For instance, in Bolivia, the grass roots social movements would not compromise with Bechtel owning the water system; they forced Bechtel out of their country. Another for instance: The coca leaf farmers' union, led by Evo Morales, would not compromise with the US "war on drugs"; they threw the US "war on drugs" out of their country and legalized the coca leaf in the frigging Constitution! (--after electing Morales as president!).

These were not easy things to do, but they represent THINKING BIG. So, here are the three lessons...

1. TRANSPARENT vote counting and other election rules aimed at fairness.

2. Grass roots organizing.

3. Think big!

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Getting rid of the voting machines here is the kind of movement that could spark the leftist revolution that is needed here. It has the potential support of all citizens, of whatever political party or belief, who are sincere in their commitment to democracy. It is FAIRNESS itself, that everybody be able to SEE and UNDERSTAND how our votes are counted. It is our most fundamental right and power. And it would constitute a fundamental attack on corporate power and privatization.

The reason that the anti-war movement failed here is that the marchers did not a carry a "Throw 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines into Boston Harbor NOW!" sign in one hand and a "No War For Oil!" sign in the other.

Everybody MISSED the putsch--which started IN THE SAME MONTH as Congress voted for the Iraq War--Oct 2002--with the Anthrax Congress ALSO passing the "Help America Vote Act"--the $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle--with NO requirement for verifying the votes!

That was how they overrode the will of the American people nearly 60% of whom opposed in the invasion of Iraq (Feb 2003, all polls), two years later, when Bush-Cheney were fraudulently 're-elected'--despite there being no WMDS found in Iraq, despite revelations of widespread torture, despite the treasonous outing of the CIA's top WMD agent, and despite Junior's obvious imbecility in the debates.

Fascist Money, Fascist Media and the fast-tracked Fascist Voting Machines combined to accomplish that task--to keep traitors and criminals in the White House for four more years of massive looting and other horrors.

So, we need to peel back the mechanisms of oppression, one by one, in order of their outrageousness: "TRADE SECRET" vote counting is the most outrageous. And also in order of their sheer practical power to prevent reform.

It is notable that the leftist democracy revolution in Latin America occurred WITH corpo-fascist media that is worse than ours. The FIRST key to overriding fascist control of the government is NOT the media. It is TRANSPARENT vote counting. You cannot begin to bust up media monopolies, and require fair and balanced political coverage and public service as requirements for using the public airwaves, until you have elected legislators and a president who will do that--or at least start to do that. You cannot reduce or eliminate the influence of money on elections until you have the governance clout to require public funding of elections or other anti-money rules. If people vote against a money-influenced candidate and their votes are NOT COUNTED, you have gotten nowhere. You MUST have transparent vote counting to get anywhere at all with any reform.

"TRADE SECRET" vote counting says it all. It sums up the problem. And as the final blockade against reform, it IS the problem. It is THE most resonant issue of Corporate Rule--the one that can rally the most people, the one that speaks to fundamental fairness.

Diebold changed its election division's name (to "Premier") and ES&S swallowed it up FOR A REASON. If the American people get onto this issue, it's all over for the corporatists. It is THE issue that can bring them down.

scads and scads of highly paid lawyers and lobbyists to bend and contort everything back toward their profits and away from the good of individuals and the country. Imagine Diebold & brethren tossing Obama out in 2012 and installing Sarah Palin or Jim DeMint or John McCain (if he should remain fit enough via his senate health care plan to be installed in the White House). How quickly would the provisions of this bill fall to pieces under their 'tender loving care' and be dismantled? Individual patients have little enough chance against such lawyers and lobbyists with Obama running the government, and no chance if Pukes are running the government. And the country has no chance of retaining the provisions of even this sorry-ass bill with Pukes in power. How fast did George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld dismantle the Constitution? Less than a year, as I recall.

It is also too complicated, as with the tax code, and the insurance corps have scads and scads of well-paid analysts and accountants, on top of their highly paid lawyers and lobbyists, to exploit every complication, while the rest of us--including the sick and the elderly and the poorly educated and workers and parents with no time--are mindboggled with bureaucratic fine print just trying to obtain bottom-line health care. Ever try to negotiate the Medicare drug nightmare? This is the same.

We needed something simpler and more solid, which either evicted insurance corps from the health care system or severely curtailed their power, as well as the power of the drug corps and others who make big profits from illness. We needed a simple, straightforward, progressive tax, like Social Security and basic Medicare. You pay into it according to your ability to pay; the fund covers your basic health care needs in a cost-controlled system.

This bill will not likely even have a public option to create true competition on costs--and the inflated cost of medical care for profit is likely where this bill's system will break down under the pressure of highly paid lawyers, lobbyists, analysts and accountants.

As FDR said, "Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred." We needed a system that "organized money" hates, because that is the only kind of system that will work to provide health care for all at a reasonable cost.

I applaud provisions such as the one that tries to stop the insurance corps from dumping a customer when he or she gets sick. But how long is that provision going to last under industry assault? They have the lawyers; you don't. Put a Puke or a "Blue Dog" in the arbitrator's chair and you have no chance at all. You have little enough chance with a real Democrat, and you can be sure that, as that system is set up, it is inherently going to disfavor dumped customers because we have too few advocates with too little power and the insurance corps have many--entire law firms that run Washington DC.

Consider this analogy. Why is it that, when an ordinary citizen consults a secretary of state's web site, or seeks information about voting systems in other forms--say, attending hearings--unless you are a computer expert savvy in the alphabet soup of corporate "provider" hardware and software, you have no idea what they are talking about? And, further, if you were to seek review of the programming code that runs these machines--say, you hired your own computer expert to review it for you--you would be told that it is a "TRADE SECRET" and you have no right whatsoever to see the code by which your vote is counted.

I have actually seen an interview of the county registrar of a large jurisdiction in which the registrar accuses an inquiring citizen (a computer expert) of not being a "professional." I believe that what she meant was that the citizen computer expert was not one of the elite, inner circle of private corporate owners and technicians and their hired hands in government who are privy to the SECRETS of vote counting. Even someone who knows the language is barred. As for your average voter--your grandmother, your dad, Joe Blow at the office, the people who collect your garbage or roof your house, or, indeed, professionals in other fields (doctors, nurses, accountants, English teachers)--we all have no clue, any more, as to how our votes are counted and are barred by law from knowing.

