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Peace Patriot's Journal
Source: New York Mimes
CARACAS — President Barack Obama's push to put a pretty smile on U.S.-based global corporate predator sway worldwide is waning amid the fallout from Bush Jr's Financial 9/11 and the death of the planet. In recent years, the U.S. has used its wealth and its power to torture and kill with impunity to drive its corporate rulers' ruthless, 'dog eat dog' agenda at home and bully other countries into its sphere of influence, helping to inflict massive poverty, starvation, agony and death in the interests of the rich and war profiteers.
But its billions and billions and billions of dollars in easy pickings from U.S. taxpayers larded on bloody-minded regimes, such as the fascist narco-thugs running Colombia, and domestic war and torture contractors, are starting to dry up, as the people of the U.S. lay gasping from the Bushwhack crime spree, and more and more countries and peoples around the world catch on to the empty promises, lies, and hypocrisy of the evil U.S. war machine and its jackal corporations--Raytheon, Blackwater, Halliburton, Dyncorp, Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, et al. The pretty smiles are falling on deaf ears.
Trillion dollar projects such as the slaughter of a hundred thousand innocent people to steal their oil are suffering, as the U.S. desperately seeks to milk the once golden, now leaden, "goose"--the U.S. middle class consumer--to protect its corporate predators' oil contracts in Iraq, build the pipeline in Afghanistan, fuck China and propagandize the world that democracy = predatory capitalism. USAID and CIA budgeteers are tearing their hair out. Nobody wants to hear their bullshit any more. U.S. Air Force drones prowl the edges of the Empire, killing at will. That is all anyone needs to know. 'If you do not obey the Empire, we will kill you,' smiles the President. 'End of story.' But this shit is not going down well, abroad. Cheney you could fear. But why fear the Smiler? Especially when he has empty pockets, picked by the Bushwhacks of every last goddamn dime up to the very last minute before they relinquished power? The U.S. is also cutting back sharply on many types of financial support for its bought and paid for allies, a cornerstone of its worldwide influence. One recent study by the Center of How to Fuck Over the Poor Some More, a financial consulting firm headquartered in Singapore, found that, dollar for dollar, the U.S. is wasting its money on propaganda; killing is better.
That includes proposed spending on everything from military purchases to prop up fascist regimes to phony aid packages that dump U.S. agricultural products on third world markets to destroy local farming, and points to a major weakening of U.S. war diplomacy. Why propagandize people when you can starve them or outright torture and kill them with impunity? Gone, for instance, will be multibillion-dollar outlays to nazify countries like Colombia, Mexico and Israel and buy "friends and allies" worldwide. Nobody wants our worthless money any more any way. The South Americans are going to start trading in "sucres." Fuck the U.S. dollar! China, flush with profits from selling cheap, shoddy shit to the vanishing U.S. consumer, and holding U.S. debt like a death grip around the throat of the Empire, is horning in on U.S. corporate predators in Latin America and Africa, with deals that actually benefit both parties. U.S. corporate predators cannot afford to do this and keep that extra corporate jet and party mansion. The Chinese financial barons don't need shit like that. They have a five thousand year history of out-inventing the West. And they are communists, at heart. It's unfair, but there it is. We who invented financial predation are persona non grats in most of the world. Only those we buy love us, and we are broke.
Some U.S. allies even appear to be warming to Exxon Mobil & brethren's archenemy, Venezuela. Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, for instance--whom Smiley called the "most popular leader in the hemisphere"--actually said, of Venezuela's president, "They can invent all kinds of things to criticize Chavez, but not on democracy!" Imagine that. The "dictator" of South America is a democrat with a small d--according to local leaders. We can't even buy demonization when we need it, for all the biolfuel deals in the world. But there's still hope: With President Rafael Correa of Ecuador sending his personal pilot to study at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., can the victory of murder, mayhem and massive corporate theft be far away? And even Cuba wants in, no matter what they say. They want in, in, in to the booty and the nightclubs and the casinos and the corporate jets and the party mansions, and the torture, and the war, and the big cigars, yes, they do, cuz I said so, and I've got a Spanish-sounding name.
As for the planet, fuck that noise. We have Mars.
Ask Exxon Mobil--thrown out of Venezuela.
Ask Bechtel--thrown out of Bolivia.
Ask Dyncorp--about to be thrown out of Ecuador.
Ask the World Bank--whose "portfolio" in Latin America is rather empty these days.
Ask the U.S. Federal Reserve--re: UNASUR's discussions about going off the U.S. dollar.
Ask any number of U.S. global corporate predators and war profiteers hungry for oil, cheap labor, markets for their shoddy Chinese-made goods, potable water, fallow ag land to convert to biofuels, lithium, gold and other minerals, social programs and services to privatize and loot, coca fields to poison with toxic pesticides, Amazon hard woods, willing governments through which to cycle U.S. military dollars, etc.
Our corpo/fascists have been desperate to, a) stop the leftist tide in Latin America, or--failing that, b) put a new face on their greedbag, exploitative, ill intentions.
When Paraguay elected a leftist president last summer, followed by El Salvador electing a leftist president this year--adding two more to the long list of Latin America countries who have had it with U.S. domination, and who have been able, by their own efforts, to restore democracy in their countries, in spite of every effort and many U.S. tax dollars used to defeat that development--it became clear to me that the U.S. government--as the representative of our global corporate predators (not of we, the people)--would be on the defensive in Latin America for some time to come. And this is true, in my opinion, whether we have Democrats or Pukes in power here. The U.S. President represents U.S. financial interests. Period. He wouldn't be U.S. President if he did otherwise. He may be more sympathetic with "we, the people." He may be more sympathetic with the vast poor of Latin America. But his chief obligation is to the predatory global corporations who operate from our shores. And those interests do not like having to deal with uppity brown people who take democracy seriously. They would prefer to kill their leaders and advocates--as they do in U.S.-dominated Colombia, and have done throughout Latin America in the past--but, if they can't kill them, and can't destroy their sovereignty, and can't freely walk all over them and rob them blind, then they need some serious P.R. to worm their way back in.
That's how I see Obama's position at the Summit of the Americas. He's dealing with a Latin America that is in full rebellion against U.S. (i.e., corporate) domination.
The Cuba issue is one of those issues around which other important issues swirl--and there has never been such a big and serious movement against the U.S. embargo of Cuba as there is now. Latin American leaders see now as the time to assert their sovereignty and their independence, as to foreign policy, and Cuba is the thorn sticking in their hides. They have had it with being dictated to, on Cuba. They cannot send a ship with Latin American goods to Florida if it has stopped in Cuba. This is an interference in their trade rights as sovereign countries, and they see no reason for it--just U.S. arrogance and stupidity--not to mention hypocrisy on "free trade."
One of the most interesting things I have read, recently, was a joke, told by Michele Batchelet, president of Chile, to a group of U.S. investors. The context was the Bushwhack sponsorship of a fascist coup attempt in Bolivia, this last September. Batchelet had called the meeting of UNASUR, at which she achieved unanimous backing of the Morales government against the white separatists, who were being funded and organized out of the U.S. (Bushwhack) embassy. Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and others worked closely together to support the elected (and very popular) Morales government and defeat the secessionists. Batchelet then asked a group of investors she happened to be addressing in the U.S., "Why has there never been a coup in the United States?" Her answer: "Because there is no U.S. embassy in the United States."
Har-har. They laughed. She laughed. All of Latin America is laughing. It is their time. As Evo Morales has said: "The time of the people has come." Democracy, the will of the people, the will of the majority, has never been so ascendant in Latin America. It is an unstoppable movement, a tide of history. And, as King Canute said (and demonstrated--according to legend), a monarch may seem very powerful, but he cannot stop the tides.
The U.S., under the Bushwhacks, with Exxon Mobil and brethren in full control of our government, has been unable to stop this tide. Obama's job is to help them ride it out--to surf it, in a sense. And he has proven to be quite a surfer--a skill and a mindset that he possibly learned in Hawaii. If you cannot hold back the tide, you try your skillful best to ride it in.
