Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.
To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.
We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.
For the last couple of days the Al Jazeera live stream and Livestation have been overloaded with traffic and at least from my end virtually impossible to watch. I found this morning that the Dailymotion Al Jazerera feed is working fine so that may be an option if you’re having problems.
I don’t know the words to use but the Egyptian protests are exciting to put it mildly. The question remains will this be a revolution where the will of the masses prevail or end up as just a continuation of the U.S. and Israel’s desire to divide the middle east and northern Africa into more easily manageable parts.
My feelings on this are best summed up from an anonymous comment at aangirfan:
“We should be skeptical. There might be two revolutions here. One merely a consolidation of power, and the second genuine. People around the world want to throw off their corrupt governments. I know I do. Our government no longer pretends to operate Constitutionally or uphold the law for all. Yet politics around the world keep providing these fake change moments – like our last election. It let’s off just enough steam to appease, or confuse, the people so that no real change comes about.”
One important thing to remember is that no matter how the U.S. administration, the CIA and other intelligence services are working to influence the ultimate outcome in Egypt, they are not omnipotent. They have money and power and allies but they are only human. The outcome of their agenda is in doubt. The people can have the power if they can just learn how to use it and see through the lies they are being fed. It requires taking chances.
Hillary Clinton seems to now be the mouthpiece of U.S. policy but has been speaking out of both sides of her mouth. Democracy is an Orwellian term when it comes from her globalist zio puppet tongue. As much as she tries to hide it, she is worried that the house of glass is going to break.
Hats off to the real Egyptians. Americans may one day take this page in history and learn from it.
If you think about it, there’s not a government in the world that doesn’t need a good dose of protest. Not a damn one of them care a bit about the common people, except when it suits their purposes and then it’s only for show. The actions of government need to be questioned and yelled at in the streets. The more involved the better, but only if it’s real.
It’s seems that outside money and it’s influence may be in play in Iran to feed the flames. Xymphora, Scott Crighton, WRH and many others share opinions on the details. Paul Craig Roberts give us a good overview here and here.
There should be a pent up tension in the youth of all countries and a spontaneous outcry against what and who is trying to control them. There’s no excuse for not taking to the streets but plenty of ‘reasons’ for not doing so.
Sitting in front of a computer screen, voting for the designated winner/loser and accepting the status quo is not going to get it. Change will not come through sanctioned political activity. It comes through physical action. Feet in the street. Non-violent if not met with violence.
But that’s the problem. Protest is ‘illegal’ in most circumstances according to those who are in control. Too many people are saying “There’s nothing we can do.” Our own government has said that protest is ‘low level terrorism.’
“Step inside your 1st amendment ‘free speech zone’ and be happy that we allow that.“
Remember Kent State. That’s where Americans killed their own to set an example. There are always some who will obey orders, make mistakes or take the money to do it.
The Iranian militia is being blamed for bloodshed. That’s analogous to the US using Blackwater or others of that ilk to keep the folks in line. The well paid will do things that maybe the lower end of the pay scale military would not. Are there enough constitutional ‘Oath Keepers’ out there?
There’s some differences and similarities between the late 60’s/early 70’s and 2009. There were government paid provocateurs, think Hoffman, Ayers, Rubin etc., but the draft in the Vietnam War really pissed a lot of people off. Forceably sending the unwilling into a war to possibly die for lies didn’t set well with the youth who wanted to live a full life.
Now with the ‘volunteer’ military, dumbed down educational system, media manipulations and ‘revised’ history, the ranks of the pissed off are diminished. Strength in numbers is what the controllers fear most. So they use fear, economic uncertainty, conformity, divide and conquer and the vast resources of stolen money for whatever immediate purposes suits their fancy to keep us in line and out of the streets.
Can we take back our country? Can revolution anywhere succeed? And what would we do with it if we did take down the established order? Can honesty overcome the tendency towards greed?
First, let me assure you that I am not advocating revolution. In fact, I am a strong anti-violence advocate. However, that does not mean I cannot urge you to shoot back when the time comes.