What's wrong with this picture?

That's what private corporations do to "the commons." They make it possible for them to easily negotiate the complications of modern life, and no one else, and they up the ante of complication as a method of exclusion. They introduce of culture of secrecy into "the commons," as further exclusion. And on top of all that they charge us taxpayers a lot of money for the very privatization of everything that benefits the rich. Electronic vote counting, with its constant need for upgrades and maintenance, run by private corporations on their 'TRADE SECRET' code, is the most costly way to perform this relatively simple task, as well as the least secure. That the task is the most essential, bottom-line requirement of democracy--the counting of our votes, to determine the "will of the people"--makes this over-complication and obscurity even worse.

Vote counting is something that everybody should be able to see and understand. It should not be complicated and obscure. And God knows it should never contain 'TRADE SECRETS.'

A government health care program that seeks to have medical care available to all citizens should be simple, straightforward and fair. The fact that it is not going to be is probably fatal. It is set up to fail, because it was set up largely by the very profiteers who have caused the medical care crisis.**

The program needed to create a solid foundation in public service--not a bunch of private parties running around, each trying to chip off the juiciest morsels, each trying to sabotage the rules, each with batteries of lawyers and lobbyists trying to screw each other as well as the victims--the "consumers," te patients--with the goal of profiteering on every level, with every product, and with the death of sick people still being the preferred outcome (if the truth were known) to insurers, and decisions continuing to be made on the basis of cost and not on the basis of medical ethics. Such a system inherently attracts vultures--as our current system has--and vultures swallow each other up, creating monopolistic vultures with too much power.

Our nation's voting system is now run by a handful of rightwing-connected, private corporations--with one of them, the worst of the lot, the one with the most extremist rightwing connections--ES&S (which just bought out Diebold-Premier)--now controlling 70% of the U.S. vote counting 'market.'**

I am not kidding when I say that Sarah Palin or Jim DeMint or John McCain can easily--EASILY!--be Diebolded into office in 2012. Then what happens to your health insurance? How fast would they fuck up this complicated, big business-friendly program? How fast would they dismantle any provisions that protect the "customer" (the sick person, the patient)?

Like our voting system, our health care system is now in the hands of very rich people who truly mean us ill. And all I can say is, "Look out!" They have all the lawyers, lobbyists, analysts, accountants and P.R. propagandists, and we have almost no one on our side in the halls of power. They will loot us again on health care--as they have on anything else you can name: privatization of war, privatization of energy, banksterism/bailouts, the S&L lootings, privatization of prisons, privatization of "the war on drugs," private monopolistic control of the public airwaves, filthy amounts of private money in political campaigns (which almost all goes to the corpo-fascist 'news' media), privatization of the CIA, privatization of many aspects of education (with jacked up costs--always)--all manner of privatization, along with starvation of public services for corporation invasion of anything left of our "commons."

We needed to establish our "commons" on health care. We were prevented from doing so. And we will pay dearly for it. And I think that this failure is related to the loss of our 'commons" in the most critically important system of all: vote counting.

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**(See Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net . The program has a section on who fucked up the punchcard ballots in Florida 2000, that was then followed by the "fix" of this "broken" system--the Anthrax Congress creating the $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle, by which the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines were fast-tracked all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period. The same corps who caused the fuckup in Florida then benefited from the e-voting boondoggle in more ways than profit--they gained 'TRADE SECRET' control of the whole system.)

It was certainly tough for me. I was a very young Kennedyite, and I never really faced what happened until I read this book. Douglass nails it--solves the mystery--and understands the event at every level, from the nitty-gritty details of the conspirators' misdirections and coverups, to the motives of all parties--JFK himself, the murder plotters, witnesses, patsies, the Joint Chiefs, the Russians, LBJ, everybody--up to the higher levels of that event: our nation's spiritual struggle over nuclear weapons and war and war profiteering.

The book is compelling on the level of mystery--totally convincing, extremely well-documented--but it is absolutely brilliant on the question of "Why It Matters." In truth, that assassination created today's world of out-of-control U.S. war and war profiteering. That is what was at issue in that assassination. JFK had opened a back-channel to Krushchev to END the "Cold War," to get rid of nuclear weapons, to stop all the proxy wars and to create a world of peaceful competition between the two economic systems. He was in the midst of this essentially spiritual transformation--triggered by his having faced armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis--when he was cut down, and this is why he was cut down. The "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower had warned against was already out of control. Many people have suspected that the CIA did it and that this was the motive. Douglass establishes this beyond any question, in my mind.

One especially compelling detail that Douglass makes clear is that the paranoid fear of communism and of Soviet Russia was genuine in some leaders of the MIC--some generals, some members of the CIA, for instance. They considered JFK to be a traitor. Others were just powermongers and war profiteers. I lived through this period, and experienced the McCarthy era and the continued paranoia in the society around me into the 1960s, as I was just becoming politically aware. It was an era in which people simply could not see that nuking another country over an economic system, and taking "300,000" U.S. casualties was not a "victory." We didn't know in those days that it would have destroyed the entire planet within months. But we were beginning to get an inkling of the devastation it would bring down. And still, many people thought that we should use these weapons to destroy Russia and smash communism.

The Joint Chiefs wanted to nuke Russia--to wipe it off the face of the earth, and take the casualties here--while they had missile superiority. JFK refused--he thought they were insane--and he subsequently decided to end the "Cold War" but he was all alone in that decision (except for his brother Bobby). When he began implementing that decision over the following year, with his backchannels to Krushchev and Castro (trying to get around the CIA), his "wheat deal" with Russia, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and his orders starting withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, these actions triggered the assassination conspiracy at the CIA, among people who believed that JFK was a traitor. (The conspiracy was led by Richard Helms and probably by Allen Dulles but James Douglass is unable to nail Dulles definitively--JFK had fired him, and he slips well behind the curtain at that point, until he reemerges, of all things, as a member of the Warren Commission!).