I'm an old lady and I've been in protests since 1967 (the first big anti-Vietnam War march), so I have a lot of experience of anti-war and other protests, and of corporate media handling of protests. And I was in Seattle in 1999 primarily to protest the WTO's illegitimate power over state/federal environmental regulations, and generally to protest the lack of democracy in the WTO, and lack of consultation with the American people in the signing of various global trade agreements. Others were there to protest the impacts of bad trade agreements on organized labor, and on other human rights issues. I and the 50,000 other peaceful protesters in Seattle--including the 10,000 people who entirely peacefully shut down the WTO meeting, by sitting down in Seattle's intersections, in a time-honored act of civil disobedience--were a "legitimate" protest, and one that the American people badly, badly needed to hear about. How this protest got portrayed as somehow "illegitimate" and violent is a study in our loss of all objective journalism in this country. There was no violence on the day of the massive civil disobedience by any protestors until very late in the day--about 4-5 pm, after six straight hours of the ugliest police violence I have ever witnessed--for instance, pulling up this big blower machine to an intersection where hundreds of people were sitting peacefully, getting out a big hose, and hosing pepper spray directly at the heads and faces of seated protesters. Just before this started, I turned to one of the cops in the long Darth Vader line (I was a legal observer) and asked him, "What are you going to do to us?" His answer: "We're not going to kill you." Then they released cs gas over the whole region, and everyone ran to get out of it--with police chasing people and beating the crap out of them, and shooting them with rubber bullets. By late in the afternoon, after hours of mayhem created by the police, the police then permitted a few "anarchist" youngsters to run wild, burning trash cans and breaking windows downtown. The real protesters tried to stop them. The police clearly sat back and let this vandalism proceed. And I was amazed, when I got home that night, to watch the evening news and the first thing they showed was a young "anarchist"'s foot going through a store window. The sequence of events had been reversed. The late in the day vandalism was being used as an excuse for the daylong police violence against peaceful protesters. The police proceeded to riot into the evening, tear-gassing and cs-gassing large swaths of the city, even into completely uninvolved neighborhoods. They even beat up a city councilman. So, IF, as you say, the Seattle protests "delegitimized liberal and anti-war protests for years afterward," that delegitimization was a planned effect of the twisted-around 'news' reports by the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies, in service to the global corporate predators who control them. The peaceful shutdown of the WTO meeting was THE most amazing protest I have ever seen or heard of. It was a brilliant civil disobedience action. And if it's extremely important point--the lack of democracy in global trade decisions--had been objectively reported, and if more Americans had understood that protest, it is at least possible that we wouldn't be in the grave situation we are in today, with global corporate predators absolutely robbing us blind, and destroying our sovereignty as a people, our democracy, our economy and our planet. The corporate powers-that-be had much reason to "de-legitimatize" the Seattle protest, and all protest. They had an oil war to pull off--and more jobs to outsource, and much more looting to do. Hell, they've even outsourced the manufacture of the very voting machines by which they steal our elections. (See "The Trouble With Touchscreens," by Dan Rather, www.HD.net .) You are, unfortunately, buying into their line, that the Seattle protest was...wrong, non-mainstream, violent, "illegitimate." How many times do they have to lie to you, before you become skeptical of the self-serving impressions they give you about people and events? They were lying about Seattle, and they were soon lying about Iraq. Please, think hard about how you formed the impression that the Seattle protest was "illegitimate."
the rightwing political opposition including fascists, coup plotters, assassins, mass murderers, rioters, 'brownshirt' thugs, drug traffickers and criminals of various kinds and their political front operations, in order to overthrow honestly elected leftist governments.
I'd say it needs more than reform. I'd say it needs to be abolished. Even without Bushwhacks in charge, the arrogant presumption of the USAID is that the U.S. knows best how other peoples' should organize their governments and their political agendas. We have demonstrated to the world, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the ONLY interests that the U.S. supports are those of our U.S. based global corporate predators, and that we have become singularly incompetent at maintaining our own democracy in the face of global corporate power.
Example: In the U.S., three private, rightwing, Bushite corporations (Diebold, now called "Premier," ES&S and Sequoia) have taken over and privatized our election system, which is now run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that the pubic is forbidden to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. This is how Bush/Cheney were kept in office in 2004, after the initial Supreme Court coup in 2000. Half the voting systems in the U.S. now have no paper trail at all and no means to verify the results of electronic voting machines. The other half may have a paper ballot, but they conduct only a miserably inadequate 1% audit (automatic handcount), as a check on machine fraud. Statistical experts whom I respect say that a 10% handcount is the minimum needed to detect fraud.
By contrast, Venezuela not only uses OPEN SOURCE code in its electronic voting system--code that is owned by the public and that anyone may review--but they also handcount a whopping 55% of the votes as a check on machine fraud--more then five times the minimum to detect fraud. Their system is also characterized by very high citizen participation, by very high citizen satisfaction levels with their democracy and its direction, with strong election rules of every kind (for instance, a ban on political advertising in the week before the voting, to prevent "hit piece" ads), and with the active participation of international election monitoring groups, including the Carter Center, the OAS and the EU, at the invitation of the Venezuelan government.
Who has the better democracy--the U.S. or Venezuela? Indeed, it can be argued that we have a corpo/fascist state controlled by corporate war profiteers, that can barely be described in democratic terms at all, while Venezuela has the most vibrant democracy in the western hemisphere, and has been a pioneer in the involvement of excluded groups, including the vast poor majority which has never had political power in Venezuela, ever before. And the same goes for other targets of the USAID and its various political destabilization programs--Bolivia, for instance, where the first indigenous president ever to be elected in South America, Evo Morales, was the target, this last September, of USAID, DEA, CIA, U.S. military and U.S. embassy-instigated white separatist riots and mass murder of peasant farmers.
The USAID has become the tool of global corporate predators. And it, and every other U.S. program of interference, and covert and overt war, against democratic countries should be abolished. I do not believe that these corpo/fascist tools can be reformed. The change, if any, will be cosmetic, and then they will again be used for evil purposes when the next corpo/fascist junta gets Diebolded into office here.
I'll bet the CIA doesn't know how much WE handcount.
Answer: ZERO PERCENT in half the systems in the U.S., and an extremely inadequate 1% in the rest.
Or maybe they do. And we're just another one of their fucking destabilization/install dictator projects. Hm, CIA? Which is it, you fuckers? Don't know? Did know?
Venezuela not only uses OPEN SOURCE code--code that belongs to the public and that anyone may review; they not only have a paper ballot for every vote and count FIVE TIMES the minimum amount needed to verify results; they not only ban political advertising in the week before the election and other "best election practices"; they also have thousands of international election monitors from the Carter Center, the OAS, the EU, and other groups, including U.S. groups like the NAACP, crawling all over Venezuela during every election at the invitation of the Chavez government.
So I guess this news is getting around, eh? That Venezuela has honest, aboveboard, transparent elections and we don't. So, they call up the "Mission Impossible" team--and, now that the Bush Junta has hijacked the U.S. military for corporate resource wars, and looted us of trillions of dollars--have to figure out a way to keep more of our people from finding out the truth about Venezuelan vs U.S. elections. It doesn't matter now here--the damage is done. But it does matter in Venezuela, where the oil is being used to bootstrap the poor and not to stuff the pockets of Exxon Mobil executives and boost their power as a global corporate monster.
This is an INFURIATING lie!!! And it is also ominous and dangerous. WHY would they do this? WHY? --if they are NOT planning a war on Venezuela, one of the best democracies in the western hemisphere?
I have often expressed my concern about this here at DU, in view of the relentless psyops, disinformation and propaganda in all the corpo/fascist media here about Chavez and Venezuela--which appears to me to be pre-war preparation--just like the lies about WMDs in Iraq were--combined with other evidence from South America, for instance, strong evidence of a Bushwhack war plan to create fascist, secessionist states, in control of the oil, in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, with the Bolivian plot having unfolded this last September in fascist rioting and murder, funded/organized right out of the U.S. embassy, and the effort earlier in 2008 to draw Ecuador and Venezuela into a war with Colombia (U.S./Colombia bombing/raid on Ecuador's territory, in March 2008), orchestrated from the "war room" at the U.S. embassy in Bogota.
The lies are getting MORE, not less, intense, with Obama in office. Even Obama has been telling these lies--and took time off during his inauguration week to give an interview to a rightwing 'news' monopoly in South America (Univision) accusing Chavez of "exporting terrorism" and being "a hindrance to the progress of the region." So, maybe these lies were not a blunder, with a Bushwhack holdover handing Obama the script? That's what I initially thought. Maybe we are seeing the price Obama had to pay, to be permitted to win the election: Rumsfeld & brethren can't have Iran's oil, but can go after Venezuela's, and Obama will wink at this private Exxon Mobil war? Is that it?