I think a true violent revolution in America now is inevitable. The dominos already are falling and the inexorable result lies directly ahead.
What We Can Do
Nothing.
Elections are useless in America to effect local, state or national change, as now proven. If you must vote, vote against all incumbents, right down the line … including Dr. Paul (if he didn’t have that congressional slot to which to return, he might have proven more adventurous). The international cake already is in the oven and will explode no matter what we do. The dollar is doomed and there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do about it.
As I said at the outset: We’re screwed.
Violence? Much as I would love to say, “Go get ’em and bring me their heads on pikes,” truly there is only one answer that I can give: Absolutely not. Anything else, of course, would get me arrested. Besides, it still is too early. Violent and/or illegal acts done now simply would serve to delay the time when the average American will be willing to throw his or her lot in with ours.
Notice that I assume you already are on the same page as I, since I doubt that hardly anybody not already there, other than our enemies, of course, will be reading these words.
I am paranoid about police-state action, financial devastation, infrastructure breakdown, nuclear strikes, nuclear fallout, racial strife, earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves and hurricanes, not necessarily in that order. That is why I live in North Idaho, one of the very few areas in America likely to be free from (the initial effects, at least, of) nuclear fallout, in the country with a well and a little acreage on which we grow livestock and could grow modest crops.
Next, arm yourself well, with plenty of reserves of ammunition, to protect yourself and your family. Bury some of your guns as gun confiscation is coming.
Next, put up substantial stores of basic foodstuffs, enough to get your family by for a year, ideally. Plant a garden. It will take at least two growing seasons for you to overcome your major misconceptions and mistakes and begin to produce real food for your family. Farmers will tell you that it takes ten years just to get past most of the mistakes.
Finally, protect yourself financially, if you are fortunate enough to have any money left over from the real priority items. Get out of all dollar-denominated assets and into something designed to weather the coming financial storm (which already is in progress). Check my archives for articles aplenty on this topic.
Cultivate like-minded friends, but avoid those who advocate violence or who might seem a bubble or two off center. Don’t worry about federal agents. They are everywhere. Live your life right out in the open, keep your head down and do nothing illegal and you likely will avoid their wrath, if not their pettiness.
Our day will come, rest assured. All too soon. The day they start shooting us down in the streets. The day we start shooting back.
Then will be the time to retake America. Then will be the time to even scores and settle accounts. Then we begin the long journey back toward freedom and a constitutional republic.
Pointless expenditures on space exploration or construction of monuments to the vanity of the ruling class would actually make more sense than the Regime’s present course, which is to ruin the currency in a doomed effort to save a failing and terminally insolvent banking system.
When budgets and annual deficits go hyperbolic, hyperinflation is sure to follow. But the cruelly amusing fact is that neither Obama nor the gallery of trained seals called Congress is in charge of the public purse.
Sure, Obama can propose a budget and Congress can ratify it on a party-line vote, but the real economic power now resides with the Commissar for Official Counterfeiting, Ben Bernanke, and the Commissar for Fiscal Fraud, Tim Geithner.
Obama is seeking to salve the electorate’s economic wounds with oleaginous words about hope, change, and determination. Meanwhile, Geithner — as pure a product of the bankster elite as ever drew an undeserved breath — is “finishing touches on a plan that will dump $1 trillion of toxic assets on the US taxpayer,” warns Mike Whitney of CounterPunch. “The plan, which goes by the opaque moniker [of] the `Public-Private Investment Fund’ (PPIF), is designed to provide lavish incentives to hedge funds and private equity funds to purchase bad assets from failing banks. It is a sweetheart deal that that provides government financing and guarantees for illiquid mortgage-backed junk for which there is no active market.”
There is other mischief afoot behind the obscuring barricade of official acronyms.
No, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, either: A visibly stressed Tim Geithner (right foreground) testifies before Congress.