This is the explanation--that has been so elusive for everyone, I think--in understanding how supposedly patriotic Americans in positions of high authority could ever assassinate a president of the United States. John Wilkes Booth, you can understand. He did not feel loyal to the Union. Miami anti-Castro Cubans, you could understand. Their loyalty was to Batista (that monster) and to their own money and privilege in "their" Cuba. JFK had foiled their dream of overturning the Cuban revolution. Mafia, you can understand. Bobby was an anti-racketeering A.G. But it was not really understandable how high placed defenders of our country--people who, like JFK himself, had fought WW II--could ever participate in this, with such determination, efficiency and secrecy, never breaking ranks. Anti-communist paranoia is a vital key to the story.

It was, in essence, not real, yet it was enforced as a doctrine, driven by war profiteers. Peace itself was treated as a "communist" idea. Peace activists were called "peaceniks," to associate them with the Russians, and to imply that they were traitors. Most Americans wanted peace--as I will prove below--but they couldn't get past this dogma, that communism was so evil that it had to be destroyed in order to have peace--a peace that never came.

If you lived through that era, it's hard for you to see it. It was "the air we breathed." It was a pervasive disconnect from reality--that the only way to have a peaceful world was for America to kill all the communists. And if you think only of the details of the assassination, as a plausible murder mystery, you can end up not looking too closely and dismissing it as "tinfoil," because you can't imagine how and why loyal Americans would do that--assassinate a president, a war hero, over policies that weren't going to de-fund anybody's pet nuclear missile program or bomber contract right away. He wasn't proposing unilateral disarmament, or immediate dismantling of the war machine, or anything sudden or extreme. They killed him for merely trying to envision something better and taking some mild steps toward that end. But if you don't grasp that THEY viewed these steps as extreme--as, indeed, traitorous--then it is hard to accept what they did (as realistic motivation). You just want to turn away from it. You don't want to face it. Douglass does a very good job of documenting and emphasizing this detail--the anti-communist paranoia of the era--the why.

Oh, and one other thing: They set it up to point to Russia as the perpetrator, to force LBJ to nuke Russia in retaliation. (And that is how LBJ--who was not part of the conspiracy--became part of the coverup.) This is another important point that reveals their motive and points back to the key event--JFK's refusal to nuke Russia, the year before, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That, his solution to it (withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey), and his subsequent growing independence of thought, his envisioning of a peaceful world, his recognition that Russia had changed, under Krushchev, that they, too, wanted peace, his assessment of the Cuban revolution as justified, and all the actions he began taking to end the "Cold War," are why the patriots among the conspirators felt justified in killing him, and why the dirtbag war profiteers didn't care. Three days after the assassination, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam. The justification for Vietnam was anti-communist paranoia.

To the North Vietnamese and their many supporters in South Vietnam, the issue was independence, also social justice. To JFK, the issue was the ravages of war, nuclear war or proxy conventional war, vs another way: peace. He was a perfectly loyal American, too, who could not fathom the others' willingness to sacrifice 300,000 Americans to end communism. He thought communism would ultimately lose in a peaceful competition. He managed to shed his paranoia--a remarkable feat, for that era--and was done in by those who could not.

"Why It Matters" is that we are still there.

Those who profited from paranoia, fear and war, back then, did not trust the American people. They knew that JFK was right in his assessment that Americans wanted peace, and that Americans would re-elect him, overwhelmingly, in 1964, on his new platform of world peace. I know this was true, and remember it well, because 1964 was my first vote for president--a year after Kennedy was assassinated. I voted for the "peace candidate" in 1964--LBJ--who won one of the biggest landslides in history. The issue was peace. LBJ successfully painted his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a warmonger. The people voted overwhelmingly for peace.

The problem was that JFK would have meant it, and LBJ did not. LBJ was, even as he spoke to us of peace, undoing Kennedy's orders and escalating the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, and deceiving Congress with the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. JFK would have been re-elected, overwhelmingly, with a huge mandate for nuclear disarmament, ending the 'Cold War,' pulling out of Vietnam and opening up our relations with the Soviet Union to dialogue and peaceful interaction. That's what the American people wanted. They were ready to shed the paranoid fear of communism. They wanted our country to take genuine steps toward world peace. And that's what they were denied, then, in the intervening years of war, and now. We will not be permitted a president who genuinely wants peace. That is the reality. That is why it matters. The methods have changed for installing and controlling war-friendly presidents. (Now they have Diebold.) The goal has not changed. The goal is to use the U.S. war machine for profit. And there is no such thing as civilian control of this monster--the U.S. war machine. No man or woman who is intent on dismantling it (reducing it to a true defensive force) will be permitted into the White House.

"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters" is a healing book in that it helps you to see all of this very clearly--the continuum from then to now. Douglass does not make the connection explicit (that I recall). He doesn't have to. It's before our eyes every day in the news. Our country does not have to be this way--at war with the world, seeing "terrorists" everywhere, now killing dozens of innocent people in Afghanistan every week with "drone" airplanes; a few years ago, slaughtering a hundred thousand innocent people in one week of bombing in Iraq, to steal their oil, torturing prisoners in violation of all the rules we thought we lived by, engaging in a U.S. military buildup in South America, spending trillions of dollars on war materials and military bases around the world, propping up hideous regimes (like those in Colombia and Saudi Arabia and Honduras and Uzbekistan), always on the wrong side of peoples' struggles for independence and social justice and dying--literally DYING--as a democracy and a country--drained of our resources, in debt unto the 7th generation, harming the poor, padding the pockets of the super-rich and killing the planet, not with nuclear war (yet) but slowly, with our corporate rulers' greed and lawlessness.

This is the nightmare world of the assassins. This is the world they created out of their paranoia, war profiteering and hatred.

Compare it to this ideal, spoken by John F. Kennedy, at his Inaugural, before he faced armageddon, and before he had conceived the dangerous notion of world peace: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can for your country."

His country did nothing for him. It killed him. But he did something for his country. He planted a seed that is still out there, lying fallow, waiting for us to water it and nurture it into life: a country at peace, a world without war.