This CIA bullshit about Venezuela's elections may be a clarifying. I wasn't sure about Obama's Latin American policy--it has been very wobbly. But now that he has his man at the CIA (or his man has him in the White House?), and the CIA is spouting bullshit like this, I can only presume that Obama is not being led astray, but is part of the civil war game being played in South America. I've given Obama every benefit of the doubt. His hands have been full, for sure, with the Bushwhack Financial 9/11, and two Bushwhack wars. But maybe South America has not been on the "back burner" as I thought. Maybe it has been front and center all along as the alternative to nuking Iran. And maybe Exxon Mobil is still running our government.
to me that it was planned. It's true that it has a three-decade history--Reagan thru Bush Jr. (including Clinton, to some extent) of deregulation and welfare for the rich. But the coup de grace was not the September 2008 final looting. The coup de grace was the 'TRADE SECRET' code voting machines fast-tracked all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period--'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code owned and controlled by Bushwhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls--the privatization of our voting system itself. 2004 was the moment that democracy should have kicked in and resulted in a course correction for our sinking ship of state. This was deliberately prevented by a quickly installed non-transparent voting system all over the country--with, I have to add, the collusion of many Democratic leaders. Through Clinton, the economic/political system was still correctable. With the Supreme Court coup d'etat in 2000, followed by the Diebold/ES&S coup d'etat leading up to 2004, we were not permitted to elect a decent, vigilant government--maybe not an ideal government--but one that was Clinton-like, in its better respects, and with a president, John Kerry, with a strong history of investigations into large financial scandals--i.e., a decent, vigilant government that would not have permitted the September 2008 Financial 9/11.
And I think the same is true of the 'Terrorist' 9/11. A Gore government would not have permitted it to happen. (I'm sure about Gore in that respect; but not about Lieberman.) At the least, NORAD would have mounted some defense. The unprecedented disorganization of NORAD/AF on 9/11 was Rumsfeld's doing, in my opinion. Fast-forward to the Financial 9/11, and this, too, was both preventable, and characterized by Bush Junta complicity. Imagine Kerry-Edwards in the White House as of 2004, and you can see that it simply would not have happened. A recession maybe, due to 2000-2004 malfeasance and looting. Not a worldwide meltdown and massive looting of the future unto the 7th generation.
The election system is the key to everything. It is our only real power as a people. Transparent, honest, aboveboard elections are the fundamental condition of democracy. Democracy is the very best system ever devised to insure a change of direction, when a nation is headed for disaster.
These 'talking points' have begun to stick out like diseased thumbs--so putrid with flesh-eating bacteria that the only remedy is amputation...
The article's going along, like a normal article, about how important Brazil is (no question), and who Lula da Silva is (a mediator, true enough), and what-all this Obama/da Silva meeting might cover, then, bang, the awful-smelling thumb sticks up...
"Brazil has become a major U.S. trading partner, and its cautious economic policies have helped it weather the global economic crisis better than almost all other major economies. South America's largest country, Brazil also has huge new sources of offshore oil and abundant ethanol, which could give it a key role in helping the U.S. wean itself off Venezuelan crude and shift to cleaner sources of energy."
Actually, the sick thumb could be smelled in the previous sentence: Brazil's "cautious economic policies have helped it weather the global economic crisis better than almost all other major economies."
The truth is that the Chavez government's socialist policies--and in particular its strong action to curtail global corporate predators like Exxon Mobil and the World Bank--have also greatly helped not just Venezuela but also its neighbors and allies to "weather the global economic crisis" (i.e., Bushwhack Financial 9/11). Due the "cautious" Chavez government government policy of not giving away all of Venezuela's oil profits to multinationals, and its excellent management of the economy, Venezuela has $42 billion in international cash reserves--basically a three year cushion against drops in the price of oil--and has furthermore socked money into the Bank of the South, to help its neighbors avoid getting "shocked and awed" by US/World Bank opportunistic ruination. Also, by pouring oil profits into health care, education, adult literacy and re-training, land reform, local manufacturing and development, and regional infrastructure (such as the new bridge between Brazil and Venezuela over the Orinoco River, and the new highway being built from Brazil's Atlantic coast to the Pacific, through Bolivia), Venezuela has one of the most forward-looking social and economic situations in the western hemisphere. The bankrupt U.S. population can only look with envy at the priorities in Venezuela, while jobs bleed out of our country, and our medical, educational, infrastructure and political systems fall apart. The Venezuelans have had ten years of progress--including an astonishing economic growth rate of 10% for the last five years (most of it in the private sector, not including oil), while we have had ten years of fascist looting.
Now re-read the Associated Pukes: Brazil's "cautious economic policies have helped it weather the global economic crisis better than almost all other major economies."
What other major economy is weathering the Bushwhacks' Financial 9/11? Venezuela! But, nope, they don't say it. And their next sentence tells you nakedly, putridly, sore-thumbwise, what AP's (and the Bushwhack-CIA's) agenda is: Brazil also has huge new sources of offshore oil and abundant ethanol, which could give it a key role in helping the U.S. wean itself off Venezuelan crude and shift to cleaner sources of energy."
Divide. And. Conquer.
Then comes the non-surgical amputation of the rotting thumb and AP reporters bleeding to death for lack of medical care:
"Silva, who runs the world's fifth-most-populous nation and ninth-largest economy, has close ties with leaders across the political spectrum. He's been asked to lobby Obama for free trade on behalf of conservatives in Colombia and for dropping the U.S. embargo against communist Cuba.
"Even Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has had a prickly relationship with the U.S., has asked his Brazilian counterpart to put in some good words for him."
This putrid lie is also set up by its prior sentence, which equates the universal outcry in Latin America against the US embargo of Cuba, with the narco-thugs in Colombia wanting their reward--US "free trade"--for slaughtering thousands of union leaders with military-connected death squads and hosting the biggest US military boondoggle on earth outside of Iraq and Israel ($6 BILLION in US-Bushwhack military aid to Colombia, which has one of the worst human rights records in the world). Most of South America has rejected both US-dominated "free trade" and the corrupt, failed, murderous US "war on drugs." Colombia is an isolated, undemocratic, fascist, putrid sore thumb in South America. To give such prominence to what their corrupt leaders may have dropped into da Silva's ear is an enormous distortion.
Here's how distorted it is:
The new political alignment in South America...
Venezuela - left
Bolivia - left
Ecuador - left
Argentina - left
Uruguay - left
Paraguay - left
Brazil - center-left (allied with the left)
Chile - center-left (allied with the left on important issues like non-US interference and the new South American common market, UNASUR)
Peru - run by corrupt Bushwhacky "free tradists" (will go left next election)
Colombia - fascist; total Bushwhackdom.
Central America/Caribbean: Nicaragua - left. Guatemala - center-left. El Salvador - likely electing a leftist as president this weekend. Cuba - left. Costa Rica - center-left. Honduras - leaning left. Mexico - will go left next election.
The prominent issues in this OVERWHELMINGLY leftist trend are, a) how to fight off US-dominated "free trade" and US bullying and interference; b) social justice for Latin America's vast poor population; c) local control of economics, finance and development and Latin American integration (UNASUR) against the tottering behemoth to the north.
US-dominated "free trade" ain't in it. "Free trade" is dead. So is the US "war on drugs" which is almost universally perceived as US military domination and bullying of sovereign countries.
Now re-read the Associated Pukes' sentences above, then the anti-left capper: "Even Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has had a prickly relationship with the U.S., has asked his Brazilian counterpart to put in some good words for him."
This is not only an insulting little snipe, it is a lie. Lula da Silva, on his own volition, by his own account, in his own words, months ago said that he wanted to meet with Obama to help apprise him of the truth about Venezuela and Bolivian democracy in particular. Why? He did not say this, but it is the truth: Because of the lies, disinformation and psyops of putrid 'news' monopolies like AP, which serve the CIA, global fascists and the super-rich, and which copy and paste their 'news' from US State Dept. talking points.