What Obama apparently meant by “Day of Reckoning,” however, was something along these lines: “My squanderlust predecessor somehow neglected to destroy every pocket of prosperity and productivity left in this economy — so I reckon it’s up to me to finish that job.”
When the actual Day of Reckoning arrives, one of three scenarios will play out:
*Sanity will seize our population and our chastened political class will restore the foundations of the pre-1913 (or, better yet, pre-1861) political system.
Yeah, I don’t think so either, but it is a possibility.
*The productive elements of the population will divorce themselves from the parasitical ruling class and its client constituencies, eventually creating some kind of loose confederation. While the parasites won’t surrender their host without a violent struggle, this is probably the best we can hope for.
*We’ll see the Regime continue to inflate, spend, and regiment the population until we achieve the ne plus ultra of Keynesian economics: The government will achieve full employment by forcing all of us to build immense pyramids out of its useless, unwanted fiat currency. more
Wall Street loses trillions of dollars, mostly from elderly stockholders and pension funds and no one seems to know where all that loot disappeared to?
Where has all of that money in those 401K accounts and pension funds got off to?
Welcome to IDC Herzliya held each year in Israel. “The Herzliya Conference is Israel‘s primary global policy annual gathering, drawing together Israeli and international participants from the highest levels of government, business, and academia to address pressing national, regional and world strategic issues.”
Heavy emphasis on business, especially Wall Street banks.
“Sir” Allen and the Stanford Group Another investment fund, the Stanford Group goes “Uh-Oh”, billions of dollars disappear and who’s to blame?
Maybe you should look at the recent Ninth Annual Herzliya Conference held in Israel, February 2-4, 2009 and attended by members of the Stanford Group.
Besides hauling the loot to Israel, Bernie found time to spend some of that money on luxury homes.
Think any of that plunder made it back to the USA and into the pockets of our corrupt Congress?
Or maybe this is the “Clean Break: Securing the Realm” scenario talked about where Israel gets some type of outside money to permanently prop up that racist and apartheid, Jews only state.
A document written by some of the same thugs that lied the US into the Iraq War.
Thugs like, David Wurmser, Doug Feith and Richard Perle.
The Clean Break document here, says that “…[financial] self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.”
20 TRILLION dollars would keep Israel on its war mongering path for decades to come. more
Patrick Martin speaks of our government as bankrupt and how Pentagon spending exacerbates the banker thefts.
For all Obama’s rhetoric about renewing and reviving the economy, the budget figures have a stark meaning: the US government is bankrupt, the US economy moribund. The crash of 2008 marks, not a conjunctural crisis, even of immense magnitude, but a turning point, one that marks the long-term decline of American capitalism and the irreversible loss of its position of world domination.
The White House has ended the Bush administration practice of excluding the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the regular budget, and financing the wars through so-called emergency spending bills passed separately. Obama hailed this action as truth in budgeting, although he will nonetheless request a supplemental appropriation for the two wars, supposedly the last such effort, totaling $75 billion for the current year.
The ten-year projection nonetheless shows total Pentagon spending rising steadily, despite the assumed end to combat operations in Iraq, reaching the staggering total of $872 billion by 2019. Over the entire ten-year period, total US military spending is projected at nearly $8 trillion, a sum greater than the entire GDP of any other country on the planet.
Much publicity has been given to claims that the Obama budget allows Pentagon spending to rise by only 4 percent in 2010, and thereafter 2 percent annually, compared to a 7 percent rate of increase for domestic spending. This is largely a statistical fiction, caused by the assumed decline in spending in Iraq. The baseline Pentagon budget, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, will rise from $557 billion this year to $689 billion in 2012, a 24 percent increase during Obama’s first term in office.
The bloated military budget is likely to swell to even greater proportions. The budget document explicitly declares that the reduction in spending on Iraq and Afghanistan is merely an assumption for the purpose of making estimates, and does not reflect any actual policy decisions to withdraw or redeploy US troops.