We look at the situation now and we think it's overwhelming. It does seem that way. The war profiteers rule. But--another value of Douglass' book is that he helps you understand just how difficult it was for JFK to think his way out of the "Cold War." His speeches and debates during the campaign in 1960 are like night and day from his speeches just before he died--speeches that Douglass points out, were not well-covered in the news. How did he get from one place to the other? It was a remarkable journey--a gift to us all--a template for transformation. It was very, very difficult. He was at the center of world power, personally responsible for the U.S. war machine, for its nuclear arsenal and for the safety of the American people. He had been a Navy lieutenant during WW II, trained to kill on our behalf. He had seen action. He had been wounded. He had been heroic under fire. He was furthermore from a rich family, who had benefited greatly from our capitalist system. How on earth did he overcome all of these pressures to "go along, get along" with the "military-industrial complex" and try to see out of it, and to get us out of it? And how can we--each of us, who aren't asking what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country--finish his truncated journey, on our children's behalf? If JFK could see past the Forever War, way back then, in the midst of the "Cold War," with anti-communist paranoia all around him, so can we.

My advice: Start with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines.

The war profiteers now rule us completely, as none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower--victorious general of WW II--warned us of, in the post-WW II era.

We soon lost our chance to become a peaceful nation, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who, after facing near armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, opened a backchannel to Nikita Krushchev, and began negotiations to END the "Cold War," ban nuclear weapons, stop all the proxy wars and "hammer swords into plowshares" for a peaceful and friendly competition between world economic systems.*

Instead, the U.S. proceeded with the Vietnam War--a disaster that Kennedy had decided that he must stop*--in which 2 million Southeast Asians and over 55,000 U.S. soldiers were killed before it was over. Although the U.S. made some fitful attempts to stop exporting war--the U.S. anti-war movement of the 1960s-early 1970s, the end of the military Draft, the efforts of one Congress to ban Reagan's war on Nicaragua, and, recently, the nearly 60% opposition of the American people to Bush Jr.'s war on Iraq**--war re-emerged as our main export beginning with Reagan, more with Bush Sr., and full-blown with Bush Jr., who easily overrode the will of the American people.

Our once fabled manufacturing capability has been outsourced to the cheapest labor markets abroad. Our farming communities and farm lands have been decimated by corporatization and corporate pesticides. Our natural resources have been exhausted and/or polluted by corporate profiteers, with no thought to the future, and no consideration of cumulative effects. Our highly touted environmental regulations have failed. And the same corporations who have done us in, have used our labor, our infrastructure and our liberty, to turn themselves into global corporate predators whom no one can control, and who are accountable to no one and loyal to no one. And they have now hijacked our last remaining asset--the U.S. military--for corporate resource wars.

Corporatization has profoundly affected our once free press--a basic pillar of democracy. Broadcast and print media are now controlled by a few corporate monopolies, that spew forth a relentless stream of pro-corporate, far rightwing, fascist garbage as political news/opinion, 24/7. But even worse than this, our election system, already grown putrid with private money and corporate 'news' illlusions, is now controlled by a handful of rightwing corporate voting machine corporations, and run on 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. That this could occur in the USA, with no opposition from the press or the Democratic Party, is a symptom of how bad things have become. It is also the final-- the ultimate, the definitive--blockade to any significant reform. The final blow. The ultimate corporate insult. The definitive line between a troubled democracy and no democracy.

With transparent vote counting, we still had the chance to change things. They've done it in Latin America--and they have an even more vicious rightwing corporate press than we do. Despite that press, they have been able to elect good leftist leaders in most of South America and half of Central America--a rather amazing, grass roots, leftist democracy movement that has swept the region. The key is the hard civic work that Latin Americans have done on their democratic institutions, including fair and transparent elections, over the last decade. And this, of course, is why the U.S. is larding its "best friend" in the region, Colombia--a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth--with $6 BILLION in military aid, and why the Pentagon is moving into Colombia, with newly granted access to SEVEN military bases, and all civilian airports and an escalation mechanism for unlimited U.S. soldiers and 'contractors' who will have total diplomatic immunity; why the U.S. permitted a rightwing military coup in Honduras (to secure that U.S. military base); why the U.S. has reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II), and why the U.S. has led an intense psyops/disinformation campaign against Venezuela's democratically elected socialist government.

Democracy is the enemy of global corporate predators and war profiteers, here and abroad.

With 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting, now owned and controlled (70% of the U.S. "market") by one of the scariest rightwing corporations (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold), we, the people of the U.S., have no power to correct our country's course, no power to call off its wars, no power to curtail U.S.-based global corporate predators, and no power to direct our tax money to positive purposes--schools, health care, help to small business (the biggest employer in the U.S.), emergency services, infrastructure, protection of basic socialist programs like Social Security and Medicare, food and housing support for the poor, technical innovation (for useful products not war systems), and so on; no power to achieve FAIR taxation; and no power to direct foreign aid to positive purposes (billions in USAID money going to rightwing groups all over Latin America, for instance; and trillions for war, everywhere).

I would say that Step One, for restoring democracy in the U.S., is restoring THE most fundamental condition of democracy: transparent vote counting.

This is still doable--since control over voting systems still resides at the local/state level, where ordinary people still have some influence. Corruption--including "revolving door employment" and corporate lobbying--are the main problem, and this is easier to expose and to remedy, at the local/state level. (I'm afraid Washington DC is hopeless.) Transparent vote counting is such an obvious requirement of democracy, that ordinary people "get it" pretty quickly, and it is a bipartisan matter (except for nutball fundies and paid corporate operatives). I think we should probably give up anti-war protests, for the time being, and focus exclusively on picketing local voter registrars, who may live right down the street--and do this everywhere--until we have restored vote counting that everyone can see and understand. Until we do, we really don't have a democracy, and the Forever War will continue.

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*(See, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters," by James Douglass.)

**(Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the invasion of Iraq--Feb. 2003, all polls. About half of that 60% were against the invasion outright, on any terms. The other half would only support it if it were a UN peacekeeping mission--i.e., international consensus that military action was necessary, i.e., they didn't trust Bush. The UN refused to be bullied into that war. Major U.S. allies dissented on the necessity of war. The problem of Iraq WMDs had in fact been solved. Yet, despite this overwhelming set of facts and circumstances against invading a country with no air force and slaughtering a hundred thousands innocent people in one week of bombing alone, that is what the U.S. did, because war is now our only asset, our only export and our only value. Or rather--to be fair--war is now the only asset, the only export and the the only value of the war profiteers who rule over us.)

or society has descended into barbarism because there is no food, whether the commies are coming to get you?