Amputation. That's what's needed to rid our society of the stinking, oppressive, lying, warmongering assholes of corporate journalism. The 'news' monopolies need to be dismantled--their corporate charters pulled, and their assets seized for the common good, and distributed to small business people, to create a new, truly competitive "marketplace of ideas." Their diseased members are stinking up democracy throughout the western hemisphere and the world.
is the most important. The principle of "balanced coverage" on issues of public importance is harder to implement and enforce in a meaningful way. I remember the midnight broadcasts of dissenting opinions in the 1960s and 1970s that were so boring, everybody turned them off--if they were up that late watching old movies. The public service component of "balanced coverage," however, is extremely important, as a requirement for use of the pubic airwaves (for instance, the broadcast of important public events, national or local). Also, the notion of "balanced coverage"--even if it was ineffectively implemented--was deeply influential throughout the media, encouraging more objective journalism even in print newspapers and news magazines.
But the anti-monopoly principle is really the main thrust of the Doctrine. No one--and certainly not a handful of rightwing billionaires--should have a monopoly on news and opinion, in any region, or in the nation as a whole. Monopolies over broadcast and print news, often combined in entertainment conglomerates (and in NBC's case, with war profiteering businesses), are extremely damaging to freedom of speech, one of two core principles of democracy--the other being transparent vote counting (which we have also lost). The internet is our only hope and refuge as to free speech. That is a positive development. But as to the rightwing tripe that spews into our homes via TV, and over the radio--free speech, "balanced coverage" and all of the essential values of objective journalism have been lost, and this horror has bled over into newsprint as well.
Some new version of the Fairness Doctrine is absolutely needed. I would structure the proposal this way:
1. Bust up all news/entertainment monopolies. Re-create competition, by encouraging small, creative, new businesses to take over the broken up parts of these monopolies, on a small scale.
2. Ban all private money from political campaigns (or alternatively, ban all political ads on TV/radio). And: require licensees of the public airwaves to provide 4 to 6 weeks of 24 hour, or prime time, coverage, prior to every election, with all broadcasting devoted to public debate and candidate access to the voters.
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Re #1: This would include conglomerates that control book publication, newspapers and news magazines, movies, TV/Radio and/or cable, as well as other businesses. Bust out the book publishers, say, from Time-Warner, and, if there are several book publishers, bust them apart from each other. They must become small, single enterprises, with no relation to the parent corporation. The same with other elements of news/entertainment monopolies or conglomerates. A TV broadcaster cannot own a newspaper. A newspaper owner can only own one newspaper (and no other news/entertainment businesses). Thus, the profits from advertising are spread around to millions of new, small businesses, which compete with each other to be the best--and will serve their communities far, far better than monopolies and conglomerates have.
Re #2: The notion of "balanced coverage" is a two-part problem. The first part is the humongous, dreadful, putrid, democracy-killing influence of "organized money" (as FDR put it) on the parameters of public debate, and on who can run for office. Today, you have to have a million dollars in hand, to even think about running for Congress. That is DEATH to democracy. Its driver is the enormous cost of TV/radio political ads. And you can solve this problem at the same time that you solve the problem of wall-to-wall corpo/fascist bullshit on TV/radio. You ban political ads (or all private money), and require that all public airwaves be devoted to public debate in short campaigns, prior to elections, as a condition of the license. The applicants for such licenses will know that they cannot count on any profits during those periods--and they either accept that condition or they don't get the license, and it goes to a more public spirited business. We are long past due for this in the United States. Are we going to take our political life seriously, or not?
in the modern era, that qualifies for such a black and white attitude--and that is the war against Hitler, and possibly the war against Japan. Every other war that I know of, in our era, is a fuzzy situation with two sides that have justifications for fighting. Often it is one with the most fire power that has the least justification--I'm thinking mainly of the U.S. war on Vietnam, and the two U.S. wars on Iraq, especially the second, and of course the many "dirty wars" that the U.S. has unjustly fought--against Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina and others, and the horror we are involved in--with $6 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and U.S.military personnel, and Blackwater--in Colombia right now; as well as the dirty rotten attempted fascist junta this last September in Bolivia, run out of the U.S. (Bushwhack) embassy.
There are two sides in Colombia. According to Amnesty International, 92% of the murders of union leaders in Colombia are committed by the Colombian military (about half) and its closely tied rightwing death squads (the other half), with only 2% committed by the FARC, the armed leftist guerrillas (and the rest are common crimes). These stats hold up for the deaths of political leftists, human rights workers and others as well. And the death toll includes peasant farmers and youths whom the Colombian military or rightwing death squads kill and dress up as FARC, to up their 'body count,' to impress U.S. senators. There are "two sides" but one of them has $6 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and is held up as a paragon of democratic virtue--when nothing could be further from the truth--and the other is demonized as "terrorists." The FARC kidnap; they kill some people--though far fewer than the fascists. To end the 40+ year Colombian civil war, these two sides have to be brought together. Both sides have to be listened to. The injuries that both sides have inflicted, and suffered, need to be put aside, so that peace can occur. If one side keeps getting propped up with billions in military aid, it will never end.
The situation in Bolivia in September was rather different. The Bolivian government did not fire one shot. It was the injured party. U.S.-funded and organized rioters tore down government and NGO buildings, beat up indigenous, blew up a gas pipeline, and machine-gunned some 30 unarmed peasants. Still, for the sake of peace--after President Morales threw the U.S. ambassador and the DEA out of Bolivia, the new South American Common Market--UNASUR--unanimously ralled to his support, and was able to bring the parties together, to prevent a split up of Bolivia (the fascists are white separatists and wanted to secede, in their eastern provinces, and take Bolivia's main gas/oil reserves with them), and to enable a peaceful vote on Bolivia's new Constitution (which allows the provinces and indigenous tribes some autonomy).
Talking and putting aside phrases like "idiotic terrorism" is necessary for peace. The white separatists posed a mortal threat to Bolivia, yet the Bolivian government sought detente and an end to the violence, and the chance for the sides to work together for the greater good. The white separatists were trying to create exactly what you describe--"an eliminationist quasi-government" not just on Bolivia's doorstep, but within Bolivia. This insurrection was aimed at destroying the Morales government and Bolivia's democracy, by absconding with its main natural resources.
To make peace you have to end war. There is no other way. And I'm afraid that the situation of Israel/Palestine is similar to Colombia--a more than 40+ year, seemingly insoluable conflict, with both sides feeling greatly aggrieved, both sides having reasonable arguments about the security and welfare of their people, and reasons for fighting, for a very long time, and for wanting to eliminate the other. The Colombian rightwing feels that they are in a "real struggle" to cope with an armed leftist guerrilla army. The rightwing's drug trafficking, corruption and death squads aside, they--or rather the people they represent--have a point: their lack of safety and security. And the FARC guerrillas--and many non-armed leftists in Colombia--also have a point: the social injustice in Colombia, and the greater brutality of the Colombian military, with its U.S.-funded fire power.
How do you stop this war? How do you create peace for everyone? If you want peace, you have to end war. You have to stop demonizing the other side, as if they were not human. And if you have superior fire power and go the way of crushing an insurgency with legitimate grievances, you will end up like Colombia, with such disastrous carnage all over the landscape and such vast corruption, that you invite your own demise--which is what I fear Israel is doing.
You do Israel no favor by asserting that the Palestinians don't want justice, and are engaged in "idiotic terrorism." You contribute to the illusion of Israel's rightwing that Israel can exist as an armed medieval fortress, in the midst of hostile neighbors, and not crumble from within, or lose all U.S. support, due to its injustice (or our bankruptcy), or be ultimately defeated. How can Israel achieve peace--and healthy, honest relations with its neighbors? It has to be done--so, how can it be done?
Now they have a new leftist president, with a 70% approval rating--Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a largely indigenous country)--a new Constitution, voted on by the people, which, among other things, sanctifies water as a human right; it also makes coca leaf chewing and tea drinking (a traditional medicine in the Andes) a Constitutional right--and many other wise and humanistic things.
Bechel Inc. came in there, invited by the previous rightwing government, privatized the water system in the city of Cochabamba, and immediately jacked up the price of water for the poor of the poor, even charging poor peasants for collecting rainwater. The people of Bolivia rebelled, with peaceful but unstoppable protests, and rallied to Morales, a coca leaf farmer and head of the coca leaf growers union, and elected him president. Morales re-negotiated Bolivia's international gas contracts, and increased Bolivia's gas revenues from $1 billion/year to $2 billion/year, to be able to pay for social programs, for instance, a small pension for the elderly, universal medical care and schools. He also was able to settle a hundred year old dispute with Chile, and gained access to the sea for landlocked Bolivia, and attracted a project that Brazil and Venezuela are helping to fund, to build a new highway from the Atlantic coast of Brazil, across South America, and through Bolivia, to the Pacific Ocean, which will turn Bolivia into a major trade route between Africa and Asia, and up and down both South American coasts.