In the course of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” total Pentagon outlays rose so sharply that they came to exceed the combined total of all other discretionary government spending (i.e., spending that is not already required by law, such as payments under Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other “entitlement” programs.) The Obama administration budget confirms and extends this supremacy of guns over butter: Pentagon spending will exceed all other discretionary spending in each of the next ten years, and the discrepancy will grow wider year by year.more
We could on and on with examples of the criminal activities of the bankers and government but sooner or later it comes down to what are we going to do. Bow down to the ‘masters’ and take our slavery in stride? Give up our children and grandchildren to being indentured servants with no knowledge of what a little freedom is?
Ed Encho at The Existentialist Cowboy is mad and knows that it’s up to us to do something, or die on the vine.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
-H. L. Mencken
The fascist controllers are in full recognition of the rising tide of anger that is the result of economic despair brought on by a rotted and failed system. I would suggest that any who may have some degree of doubt about the coming reaping of the whirlwind her in Der Homeland only take a look around them for signs. In a couple of recent articles that I personally find relevant, Michael Klare’s A Planet On The Brink and Chris Hedges’ Bad News From America’s Top Spy. The observation that the political unrest that is currently occurring outside our little flag draped cocoon of ignorance and denial will soon be coming to America. An additional reading assignment is this article from The Guardian entitled Summer of Rage.
In layman’s terms, the state is soon going to be weaponized by the very parasites who have sucked the country dry and sold us all out for chump change and are going to make damned sure that the rabble is put down like rabid dogs when the time comes. Now that Posse Comitatus has been rendered irrelevant and the new programs that grew out of the shadow government’s prototype REX 84, Cable Splicer and Garden Plot martial law plans are ready to be implemented. The trap is about to slam shut just at the time that a growing number of the general public is finally starting to get the point that the late, great George Carlin articulated so greatly in his epic rant about who really owns America:
Forget the politicians. They’re irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. They own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls!
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. That’s right.
You know something? They don’t want people who are smart enough sitting around the kitchen table to figure out they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club… and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long, beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.
The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue… these are people of modest means… continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. And nobody seems to care.
That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will remain wilfully ignorant about the big red, white and blue dick that is being shoved up their ass every day. Because the owners know the truth. It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Divide and conquer is the oldest tactic in the book. This strategy is playing out right now as the guardians of the oligarchy use their bought and paid for corporate media pulpits to propagandize and deceive. Notable is FOX News’ involvement in fomenting violence and seeking to splinter and confuse the victims of the grand Ponzi scheme into attacking each other rather than the real cause of their misery. Glenn Greenwald addressed this in his recent piece entitled Fox News “war games” the coming civil war.
In a flaming Fox News extravaganza, bursting at the seams with more than the usual fascist bullshit dime store demagogue Glenn Beck (the former local Tampa Bay hack who used to specialize in staging ‘big eater’ runs prior to being called up to the hatemongering big leagues) spoke of a coming civil war. The GOP Gladio (the reference is to a famous fascist WW II stay behind operation) will be led by get this – “bubba” militias aka the dregs of WASP society out to get some payback against that Commie, Muslim ‘nigger’ in the White House, armed to the teeth and jacked up on a mixture of Jesus juice, horny goat weed and home brewed methamphetamine. The really slick and Rovian shrewdness of this dastardly black propaganda operation is the intent to fragment the growing resistance movement by attempting to peel off the anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, anti-Federal Reserve types that have most recently found a haven in the Ron Paul libertarian camp. The same sort of folks that Herr Beck had previously decried as kooks, dangerous extremists, terrorist sympathizers and anarchists back when the Bushreich was still in power.
FOX’s War Games project has in addition to Beck recruited a veritable rogues gallery of racists, operatives and military industrial complex information warriors like the ‘former’ CIA agent and Osama bin Laden groupie Michael ‘kill ‘em all’ Scheuer, on call Pentagon pimp Tim Strong and a gaggle of other so-called ‘experts’ who wear their fascism on their sleeves. Fox also cannily offers airtime to Congressman Paul along with trends forecasting guru and self proclaimed “political atheist”Gerald Celente (who I happen to be a big fan of) in order to launder their disinfo through a cheesecloth thin guise of semi-legitimacy. Make no mistake though, these people are the modern day heirs to the same fascist traitors who once tried to overthrow Roosevelt by recruiting former Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler to lead a coup d’etat (known as the Business Plot) against the legitimately elected government of the United States. Butler, a loyal American played coy, gathered intel and then ratted those disloyal scum out as the enemies within that they were then and their legacy remains to this day.