The danger now--a far, far, FAR worse danger than humanity has ever faced before--is mainly the fault of Corporate Rule, and, believe me, Corporate Rule is totalitarian and is strangling not just half the world but all of it, and all life to come.

The answer is DEMOCRACY--real democracy, not tyrannical corporatism. Why do you think it is that Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez spoke the truth at the Copenhagen conference, while "first world" countries hemmed and hawed, backfilled, lied, secretly drafted their own document, and served the monopolistic interests of the corporate rulers rather than addressing this catastrophe head on? Because "the will of the people" is listened to, in Bolivia and Venezuela. They in fact have far better democracies than we do! Their leaders are not hogtied by the rich and the corporate. They are free to speak the truth.

You mistake cooperation, socialism, social conscience, alleviation of poverty, humanism, respect for Mother Earth--for Stalinism! Do you know that anti-Stalinism is a major theme of Chavez's socialist party in Venezuela? It is a victory of our lying, disinformationist, corporate monopoly press that many people don't know this. Chavez is no more of a "dictator" than FDR was.

But, because you seem to have misinterpreted what I said, I will amend it this way. It is not "capitalism" that is greatly quickening the end of life on earth; it is predatory capitalism. Simple capitalism is merely a development strategy--a human system for pooling resources and organizing product manufacture and services. But what we have now is NOT simple capitalism. It is NOT a free, unfettered, fun, interesting, colorful, prosperous marketplace. It is a deadly system of CONTROL by the super-rich. It is characterized by big monopolies and the destruction of the rights, dignity and well-being of MOST of humanity.

If you set up a world, in your mind, that has to be either Soviet tyranny OR predatory capitalism, you miss quite a lot of solutions in between. One of them is real democracy, in which good ideas rise to the top--are not stifled by corporate monopolistic control of the media--and in which the needs of the many are well-balanced against the desires of the rich and powerful. People need strong government to protect everyone's rights, to PREVENT the tyranny of the rich--who have forever trampled on the rights of the poor, if they can get away with it--AND they need great freedom to pursue their own happiness, as Thomas Jefferson put it.

Just want to mention one more thing that most people--or rather, most north Americans--don't know, which helps put things in perspective. The Chavez government--which is strongly socialistic--created a sizzling economic growth rate over the previous five years in Venezuela--10% economic growth, 2003 to 2008, with the most growth in the private sector (not including oil!). This was the result of socialist policies--of spending on PEOPLE, bootstrapping the poor, promoting literacy and education, providing loans and grants to small businesses and coops, land reform (putting the best farmers--campesinos--back on the land, with an intelligent program of incentives, and without draconian land seizures from the idle rich), while implementing fair taxation and strong regulation of big and multinational enterprises. The Chavez government is NOT Stalinist. It is intelligent. And it operates entirely within the Venezuelan Constitution and the rule of law. It is NOT repressive. It is not predatory. It is extraordinarily democratic. And it has produced such hot economic growth that now they have to worry about inflation!

It is Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, Dyncorp and their ilk who are tyrannical, not the Bolivarians. And it is the corporate monopoly press that has twisted this around to its opposite (i.e., lied) in portraying these corporate tyrants as favoring "freedom" (i.e., freedom for the rich and powerful) and countries that exercise real democracy as "dictatorships" because they don't cater to the rich and powerful.

The solution to the peril we are in from climate destabilization will come from democracy--not corporate tyranny and predatory capitalism, which are causing vast pollution AND blocking remedies. I suppose one could imagine an absolute monarch ordering up restoration of the natural world, and enforcing it with death by hanging, as the kings of England once did, in protecting England's forests. But that is not likely in our world. And it has, in any case, been replaced by the "sovereignty of the people." "The people" are the sacred rulers now, and must act to preserve nature for all.

I remember reading some polls, sometime back, in which 70% to 80% of the people in the U.S. favored strong environmental regulation. Did they get it? No. Why not? Why did they get Bush and the Forever War instead?

From a report on Copenhagen by Ron Ridenour, including quotes from Evo Morales and other Bolivarian country leaders...

"At the press conference,...Morales posed the problem and the solution to it thus: 'The rich countries seek to divide the rest of us ... by offering crumbs of money. Mother Earth can’t be preserved with money alone. Europe’s food almost entirely depends upon petrol. What happens when there is no petrol? This dependency on fossil fuel is a threat to humanity, so we have to change the structures of food. It is a structural problem of two forms of life: one way of living is the way of over-consumption and waste, the way of luxury, of egoism and individualism-capitalism. The other way is vivir bien — living well — food enough for all and living in harmony with others and our Mother Earth, in solidarity and complementarily.'"

-----------------------

I think that these other remarks of Morales are also thought-provoking...

-----------------

"Morales: 'There is profound difference between their document (26 rich countries drew up a so-called `Copenhagen Accord')(2) and the peoples fighting for humanity and the planet. This group of friends led by Obama accept that temperatures can increase by 2 degrees Celsius by 2020. This will end the existence of many island states; it will end our snow-capped mountains. And Obama only seeks to reduce gas emissions by 50% in 2050. But we want and need 90 to 100% reduction, in order to save the planet...'.

"President Morales was referring to one of the five questions -- to be answered yes or no-- that he proposes for a global referendum on climate change. The other four are:

1. Do you agree with re-establishing harmony with nature, recognising the rights of Mother Earth?

2. Do you agree with changing this model of over-consumption and waste that the capitalist system represents?

3. Do you agree that developed countries reduce and re-absorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions so that the temperature does not rise more than 1 degree Celsius?

4. Do you agree with transferring all that is spent on wars to protecting the planet and allocate a budget for climate change that is bigger than what is used for defence?"

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5...
(my emphases)

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I especially like no. 4, since our government is wasting so much of our tax money on wars and massive and unnecessary U.S. military presence all around the globe. What are we doing spending $6 BILLION of our tax dollars on militarizing Colombia--a government with one of the worst human rights records on earth--and planning to spend yet more on SEVEN new U.S. military bases in Colombia, and an agreement that places NO LIMIT on the number of U.S. troops and 'contractors' who can be deployed there?