This last September, the U.S. (Bushwhack) ambassador in Bolivia and the DEA instigated fascist riots against the Morales, in which they trashed government and NGO buildings, beat up indigenous people, blew up a gas pipeline and machine-gunned some thirty unarmed peasants. They were trying to split off Bolivia's gas/oil rich eastern provinces into a fascist mini-state in control of the resources. Morales threw the U.S. ambassador and the DEA out of Bolivia, and all of South America rallied to his side. All the leaders held a meeting in Chile of their new, all-South American 'common market'--UNASUR--formalized only a few months before, and unanimously backed the Morales government, and sent delegations to Bolivia, where they successfully negotiated a peace agreement with the saner faction of the white separatists, and helped Bolivia to peacefully hold the Constitutional referendum.
Evo Morales said something, about two years ago, that really stuck with me. He said, "The time of the people has come."
It all came from Bechtel privatizing the water and charging for collecting rainwater. I don't know if things will ever come to such a pass in Colorado, but, if they do, remember this story, and what Evo said, who was given a special blessing from the tribes of the high Andes, upon his investiture as president of Bolivia, at which he wore a wreath of coca leaves around his neck: "The time of the people has come."
long ago.
2) "Native Born Citizen" - born on US soil or to a US citizen parent overseas, one or both parents not US citizens if born in the US. The belief is this causes "divided loyalties" from birth, therefore the belief is such individuals are not able to be president.
Obama was born of a U.S. mother, in a U.S. state (Hawaii), but even if he wasn't born in Hawaii (and had been born in a territory or a foreign country), he would still be a U.S. citizen. Her citizenship absolutely establishes his.
The "belief" of some that this causes "divided loyalties" is irrelevant. It's a matter of law. I was taught this early in my education, but I don't know when it was established, by which cases (or whether the 14th amendment was the settler of this issue).
Perhaps we're dealing here not only with this vague notion of "divided loyalties" (that has no meaning in law, that I know of--and is contradicted by our use of conscripted or voluntary aliens as soldiers in the U.S. military)--AND a sexist bigotry against female U.S. citizenship. If Obama's father had been a U.S. citizen, and his mother the foreigner, would these fascists be pursuing this obsession? The Grover Norquist plotters are clever at manipulating underlying sexist (and of course racist) feelings in a small group of bigots whose views then get trumpeted--way out of proportion to their numbers--by the corpo/fascist media.
I can envision the corpo/fascists using this issue in a coup d'etat situation (re: 2000, 2004), the way Hitler twisted laws and nativist/patriotic feelings to his ends, to dispossess and kill Jews, and to invade the rest of Europe. But I can't imagine it having any traction in law and in normal political circumstances in the U.S. An important question is whether these are normal political circumstances, or whether a further fascist coup is in progress here. As to that, I am very, very, VERY concerned about the 'TRADE SECRET' code voting machines, all over the country, with the code owned and controlled by a handful of rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. They could very well have permitted Obama to win (but I think significantly shaved his mandate, to hamper reform), with the intention of knocking him down and throwing him out, and installing the next fascist coup in 2012. In that kind of scenario, I could see this citizenship bullshit being part of the corpo/fascist 'news' monopoly false narrative about Obama.
The rightwing in this country--controlled by multinational financial interests--are nothing if not stinking, rotten, vomitty, foul, bloody-minded traitors. We should never forget this. What may look ridiculous to us and all reasonable people now, could well turn up as an important plank of the next false narrative covering up the next stolen election. They've done it before. Remember the bandaids at the Republican Convention? Can there ever have been anything more absurd than the lie that Kerry didn't deserve the medals he received in combat, while CBS execs were suppressing the true story of Bush's AWOL?
So we had best understand this latest idiocy. I've been ignoring it, and I shouldn't have been. But what may be more important than early debunking this utter B.S. about Obama's citizenship, is insuring that we can prevent another stolen election. And, right now, we cannot.
Rafael Correa--the Sir Lancelot of the leftist sweep of South America--calling the indigenous protectors of Mother Earth "nobodies" and "extremists." Yikes. If it was written by the Associated Pukes and that lot, I would dismiss it out of hand--as lies aimed at "divide and conquer." There is nothing that our corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies would like more, in South America, than to destroy Rafael Correa. Only Hugo Chavez's assassination would please them more. But this is "In These Times," a publication that--unlike the Christian Science Monitor, for instance--is not fake leftist in service to corpo/fascism. Nor does it have that metallic taste, that true leftist publications sometimes get--Counterpoint comes to mind--of such relentless negativism, with no solutions suggested, that you simply get tired reading it, and end up feeling hopeless, powerless and doomed. ITT is more in the vein of the Catholic Agitator (out of Los Angeles): There are solutions but you may not like them ("Give everything you own to the poor and come follow me!"). ITT is non-profit, and was founded in the 1970s by the likes of Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. But its highest recommendation is this: “If it weren’t for In These Times, I’d be a man without a country.” —Kurt Vonnegut. I mean, if you can't trust Kurt Vonnegut, who can you trust? (ITT's "About" page: http://www.inthesetimes.com/about / ) The article is written by Daniel Denvir, "a freelance journalist who recently moved from Quito to Philadelphia. He is writing a book on poor people’s environmentalism in Ecuador." He has no other credits at the ITT author credit page. Far be it from me to dis an unknown writer, but he has no creds and I have no idea who he is or where he's coming from. The only thing to recommend him is that ITT is publishing him. However, I will say this: I have certainly heard of this indigenous criticism of Rafael Correa before. It is not coming out of nowhere. And if it's true that, a) Correa dismissed these indigenous protesters so contemptuously, and b) he is going for big corporate mining, instead of small scale, highly regulated mining (or no mining in sensitive areas)--then it is, at the least, questionable, and probably reprehensible. Dismissing poor, indigenous protesters as "nobodies" and "extremists" could be described as tantamount to giving them a death sentence. If the leftist government considers them to be inconsequential, how are mining interests going to regard them? Denvir reports that, "One leader in the Amazon was briefly disappeared only to show up in a hospital in the Amazonian city of Macas with a gunshot wound to the head. Police officers were also injured in attempting to clear blockades." However--caveat--Denvir does not say anything more about this. He doesn't quote the family or friends of the shot man, nor give any hint of what locals believe happened to him. Could be a private dispute. We don't really know. The article is broadstroke in this way. It is not good reporting. Ecuador's Amazon has taken a truly severe hit of pollution by Chevron-Texaco--in what has been described as the "Rainforest Chernobyl," a spill of oil and toxic sludge far worse than the Exxon-Valdez. That horror certainly spurs the indigenous to try to prevent such a thing ever happening again. Denvir mentions this, but it is not the full context. The full context is regional, and, indeed, global, involves other sectors and interests besides the indigenous tribes, and is a very, very, very, very difficult problem, which can be summed up this way: vast poverty. Great leftist leaders like Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia--leaders who have had Bushwhack bull's eye targets on their backs from the day they were elected--are in one hell of a bind, to solve the chief problem they were elected to solve--vast poverty--while trying to do so sustainably, as to the environment, and fairly, as to all sectors (for instance, the displaced urban poor, with no jobs), and trying to stay alive, and protect and promote democracy, at the same time. Denvir does give Correa's side of it: "In his Jan. 24 weekly radio address just days after major protests, Correa pledged to press on with large-scale mining. 