Revolutionary Moi
When the shit really doe shit the fan you can count me in with the folks who are smarter than the ones who are duped by the tinpot despots, their drooling demagogues and the ‘bubba’ militias who will be out there targeting libruls as the new Juden. Hell, bring the cocksuckers on, they will get a twelve-gauge enema form me and many others who are not too stupid to be suckered by the rulers of chumpland. Count me in with the people who pumped their fists in the air over Bill Maher’s ‘joke’ about killing two bankers. But as a sworn enemy of tyranny, fascist oppression and the looting bastard parasites that Thomas Jefferson warned of:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
And I might say…why only two?
Were George Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the revolutionary patriots who founded this country in casting off the yoke of slavery of the king and his paper merchants still around there wouldn’t be enough lampposts and trees to hang these fuckers from. Hell, let’s have a full-blown, storm the Bastille French style REVOLUTION!! Eat the rich, roll out the guillotines and let the fun begin. We can even ‘invite’ Glenn Beck, Rick Santelli and the other fascist stooges to help with the testing process. I mean, don’t we want to get the guillotine settings just right in regards to calibrating the blade drop for maximum efficiency before we get to the filthy looters themselves? Shit, why not ‘invite’ ALL of the mouthpieces for the four-flushing bastards who have destroyed this country and now are trying to implement their police state to ‘blow the roof’ while they slither off to Dubai or some other refuge with no extradition treaty? They hanged Julius Steicher at Nuremberg didn’t they? Did he really ever personally kill any Jews or did his propaganda rag Der Stürmer only make him an accomplice to the mass murders? Shit, Charles Manson killed fewer people than George W. Bush and one is on spending his fourth decade on death row while the other is already racking up future appearances on the speaking circuit.
What the fuck?
I will close now with this, I am not exactly sure of where exactly where it came from but I really like it:
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
1: SOAP 2: BALLOT 3: JURY 4: AMMO
Please Use in that order
(editor’s note, be sure to stockpile #4)
This is a revolution call, a call to arms and the scourging of the fascists, the conniving banksters and the oligarchy that has declared war on US, the American people. Heed this call and we can reclaim our legacy as a free people as well as our cherished birthright –
The deep depression that started in America has already triggered violence in many places around the world and is being played out in Europe and elsewhere with increasing violence and other forms of social unrest are spreading around the globe. In Iceland for example the government has already fallen.
The question many are asking is this discontent going to spread around the world as things get even worse?
As things deteriorate around the globe economically Americans are starting to realize what a bad place they are finding themselves in and that Americans for the first time since the great depression are losing jobs at an alarming rate, losing their homes, savings and the way of life they have grown accustom to.
Americans, the very people who the big banks, Wall Street and corporations made their massive fortunes from are now being forced by the United States Government to bail out those same companies. The price tag, that many believe will be in the trillions of dollars and are being given to those same companies in the form of American tax dollars. Those very same companies are being rewarded for failing, yet the American citizen is expected to weather the storm and do all the suffering without any help.
Many predict that there will be rioting in the streets of America too and that may be the reason the U.S. government is building detention camps all over the states and more are expected.
Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced to the House of Representatives a new bill, H.R. 645, calling for the secretary of homeland security to establish no fewer than six national emergency centers for corralling civilians on military installations.
The bill also appears to expand the President’s emergency power, much as the executive order signed by President Bush on May 9, 2007, that gave the President the authority to declare an emergency and take over the direction of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments without even consulting Congress.
One European says Americans are so spoiled and they have had it so good for so many years, they will be the hardest hit as they will struggle to cope. This is going to be a new world for them and they are going to have to learn how to adapt or parish.