These and other war profiteer projects are draining our coffers, at a time of grave economic crisis and potential environmental catastrophe; they encourage the wrong solutions to every problem--the militarist solution, the solution of violence-- and they benefit global corporate predators, in their war games, their oil games and their "free trade for the rich" game. Our humongous military budget does not benefit the people of this country, it threatens the people of other countries and cripples our ability to face the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced: global climate destabilization brought about by our own over-consumption and consequent pollution.

I think that we should cut our military budget by 90%, down to a true defensive posture, and get on with saving the planet and creating a world of fair trade, social justice, peace and--as Morales says--harmony with Mother Earth.

To me, it's just so transparent that I find it hard to understand anyone's blindness to, a) the reason why these countries have been targeted by the global corporate predators and war profiteers who rule over us (--they need OIL to fuel their monstrous war machine), and b) the consequent behavior of the leaders of these countries, who are responsible for their peoples' safety (such as allying with each other; or, in Iran's case, seeking a nuclear deterrent against attack; or, in Venezuela's case, closing its borders with Colombia, where the Pentagon is planning a massive U.S. military buildup).

I mean, it's not as if the U.S. had NOT just invaded Iraq, with no justification, slaughtered a million innocent people, tortured many more, and set up a puppet government to hand the oil over to western multinationals. And it's not as if Iran isn't right next door to Iraq, and hasn't been watching its neighbor get invaded, slaughtered and demolished. And it's not as if Venezuela isn't right next door to Colombia, and hasn't been watching the slow, South Vietnam-like U.S. military buildup right on its border, and hasn't been aware of the $6 BILLION in military aid that the U.S. has larded on Colombia--a country with one of the worst human rights records on earth--and hasn't objected (along with most of Latin America) to the latest outrage--a secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement for U.S. military use of SEVEN new bases in Colombia (one of them overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela and all of Venezuela's main oil reserves and facilities), NO LIMIT on the number of U.S. soldiers and U.S. contractors who can be deployed to Colombia, UNLIMITED diplomatic immunity for whatever U.S. soldiers and 'contractors' do in Colombia, and U.S. military use of ALL civilian airports and other facilities in Colombia.

Venezuela is not stupid. Iran is not stupid. And neither has invaded ANYBODY, or shown ANY territorial ambitions. Their concerns are clearly, demonstrably, and obviously defensive.

Furthermore, Iran is one of the potentially most progressive countries in the Middle East. And they would BE a progressive democracy if the U.S., England and Israel had not destroyed their new democracy in 1954 and had not installed the horrible 'Shah' of Iran who inflicted 25 years of torture and repression on the Iranian people, which drove the Iranians into the arms of mullahs, to protect them from further interference, and theft of their oil, by the west. That's WHY the first elected president of Iran, in 1954, was overthrown by the CIA--because he wanted to nationalize the oil to benefit the poor! OIL!

Venezuela has one of the most vibrant democracies in the western hemisphere--it being a COMPLETE AND TOTAL LIE of the corpo-fascists that it is not--so, democracy does not exempt you from threats, attacks and bullying by the U.S war machine--not to mention a U.S. supported rightwing military coup attempt in 2002, and numerous other anti-democracy plots.

Iran knows this. Venezuela knows this. The U.S. government is egregiously hypocritical. It tolerates the murder of thousands of union leaders, peasant farmers, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists and others in Colombia, and rewards the extermination of the left in Colombia with $6 BILLION in aid! And it is using this fascist narco-thug government in Colombia as part of a plan to seize control of Venezuela's (and probably Ecuador's) northern oil regions adjacent to Colombia.

OIL! To fuel the great war machine, and to fuel the tankers of "free trade for the rich."

It is our own government that threatens world peace--NOT Iran's, NOT Venezuela's. They are reacting to the obvious, palpable, visible threat of U.S. invasion.

Did we, or did we not, just invade another country, and bomb the shit out of its people, with no justification whatsoever, in order to steal their oil? DID WE NOT DO THAT? Are people who defend this U.S. demonization of Iran and Venezuela BLIND? Do they have Alzheimer's, or what? They can't remember what happened six years ago?

Like I said, it's plainly obvious to me that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela--one country whose democracy we destroyed, and the other whose democracy we almost destroyed, to get control of the oil--are afraid for their people. And they are not alone.

Lula da Silva, president of Brazil--who also recently welcomed Iran's leaders to his country--has said, of the U.S. reconstitution of the 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, that this "poses a threat to Brazil's oil." (Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela's.) Latin American leaders are currently reeling from what the U.S. just did in Honduras--its slimy, deceptive, treacherous, backstabbing support of a rightwing military coup! They know that multimillions of U.S. taxpayer money are going to rightwing groups in their own countries, plotting similar overthrows of democracy. Brazil has oil. Ecuador has oil. Bolivia has oil. Cuba has oil. None of them are safe. And is it any wonder that they fear the U.S., and are allying with other victims of the U.S.?

The U.S. is the biggest threat in the world to the stability and safety of other countries and their peoples. We are threatening and slandering peaceful countries--and, in the case of Venezuela, a country with a better democracy than our own--because our corporate rulers lust after their OIL.

Here's something else Lula da Silva said. He was interviewed about a year ago, and was asked about this corpo-fascist bullshit that Hugo Chavez is a "dictator." His reply: "They can invent a lot of things to criticize Chavez, but not on democracy!"

So, how does that testimony, from Venezuela's neighbor, gel with the lies, psyops and disinformation that has been aimed at this oil target? Who is telling the truth? The Venezuelan people, who know Chavez better than anybody, consistently vote for him, in fair and transparent elections, in overwhelming numbers. How does that gel with the crapola we are fed by the State Department and its scribes in the corpo-fascist media?

We are being fed LIES--both overt and subliminal. And the reason is OIL.