'It is absurd that some want to force us to remain like beggars sitting atop a bag of gold,' he said." So there you are. And "beggars" is not a metaphor in Ecuador or most anywhere in South America. Correa is literally speaking for the "beggars"--thousands, millions of human beings, whom he is expected to provide for--directly, in some cases (those who are extremely poor and lack very basic necessities), or indirectly, by opening up opportunities for employment and the achievement of decent, prosperous, happy lives, in a decent society. It is no small problem. It is nearly insoluble. It is especially difficult with global warming and the corporate predators' ravaging of planet earth. It is just not possible, any more, for most of the human race to live like indigenous tribes, on tiny, traditional, organic farms, in harmony with nature. Possibly we will be forced to, if our planet's biosphere begins to seriously unravel. Indicators are that "begin" is not the right word. "End" is what is happening. The planet's biosphere is approaching the end. We humans, in our industrial frenzy of the last hundred years--abetted by corporate greed--are well on our way to destroying our only home. So maybe this conflict will soon be moot--in a few decades not centuries. The urban rich and the masses of displaced urban poor will simply die, and all that will be left are tiny sustainably living indigenous tribes in remote corners of the globe that still have viable soils and some kind of ecosystem. This puts the people who rise to the top positions in our best political structure--democracy--the governmental system which provides the best chance for indigenous wisdom and environmental caution to prevail--into a tragic position. Well, maybe tragic. Certainly extremely difficult. Rafael Correa has a 70% approval rating in Ecuador. The other leftist leaders have similar, very high approval ratings. And they have been elected in systems that are far, far more transparent and honest than our own. So they truly represent most people--including most of the indigenous, who have rallied to their cause, as to political support and voting. The 30% who don't approve of them are mostly rightwing assholes, who would do far worse to the environment, with no chance whatever of decent wages and working conditions or environmental regulation and cleanup. This was part of the problem with the Chevron-Texaco spill--a rightwing government let them get away with horrendous practices--and all of the profit went elsewhere. Correa will certainly not let that happen. A good percentage of the profit from mining will stay in Ecuador and be used for social programs. And very likely--given the Constitution that Correa helped write and get passed by the voters (around 60%), which enshrines Mother Nature's (Pachamama's) independent right to exist and to function properly--Correa will insist on environmental regulation and cleanup, and labor protections. He won't make a bad deal for Ecuador and its portion of the Amazon. But what these indigenous are saying is that should be no deal--for corporate-scale mining. Without Correa, and the leftist tide in Ecuador and South America--with leftist leaders like Correa, Chavez, Morales, the Kirchners in Argentina, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Lula da Silva in Brazil, having each others backs and creating region-wide protection for democracy, against all of the Bushwhack plots of the last eight years, and on-going corporate looting and warfare--there would be no hope of even decent, basic environmental regulation in Ecuador, and workers would be mere slave labor to the multinationals. So there you are, again. That is the dilemma. I remember reading of CONAIE's objections to Correa when he first ran for president in 2006, and their reluctant decision to back him, because the alternative was the richest man in Ecuador, a rightwing banana magnate (the kind of rightwing politician who conspired with the Bushwhacks on plots to stage fascist coups). Now CONAIE is considering running a candidate against Correa in the April elections (according to Denvir). They won't win, of course--but it might help get more attention for their very important issues. But if it were to result in the election of a rightwinger, that would be terrible. Here, we have the fear of Nader-spoilers--a fake fear in a non-transparent election system, with the Supreme Court or Diebold crowning the emperor. But in Ecuador--and other true voting systems--it is a genuine fear that such a division on the left will bring disaster--to labor, to the environment, to the indigenous, to everybody. Is there some system of government, that we haven't thought of yet, that would insure the survival of planet earth and the human race--and still be progressive, humane and fair? We better get on it then.
would be very good for the country, regardless of whether or not the Obama administration pursues prosecution. A thorough investigation, with as much publicity as possible, is one of the few ways--besides getting rid of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--that we, the people, can help to insure that the Bushwhacks' massive crime spree doesn't occur again. While our own party wimped out on impeaching Reagan for his illegal war on Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra hearings in Congress did help curtail illegal, presidential war for a period of time, as well as helping to end U.S. complicity in a number of "dirty wars" in Latin America.
I'm all for investigation, openness, information to the people about what their government has done, a voice for the victims, and warning to our political leaders that they will at least risk exposure when they commit crimes. It is something of a deterrent, and a step toward justice.
The issue of prosecution is separate. The investigation can do as much as possible to identify crimes and perps--and can also aid potential prosecutors by being careful on matters such as immunity, the preservation of evidence, etc. But Congress has no executive power to prosecute, except as an impeachment body for current members of the other two branches of government (and for its own members). Impeachment can mean removal from office, not jail (unless the impeached official is pursued by the executive branch for crimes that are exposed in the impeachment process). So that issue is moot, as far as Bushwhack officials are involved. (It could conceivably be relevant to Bushwhack plants in different agencies, or to held-over appointments, such as that of Asst Sec of State for the Western Hemisphere Thomas Shannon, whom I think may be entangled in some very dirty Bushwhack business in South America.)
The apparent immunity that has been given to George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other principles of the Bushwhack crime spree, by someone, or some group, we know not whom, is not a matter that Senator Whitehouse or Congressman Conyers can address, obviously. (Obvious to me, anyway.) It's too big. It is outside of their sphere of power. And (I think) they would have no power--they wouldn't even be in office--if they were too defiant toward whoever is really pulling the strings. I frankly think that there was a counter-coup, within our government, to get Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld out, and probably to prevent their nuking of Iran. I think the timeframe is circa late 2006. And this is where Pelosi's strange announcement that "impeachment is off the table" came from--this counter-coup action. (Off what table, Nancy?!)
This is actually a more serious matter--or rather a deeper, more fundamental matter, as to our democracy and its long term prospects. Who is running this country? Who is responsible for Bush running around freely, off to Europe now to give $150,000 a pop speeches. (Gotta laugh at that--didn't Reagan get $2 million a pop?) Who is behind Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and others getting off scott free--and, no little matter, with plenty of wherewithal (billions of our tax dollars and other money bilked from us and others; private armies created at our expense, etc.) to cause further trouble here and abroad?
I think the key is somehow Leon Panetta. And I have to laugh at people thinking he is a civilian. No way, friends. (Did you notice, when DiFi opened her mouth and criticized that appointment because of his "inexperience," how quickly she shut up, and how quickly that issue just went away? Pay attention, folks.) It may be a 'white hat' group within our secret government--likely working with Daddy Bush whose motive was to save Jr.--who got Bush/Cheney to agree to leave peacefully when the time came, and who engineered Rumfeld's ouster, and who spared the world from nuclear war in the Middle East--and thus preserved the remnants of our democracy that we see now, but this was not a pro-democracy action. It was more in the vein of preserving the status quo.
The origins of our situation go way back to 1963 and the CIA assassination of a sitting president, JFK, for his backchannels to Krushchev and Castro, and intention to END the "Cold War," and all of the CIA's proxy wars with the Soviet Union, way back then.* Also, their probable assassinations of RFK and MLK for similar reasons. To untangle where we are now, we have to start with then--with the reasons for those assassinations, covered up all these years. We have not really been a democracy since that time. In the war between JFK--who vowed, after the CIA's "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba, to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces"--the CIA won, and it was JFK's skull that was smashed into a thousand pieces. The civilian government lost. And we have been ruled by this secret government ever since.
Clearly, there has been a war within this secret government. Some of the visible aspects of it were items like the outing of Valerie Plame and the CIA's counter-proliferation network (the Brewster-Jennings network), and Rumsfeld's creation of the "Office of Special Plans"--a separate intelligence shop within the Pentagon, to circumvent the professionals at the CIA who opposed the war on Iraq (and perhaps opposed other Rumsfeld methods and projects).
We need to deal with this--or not deal with it, settle for the illusion of democracy. It is a lot to deal with. It is not an easy thing to face. And probably we won't deal with it, as a people. It will all simply disappear beneath the surface of things once again, and we will limp along in our Roman Empire decline, to our Roman Empire fall. Do we want a democracy? Or are we willing to settle for 'white hat' groups 'fixing things' for us, temporarily, and certainly not in our financial interest?
Democracy is a great idea, you know--one of the greatest ideas in human history--that, by equality and equal opportunity, and free speech and all the rest--the best wisdom, the best leaders, and the best ideas for the common good rise to the top. But if democracy is distorted--say, as it was with slavery then segregation--it doesn't work as well. All the talent and ideas of a class of people are excluded from the pool of available wisdom. And if democracy is distorted even more--as it is now--with a very top-heavy albatross of the super-rich and multinational corporate CEOs blockading openness and preventing masses of people (workers, the poor) from truly participating in government, and cement their power by secret means (our secret government, now reinforced with private, rightwing corporate 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines), then you end up with a leader like Barack Obama, who, talented, intelligent and well-intentioned though he is, cannot really serve the common good very well, neither by prosecuting the Bushwhacks for their many and dreadful crimes, nor by wielding the "big stick" that is so desperately needed to whack our corporate rulers upside the head--dismantle their corporate monstrosities, shut down their goddamn stock market, insurance scams and all the rest, defend our manufacturing capability, tax them through the nose, and so on.