Is this America’s future? Does the American government sense chaos and public rebellion?
In his essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” the irrepressible Murray Rothbard wrote: “For the Libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set out on the road to its attainment . . . . [L]et him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism.”
Like most libertarians these days, I’ve been debating pessimism versus optimism. My context is quite a bit different than most, however. In a sense, I have removed myself from ‘the movement’ proper because I think much of it is destructive of the very liberty it claims to champion. For example, activists who pour their energy and money into the political ambitions of Ron Paul; those who believe the problem with government is that the wrong master is at the helm. Another example… those institutes that exist to convert young minds to go on and become a new generation of academics living off the government teat and working within ‘the system’ so seamlessly that I honestly can’t tell most of them from the system itself. What an accomplishment: the creation of more tax consumers who play the academia game well.
The real radicalism, it seems to me, resides in people who are trying to empower individuals (including themselves) e.g. through protecting their rights (to own a gun, to homeschool children, etc.) or by teaching the skills that enable independence. The real radicals are constructing alternatives to working with or in a corrupt system that preys on human dignity and freedom.
What does this have to do with the ‘pessimism versus optimism’ question with which I began? Depending on where you focus, you can land on either side of the debate. God knows, I’ve fence hopped. I finally decided that it doesn’t matter. Pessimism, optimism…it just doesn’t make any difference to how I act and who I am. It would be nice to have an impact on the world but the matter is out of my control. All I control is myself and those things in my immediate sphere. Moreover, my writing and research has never been fundamentally motivated by trying to influence others. I write because ideas interest me; I spent years researching Benjamin Tucker because his approach and literary style ignited my imagination. If I die without influencing anyone, I won’t regret following where my mind led any more than I regret following my heart in matters of romance. Having said this, it would be nice to make an impact on the world…and I suppose this is where the question of pessimism versus optimism arises.
So…the case for pessimism: I cannot see how the currect economic crisis can get anything but much worse. There are at least ponzi schemes poised to cause as much devastation as the mortgage disaster. They are: the American dollar, social security and private pension funds. Arguably, medicare as well. When the economy plunges into a real depression, politics will becomes a deck of wild cards played by the desperate, the fearful and those who wish to profit. Massive government intervention will only deepen and extend the depression, perhaps for years. As average people become enraged, there will tax and other revolts — whether violent or just in the form of widespread non-compliance. The government will respond by cracking down, which is all it knows to do in the face of open defiance. On a non-governmental level, I expect quite a few of the ‘niceties’ of society will break down — e.g. a rise in crime, especially against property.
So…the case for optimism: as bad as things are, they have been worse and liberty has survived. A quotation has haunted me for many years, inspring a feeling of sharp melancholy whenever I think of it. In 1914, Lord Edward Grey said of World War I, “the lights are going out across Europe. We shall not see them again for a long time.” [In some versions, the quote ends “We shall not see them again in our lifetime.”] And, yet, freedom recovered from the convulsing insanity of world war…as it will recover again. I believe this is inevitable because liberty is not an institution but an urge within man, and human nature will not change.
So…the case for opting out of the debate: my optimism rests on matters that are non-political and more within my control; my relationship with those for whom I care, my health, my independence, my farm… As the world goes to hell, these aspects of life are doing well, largely because of my decisions over the last several years; for example, the decision to live frugally and, so, be out of debt. But mostly, I opt out of internally debating “how should I feel?” because I am tired to death of caring deeply about matters over which I have no control. It is a waste of time, a waste of life and it quickly becomes boring. It may be the case that I cannot help caring but I can decide not to dwell upon miserable matters over which I have no influence.
Taking an emotional vacation is not that easy, of course, because the state of the world impacts those for whom I care; they may lose jobs, miss payments, become ill because of how costly it is to maintain health, etc. If so, well, then I’ll deal with whatever comes up whenever it does. I guess I’ve concluded that the best way to make sure liberty recovers this time around is for me to stay healthy, keep writing, stay standing upright and to otherwise go about the business of living. That way, when liberty is ready to return, I’ll be here to embrace and nudge it along.