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(NOTE: I posted this comment in older forum on this issue--the forged Iran document--and have re-posted it here, because I think it's relevant. Here's the older thread. My post is comment #32, in reply to Steven Johnson's comment #39.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... )

--kill thousands of union leaders and not prosecute the military/paramilitary murderers
--kill thousands of others (teachers, human rights workers, political leftists, peasant farmers, journalists) and not prosecute the military/paramilitary murderers
--accept $6 BILLION in U.S. military aid through the fingers of US war profiteers with no impact on the flow of cocaine to the U.S.
--displace 2 million peasant farmers from areas where Monsanto, Chiquita, Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, big drug lords and the Pentagon want to operate
--maintain a filthy political culture based on drug money, death squads, bribery, threats and intimidation
--sign the country's sovereignty over to the Pentagon for a huge and unlimited U.S. military buildup
--connive with the U.S. against neighboring democratic countries that don't do any of the above
--extra credit: fraudulent elections, privatization of resources and public services, "free trade for the rich," accepts usurious World Bank/IMF loans, hates Cuba
--special circumstances: has diplomatic relations with Iran while being a rightwing government.

U.S. State Department "report card", in order of compliance with the above requirements...

Colombia: A++ cum laude
Honduras: B (improving)
Peru: C (passing grade, needs improvement)
Haiti: C (passing grade, needs improvement)
Panama: C (passing grade, needs improvement)
Mexico: C- (needs to stop talking about legalizing marijuana)
Costa Rica: D ("free trade for the rich," A; conniving, C; militarization, F)
Chile: F+ (needs to repeat grades 1 thru 12, military dictatorship)
Guatemala: F+ (fragile leftist government, fascists still around, could take over)
El Salvador: F+ (ditto)
Nicaragua: F+ (may lose the plus soon)
Brazil: F
Argentina: F
Uruguay: F
Paraguay: F
Ecuador: F
Bolivia: F-
Venezuela: Dropped out of school.

the astounding performances of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which are remarkable for the enthusiasm, energy, passion and expertise of the young performers. They have received the highest critical praise. Documentaries that I've seen have also focused on the transformational quality of the program, for individuals and society. It doesn't just produce--and doesn't aim at producing--spectacular talents like Gustavo Dudemal (recently appointed lead conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic); the intentions of the program are to spread love of classical music as a cooperative venture and to create orchestras in every community. And it has been amazingly successful in those goals. Two million Venezuelan children have passed through this government funded program, most of them disadvantaged street children. Two hundred and fifty thousand children are currently in the program in Venezuela (and other such programs have been started in other countries). Hundreds of community orchestras have been organized in communities throughout Venezuela, by these children after they graduate. They retain a lifelong devotion to classical music.

The program struggled financially until the election of Hugo Chavez, whose government has enthusiastically supported it and has enabled it to grow exponentially. El Sistema is, of course, entirely free for the participating children.

http://www.fesnojiv.gob.ve/en/tours/544-si...
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article....
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/arti...

Here are some typical comments on the social differences between El Sistema and other classical music cultures:

"In many ways, the El Sistema operation is the opposite of the way Western classical music is taught and experienced in the more developed world. 'In the U.S. and Europe, culture tends to be owned by the elite, and shared as much as possiblewith others,' says Mark Churchill, dean of preparatory and continuing education at New England Conservatory, which has a longstanding relationship with ElSistema. 'What’s so fascinating is that in Venezuela, they are doing it the other way around. The culture is being introduced from the lower economic strata. It has become the hallmark of the lower classes; and the middle- and upper-class kids whoparticipate are the minority.' Clive Gillinson, executive and artisticdirector of Carnegie Hall, is also intrigued by El Sistema’s upside-down quality. 'Almost all of us who are involved in music education think of the top-down approach—you find the right teachers, identify talent, etc. For me, effectively this has been a bottom-up process, with a small number of people who wanted to make music together and helped other people do it. It’s amazing, and almost counter-intuitive, the way it has grown up out of passion, not out of particular skills or talent. And now that it has grown exponentially, all of that has reached a point where skill level is very high, and these players become impassioned ambassadors for the next generation.'"

http://www.bsomusic.org/res/pdfs/presskits...

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The corpo-fascist media and their scriptwriters in the U.S. State Department and the CIA like to create a bogeyman in Hugo Chavez, whom they demonize relentlessly and completely unfairly. Their idea is to paint socialism as a necessarily tyrannical system, requiring submission to a 'dictator' and curtailment of individual freedom. They create this bogeyman in order to knock him down--and completely ignore what is actually happening in Venezuela and the millions of Venezuelans who are participating in it: including the poor in democracy. Neither democracy nor classical music nor any of the good things of life should belong only to the rich. This is the new Venezuela, and it is not only-- and not even chiefly--about Hugo Chavez. It is about these millions of child classical musicians, and the millions of others--the workers, the poor, ordinary citizens, voters--who support Chavez's socialist policies, and who put him in office to attend to the interests of the majority.

Curtailment of individual freedom? Ask the children of El Sistema what freedom is, and they will not likely answer the freedom to become a billionaire, but rather freedom from dullness and the freedom to scale the intellectual heights of classical music with your friends, cooperatively, in an orchestra. That is a very dangerous idea to predatory capitalists and war profiteers. Venezuela is rich in individual freedom. It is one of the most individualism-driven societies in South America. People are free to say whatever they like, and that includes the corpo-fascist media. (Curtailment of press freedom is entirely a rightwing myth.) And they are free to get rich as well. (That is another myth, that somehow the rich are an 'endangered species' in Venezuela.) But a new idea has been born there--and one of its mothers may well have been El Sistema, which began as one man's vision of musical education, and has spread so far and wide--that every child is a genius, no matter how disadvantaged, and that every human being, no matter how poor, no matter how lowly, is a citizen of the collective entity called a nation and deserves respect, a decent life and opportunities to contribute to the whole.

A recent Latin American poll reveals that 7 out of 10 Venezuelans approve of their own democracy, and a whopping 85% believe in democracy as the best form of government (as opposed to only 49% in Colombia, for instance). Venezuelans also have high regard for the fairness of their economic system. You will never see these stats in a U.S. State Department handout, or from corpo-fascist reporters, who, because of who owns the media here, are not free to write about them. (Talk about curtailment of press freedom!) El Sistema is a good exemplar of WHY Venezuelans approve of their government and love democracy. Venezuelan democracy is a cooperative effort, from the ground up--from the grass roots--just like the classical music movement in Venezuela.

http://www.borev.net/2009/12/every_year_th...