We need a leader who says, with FDR, "Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred!" And we don't have it, because no such leader could survive the vetting of our secret government, which serves the rich and the multinationals.
I tend to think that the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines are the key to peeling back the power of the people and entities who are really running things. It is not the whole problem, but it is an essential first step. I do think Obama was actually elected--don't know for sure, our voting system is so non-transparent, but it's probably true. And I'm also pretty sure that his mandate was significantly and fraudulently shaved, to curtail serious reform. And my guess is that about half of Congress, including some "Blue Dogs," were not elected--they were Diebolded into power. Money is also, of course, a big factor--it excludes the poor and even the middle class, and even the upper middle class, from running for office, without becoming beholden to "organized money" from the get-go. So, the best thing we could do to support more serious reform--if that is Obama's intent (or, like FDR, becomes his intent, after he takes a good look at things)--is to insure that we can re-elect him. Right now, we can't. The voting system is out of public control. It is nearly 100% non-transparent and privately run.
In sum, if you want Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and that lot of criminals in jail...
THROW DIEBOLD & ALL 'TRADE SECRET' CODE VOTING MACHINES INTO 'BOSTON HARBOR' NOW!
Essential first step.
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*(Recommended essential reading: James Douglass' new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.")
"terra" alerts. (Too bad it wasn't global warming they were so alert about.) You know, now that I think back, it was Homeland Security's series of ridiculous "terra" alerts right before the 2004 election that first put my antennae up about that stolen election. It was just so...silly. And I didn't think--and don't think--that the American people are silly. I didn't know much about the voting system that had been fast-tracked all over the country, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY CODE, owned and controlled by private, rightwing, Bushwhack corporations. I knew this and that, and was somewhat worried about it, but had no idea how bad and how hackable it was. For my husband, his "moment" came way before me, in May of that year, when all the torture stuff started coming out. He said, of Bush-Cheney at that time," They act like they don't care; they're not worried; it doesn't matter to them." I just figured that that was how they act--they're jerks. But he smelled something, and said they were going to steal the election; the mechanics of it are all in place, such that they don't have to worry about a thing.
I could see what he was saying, but still held out hope--until Sept-Oct, after Kerry won the debates, hands down. (Bush was ridiculous--he could barely put two sentences together with a prompter in his ear.) And the "terra" alerts began, and quickly became the laughingstock of the country. People joked about them at work, and to total strangers on trains and buses. Comics had a field day. I think the spirit of the American people finally started to come back from the undead over those jokes. Then, of course, they tried utterly crush it out forevermore, with Stolen Election II. But it occurred to me, somewhere in there, that it was kind of like the Marx Brother's movie about "Freedonia"--the absurd little monarchy that Groucho becomes king of (--or something--it's been a while). A fake thing. A fraud. A joke. The "terra" alerts were a joke. Three years after 9/11--that awful moment--the whole thing had been reduced to a Marx Brothers' movie. And the American people were not, are not, and never were a people who lack common sense. Their common sense and their will had to be overridden.
Of course, it was a lot else--the awful, bloody oil war, torturing prisoners, the huge deficit, tax cuts for the rich, lying, coverups, lost billions, outing CIA agents, the fake issues (gay marriage, illegal immigrants), the false narratives, as well the fakery of the "war on terra." The "orange" alerts were just the capper. This is what prepared me for the night of 11/2/04. It took me 20 minutes, round about 8 o'clock. My spirit re-arose immediately, then. I knew they had stolen it. Next I found DU and began helping others figure it how they'd done it, in the famous 2004 Election Forum.
A joke of a country, with a wooden-headed puppet as President, dressed up in a military codpiece. Freedonia.
that ban corporate 'news' monopolies.
But be of good cheer. Hugo Chavez and every other successful leftist leader in South American are doing quite well despite barrages of putrid chemical toxins, called 'journalism,' such as we have never heard/seen here, 24/7, on about 70% of the public airwaves and in over 50% of the newsprint. Chavez enjoys a 70% approval rating. His closest allies, Evo Morales (Bolivia) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador) also have stratospheric approval ratings; so, too, one of their closest center-left allies, Lula da Silva (Brazil). Their newest compadre, Fernando Lugo--the first leftist ever elected in Paraguay--had an approval rating of over 90% in his first month in office. I don't know what it is now (about 6 months into his first term), but I'm sure it's still high.
How do South Americans do it--elect such popular leaders, despite pervasive, corossive, fascist press?
The main key is TRANSPARENT ELECTIONS--which South Americans have been working hard on for over a decade. We have to realize that, despite Obama's election, and some improvement in Congress, the private, rightwing corporations who control the 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code in all our voting machines, have the capability--the easy capability--of tossing Obama out of the White House in 2012, and taking back Congress and making it into a rubber stamp for Hitler II. That is the reality. I don't know that they will be able to pull it off. But that is what they can do, with our voting system the way it is.
In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and most of South America, now, the leaders know that the people can re-elect them--they have honest aboveboard elections--and so the leaders are beholden, first of all, to the people. Here, I think Obama did win--or rather, was permitted to win--but they significantly and fraudulently shaved his mandate, to prevent any fundamental reform. Among other constraints--the corpo/fascist media included--this is a good part of why Obama is the way he is, has made the appointments he's made, and hasn't proposed the profound, structural, anti-corporate and anti-war profiteer reforms that are so desperately needed. The corpo/fascists who control the voting machines can toss him out. They are who he is beholden to, not us. I do think he cares about the rest of us--what a change from Bush!--but his hands are tied in many ways, and this is simply not the case in the real democracies that are emerging in South (and also Central) America.
The second main key is grass roots organization--and on this, a lot of Latin American activists have it over us, in community relationships which make organizing easier. There are a lot things that make the U.S. different--our many fractured communities, the size of our country, our humongous war budget. We can overcome the organizing problems, and I think we are doing so, with the internet. But the other differences make us a unique target population for control by multinational corporations--corporations with no loyalty to any people or country.
I mainly just wanted to point out how they did it in South America--despite horrendous corporate media. And that shrieking, unrelenting, fascist media is still going strong. So while the media is most certainly a problem here, I would say it's problem no. 2. Our first priority must be to get back public control of vote counting. With the power to elect--and, critically, to re-elect--good leaders, we can begin to deal with media as we have in the past--with regulation aimed at busting monopolies, and at fostering public service and fair public debate.
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last 24 hours. What are the Traitorgate cover-ups covering up?