The US was never supposed to have a standing army. Our Founders totally opposed it, because they knew that it is a big temptation to would-be tyrants and to war profiteers. After WW II, the great US war machine was not de-mobilized, as it should have been, and it therefore became the "tail" wagging the "dog" of US foreign policy. Ike himself, the Allied commander of the victory in WW II, warned against this, specifically naming the "military-industrial complex" as a threat to democracy. The MIC was, at that very moment, gearing up for the manufacture of war in Vietnam. The conflict between capitalism and communism had been militarized, and the world was poised for an even worse fate than continued proxy wars against "communism" (not against people who had aggressed against the US or its allies, but against an idea)--and that was the Big One, nuclear war. Both things came to a head under the JFK administration, just following Ike into office. James Douglass narrates how the MIC won, in his book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." We have, since that time, been in "war mode" for no good reason--as the war profiteers have grown and grown and grown in power and in their ability to suck us dry, and, lately, with the Bush Junta, in their ability to hijack the US military for corporate resource wars.

The Iraq War has taught us just how unimportant Al Qaeda is as a real "enemy"--but also its importance as a bogeyman. Prior to the Iraq War, Al Qaeda was largely a phantom--dangerous in the way, say, that organized crime is dangerous. It was a police problem, not a military problem. Our war profiteers have turned it into a military problem, by invading, slaughtering and torturing people who were not at all inclined toward Al Qaeda (Iraq) or who had turned to the Taliban for the sake of order (after the US/Al Qaeda had pushed the Russians out of Afghanistan, leaving chaos in their wake), and the Taliban were inclined to harbor Al Qaeda at least as "guests," possibly as protection against more outside interference.

There is little enough evidence that (US-funded Al Qaeda) did 9/11, and there is NO evidence that the Taliban had anything to do with it. I think what is most likely true of them is they just made a political/security error--a big one. They are a very insular "boys' club," with an extraordinarily puritanical notion of Islam, comparable to the desert-crazed Christian Nitrian monks of the 5th century AD in Alexandria. So they would be vulnerable to misjudging forces outside of their insular, half-crazy society. But whatever Al Qaeda's part, or their part, in 9/11, once the US invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, indiscriminately killing tens of thousands of people, indiscriminately imprisoning and torturing people, creating utter mayhem in these societies and setting up US puppet governments, the situation was changed into a situation of permanent war--the goal of our war profiteers for fifty some years now.

They WILL NOT demobilize. They WILL manufacture "enemies" and look for the MOST militaristic response to whatever arises. (They are currently prepping things for war against Venezuela--to grab the oil--and have been working for some time to demonize Venezuela's actually good and democratic president. That's the next oil war, since our war machine was denied Iran--probably by China and Russia threatening to come into it.)

We have not seen the end of the disaster that Bush Junta has inflicted upon us. They were not really the originators of our problems, but they took everything that has been wrong with our government since the Kennedy assassination to extremities that most of us never dreamed could have happened. It all started with turning "communists" into the "enemy"--including all manner of just revolt against heinous oppression. (And, hell, it even turned mild socialists and mere leftists into "communists," the all-purpose "enemy.") What the Bushwhacks have done with "Al Qaeda" and "Islamic terrorists" is that they have multiplied them--as the people in the Bushwhack target countries have fought back, largely for their own independence, NOT in order to "terrorize" us.

It's kind of like this: Predatory capitalism and its super-rich elites create vast and cruel poverty in many countries, whose peoples then react in favor of its opposite: common ownership and rule by the poor majority. This is what happened in Russia and China early in the 20th century, and began happening in Asia, Africa, South America and elsewhere, after WW II. Most of these movements were not, initially, "communist dictatorships." In fact, many of them had no inclination toward "dictatorship" at all. They were democracy and independence movements. By lumping them all together as "the menace of communism," our war profiteers created "enemies" out of nothing (as in Vietnam) or drove the big communist revolutions, in Russia and China, in on themselves, in fear, with particularly horrendous results in Russia (with the rise of a true tyrant, Stalin), and also into proxy wars around the world to create insulation for themselves (allies, spheres of influence). But by the time Stalinism was defeated in Russia, during the Krushchev regime in the 1960s, all "communists" were locked in, as the "enemy" of convenience to maintain the war machine here. And everybody who opposed this imperialistic war machine, or who suffered from U.S.-led predatory capitalism, began grouping themselves into alliances with the big communist countries for protection. (Cuba is a good example.) Thus, the false enemy, "communism," multiplied, and was sold as a worldwide "menace," even though, in numerous cases, all that most people wanted was independence, social justice and peace.

And I suspect that the same is true of a whole lot of people who are now aligned with "Al Qaeda" or who have sympathies toward "Islamic extremists," who had no such alignment or sympathies eight years ago. However, "Al Qaeda" is STILL NOT the Soviet Russia or Red China. It is still more phantom than reality. And even without the threat of armageddon--that those countries posed (in relation to the behavior of the US and its allies), we are STILL fighting people whose primary motive is to be left alone--to not be menaced by the west and its humongous war machine and its global corporate predators. As Krushchev made clear in backchannels to Kennedy, Russia would have gone to almost any lengths to avoid nuclear war and wanted to get out of the arms race for good. They wanted to END the "Cold War." Little did we know this--we, the people of the US--as Kennedy fought this internal battle with our (by then) all powerful war profiteers. THEY wanted to nuke Russia and wipe it off the face of the earth. And if they couldn't have that 'triumph,' they wanted Vietnam and other proxy wars. As LBJ stated, three days after the Kennedy assassination: "Now they can have their war."

War was the OBJECT. "Communism" was the convenient, all purpose "enemy." And that, I believe, is the same with "Al Qaeda" today--an all purpose enemy, which is smeared over--fuzzed over, made to seem relevant to--Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries, and even, by God, South America. Our war machine is a MONSTER, feeding itself on the blood of tens of thousands of innocent people. It is now driven by the need for fuel, first of all for itself. The war machine drinks oil like it drinks blood. And every time it kills and robs, more "enemies" are created. It is out-of-control. And it will never again permit a president of the U.S. to seek genuine world peace. That is out of the question. We, the people of the U.S., don't have that choice any more. We are the cannon fodder and slave laborers of a war profiteer-driven empire.