The reason Fitzgerald hasn't indicted anyone on the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outingS--though he has a number of the outers by the short hairs--Cheney, Libby, Rove, Armitage, Novak--COULD be that he is either suspicious of the story (political revenge) or already knows that it is a cover story. And that points to Rumsfeld, in my book. Office of Special Plans. Look at this way: This conspiracy--if it was, indeed, a conspiracy to plant the nukes in Iraq after the invasion--would have two tracks, political and operational. Cheney in the charge of the political end. Rumsfeld in charge of the operational end. Cheney segues the forged docs into a full-scale allegation against Iraq on nukes, and insures that it gets into Bush's SOTU speech (against advice from several agencies). He continues to adamantly defend that charge no matter how often it is totally and completely debunked. Why doesn't he temper it--show a bit of caution (considering the evidence)? Nope. It has got to be THAT charge--over and over. In addition, the whole Junta goes into summer '03 still maintaining that WMDs will be found (--although many will soon switch to "Iraqi freedom" as motive for the war). It's all set up for the phony "find"--and a triumphant Bush-Blair announcement that will smother all criticism, and all talk of "sexed up" prewar intel, and will cement their political positions with their FIRST and foremost justification for the war: WMDs. Rumsfeld (if this theory is true) has meanwhile got several black ops teams (possibly connected to the notorious Iran/Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was present at the Rome meeting of Pentagon Neo-Cons and SISMI in late 2001, where many suspect the Niger forgeries were cooked up) moving nukes illicitly into (or on their way to) Iraq. He's got NYT WMD propagandist Judith Miller "embedded" with the U.S. troops who were "hunting" for WMDs (and, according to reports, actually directing, or trying to direct, their efforts), ready to get the "big scoop" of a WMD "find." (She said she had an "embed" contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld. Whether it's true or not, why would she claim it? It's like saying: "...but they TOLD me there WOULD BE a story"! She had Rumsfeld's word--or the word of someone speaking for him.) And Rumsfeld furthermore permitted the creation of chaos in Iraq--in his failure to stop the looting and the breakdown of all order (in fact laughing at). Civil chaos was a prime condition for planting WMDs in Iraq and then "finding" them. It was also a prime condition for setting up a puppet government to sign the oil contracts, giving away Iraqis' interest in their only resource (--and for massive looting by corps like Halliburton). Anyway, that's how it would be: Cheney covering the political front--and scrambling to cover up the "incompetence of others" (as he put it in his memo on not wanting Libby to be the fall guy) when the shit started hitting the fan. No WMDs. Nuke allegation based on forgeries. Wilson calling them out on the false allegation. And David Kelly, in England, whistleblowing to the BBC about the "sexed up" prewar intel. It would have been RUMSFELD's responsibility to get those WMDs planted and "discovered." What we are seeing may be the political fallout of his failure to do so. (We are also seeing him gone--with no change in Iraq War policy. Was it the midterm elections? Or was it that he was operational head of this attempted massive deceit--a phony "find" of weapons--which Cheney in now having to cover for--politically and legally?) Back in early July 2003, Kelly, under interrogation at a "safe house" --after he had been outed to his bosses (late June 2003)--revealed that he knew something MORE (--Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things," is how it was reported to Tony Blair on July 7, 2003 (Hutton report))-- but he promised not to speak of it publicly ("I wasn't about to give away any government secrets" is how Kelly put it). I suspect that THIS was the trigger for the Plame/B-J outingS. Not Wilson's article of July 6, but rather the report to Blair on July 7 that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things." (He was already whistleblowing, so it wasn't something that he HAD said--i.e., the "sexed up" the prewar intel--it was something that he COULD say. What ELSE did he know?) He had friends in Iraq--from his visits there as UN weapons inspector. He had told them that if they cooperate with the UN inspections, there would be no invasion. (And he then told a friend that if there WAS an invasion, he would be "found dead in the woods"--a truly haunting prefiguration.) IF there was a scheme to plant the weapons, he was in a good position to hear about it (--and my distant judgment of his character--excellent scientist, true believer in his mission of stopping WMD proliferation--is that he would have been offended by it; this could even have been the trigger for his own whistleblowing--it pissed him off that such deception was attempted or planned.) IF the WMD-planting theory is true, the Blairites discovery that Kelly knew about this nefarious scheme would have put tremendous pressure on the Bushites (and the Blairites), because it would appear to them that the plot was in imminent danger of being exposed--whether it was or not. How far had it gone? Who all knew? There were a couple of reports in the Islamic press about botched US efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq (--and what happened to THOSE people (local observers)--Abu Ghraib?). Was the CIA itself about to expose them (contrary to their tradition of secrecy)? But mainly, WHO ELSE knew? If the Brits couldn't keep a lid on it, how many people, from how many directions, could come at them, with facts and evidence about this audacious effort to deceive? So, in their panic, they outed EVERYBODY--the entire network of deep cover foreign agents and contacts, built up over the years, of friends of the US and friends of humanity, whose job it was to keep us all safe from illicit traffic in weapons of mass destruction. The multiple-outing was because they DIDN'T KNOW--who had foiled them, and who knew. Their purpose: 1) to punish and disable anybody who had foiled their scheme (including getting them killed by their own governments or by other bad actors); or (if they were still trying to plant the nukes or other WMDs, in July 2003) to destroy the network of WMD detectors and foilers that was slowing things up. By fall 2003, with the CIA enraged at the assault on its own agents, and calling for an investigation, they had to give it up--and switch to "Iraqi freedom" as the motive for the war (which is just about the time that that "talking point" was brought forward). Someone upthread asked, why did they kill Kelly, and not Wilson and Plame? I imagine that Wilson and Plame have lived with that fear. But the critical difference between Plame and Kelly may be that Plame, as a NOC and a high-placed CIA operative, is sworn to a lifetime of keeping government secrets, and Kelly was not. He was a scientist on loan to different agencies (including the UN weapons inspection team). He was not a spy (that we know of). He was already whistleblowing. He was "off the reservation," and could not be trusted, when he promised, under interrogation, not to disclose "government secrets." Also, she has the protection of the CIA--which, if it kills its own, likes to make that decision itself, I would imagine. And Kelly did not have any such protection. The Blair government and British intel agencies cut him loose. They outed him to the press, and sent him home without protection and apparently without surveillance. And if he WAS under surveillance, they let him bleed to death all night under a tree near his house. (--doesn't add up--none of it adds up). As for Wilson, he, a) comes under CIA protection as the husband of a NOC, I would imagine, and b) sought the protection of widespread publicity for his dissent. Kelly, too, was the subject of a blazing public controversy in England--one caused by his government's deliberate outing of him to the press. He did not seek publicity. In fact, he backed down somewhat under the kleig lights. It may have been his fatal mistake, allowing the "many dark actors playing games"* around him to spin a web of deceit around his assassination. If he had stuck to his allegation 100% (re: the "sexed up" prewar intel--which turned out, of course, to be 100% true), and had not tried to backpedal a bit, and get himself out of the way of the Blairites' pointed guns, his murder might have been significantly more difficult to cover up, and the plan to kill him abandoned. It also may be a measure of the how dangerous he was to the Bushites/Blairites that they had him killed in the midst of the publicity. One more thought: Kelly's murder may have saved the Wilson's. Three WMD-related murders in one week was too much to cover up. ---------- *(On the day he died, Kelly wrote an email to none other than Judith Miller--an old colleague of his--in which he expressed concern about the "many dark actors playing games." She had emailed him, stating that a "fan" of his had told her that he did well in the hearing that week (note: by all accounts, except this one, he did NOT do well--he was severely stressed during the parliamentary hearing at which he backpedaled on his whistleblowing accusations). He wrote back to her that he would know more by the end of the week, and that there were "many dark actors playing games." He added "thank you for your friendship and support at this time." I've recently begun to wonder if that was an ironical tag. Did he suspect her of being one of the "dark actors"? Of how he got outed to his bosses? His emails to other friends of his that day were upbeat and forward-looking--about his daughter's upcoming wedding, and plans to return to Iraq. He may have been worried about "dark actors," but he was not suicidal. He thought the storm had blown over.) (Note: Miller had used him as a major quoted source in her book "Germs" about bioweapons, published just after 9/11.) *(Notably, Miller has refused to disclose the OTHER topics of conversation between her and Libby (besides Wilson/Plame and the NIE). Fitzgerald had to agree to this, to get her testimony against Libby on his perjury/obstruction. A week after her first conversation with Libby (mid-June) about Wilson/Plame and the NIE, Kelly was outed to his bosses (as the BBC whistleblower)--initiating the train of events that led to his death several weeks later (three days after Plame was outed). And the other thing that Miller has been secretive about is the "dark actors" email itself. She wrote the NYT news obit on Kelly's death, and did not disclose this email, or her close connection to the subject of the article. It was his family who later disclosed the email.) --------- So--does Fitzgerald suspect or know that there is something much worse behind the Plame/B-J outingS, beyond Cheney and the political coverup, that has caused him to grant immunity to the actual outers (political operatives), and to be digging deeper into this onion, in his stated purpose of understanding WHY these outings occurred? And is it this--that the Niger forgeries were just Part 1 of a yet more nefarious scheme to plant the weapons--a scheme hatched out of the Pentagon, by Donald Rumsfeld, that Cheney is now covering up? Dunno. And Rumsfeld name hasn't come up at all, so far, in this case (that I know of). Fitzgerald appears to be building a conspiracy case against Cheney. But when you add up all the people whom Fitzgerald has NOT indicted--and the lack of indictments on the outing crime itself (despite a lot of evidence against certain people, just in the available info)--you have to wonder if he isn't trying to go deeper. The non-indictments (so far) could be part of the strategy of nailing Cheney for conspiracy. But the WHY of that conspiracy is still not known, except on a superficial level (effort to silence dissent--political motive). -------------------------------------- Originally posted by Peace Patriot in General Discussion Thu Feb 08th 2007, 01:52 PM Comment #150 at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... Visitor Tools
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