The losers of November’s election were out hitting the Sunday morning horseshit circuit in force decrying the lack of deference from Obama and the supine twits in Harry Reid’s Senate when it came to honoring the spirit of Reaganism, what’s next, they exhume the old bastard’s rotting corpse and haul it around like some ghoulish sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s? The house still sets the rules too, the media is still bought and paid for, this much is already evident with this beautiful little example: Obama’s use of fear card may backfire. So Obama is now a fear-monger despite not one fucking peep about the eight year reign of terror by the Bush regime during which Americans were conditioned to see swarthy Arab terrorists in every dark corner, under their beds and as a result turned into the world’s largest coward colony courtesy of apocalyptic conjecture about smoking mushroom clouds, manipulation of the infamous threat level matrix for political means and the canonization of Jack Bauer, a man who would rip the testicles off of a toddler with a pair of pliers in front of it’s mother for god and country. Obama is going to have a rough time taking on the consolidated fascist media colossus and the highly paid celebrity whores who pass themselves off as journalists. Operation Mockingbird is alive and well and even more dangerous now that the entire national media is owned by a handful of corporations with interlocking directorates. Now there has been talk about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine which might not be a bad idea in leveling the playing field against the sort of fascists that former Roosevelt Vice President Henry A. Wallace once so accurately pegged:
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
But any reinstatement of such rules in the current era of systemic rot and deterioration would only be selectively enforced to keep out those who question the state and the system itself. You will never see the Fairness Doctrine used to offset Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and any number of other demagogic clones. While this is a popular idea with many liberals it is only going to be eventually turned on them and other alternative media voices including bloggers who dare to question the legitimacy of the oligarchic status quo.
But the media is a huge problem and the onslaught of propaganda pumped out to prevent even a diluted bucket of horse piss of a stimulus package illustrates that any sort of return of the government from its current role of protector of corporate interests and the wealthy will be fought tooth, fang and claw in a destructive battle of attrition that will continue to transform families and friends into warring factions that can be exploited by the same ruthless scum who have rigged the tables so successfully, some could say too successfully.
How this is all going to end up is impossible to tell, the American eugenics project to create the perfect Idiocracy, a reverse master-race has any sort of reformer like Obama facing some seriously nasty odds, just think of the Detroit Lions hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after next year’s Super Bowl and you get the general idea. Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times wrote a piece this weekend entitled They Sure Showed That Obama that would tend to create some optimism in those readers less cynical than I. It was this line that killed me though and only further underlines the ongoing demographic problems facing Obama and anyone else who tries to change the system.
Rich refers to: The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Herein lies the problem, despite what may have happened during the election this is a nightmare block of the population and not one to be trifled with because old prejudices die hard and as always liberals have shown a proclivity in overestimating their ability to reach those who within their thick, Neanderthal skulls have banned logic and reason. I’ll put in a plug for a big favorite of mine, the moral beacon in this sick land of denial and dumbness and that would be for the brilliant writer Joe Bageant and his book Deer Hunting With Jesus, trust me, it’s a must read.
Now I may not be a hunter (personally I think it’s fucking slaughter) but I am one hell of a beefy, beer-drinking white dude, a military veteran and have 11 tattoos as well if that is any sort of an added qualification to the shithack D.C. conventional wisdom. Despite that I am smart enough to not be hoodwinked by a bunch of pampered, elitist, chickenhawk charlatans trying to bait folks like American Me into voting against my own economic self interests. Shit, my grandfather was a Romanian immigrant who joined a union to go work at a meat packing house (but only after at age 15 he filled his pockets full of ball bearings in order to qualify for the job’s required weight), fought in World War II in the Pacific in some of the most vicious of cleanup operations and as an FDR democrat hated the sleazy, fascist snake oil salesmen that were Republicans. Thank God that he died before that fraudulent piece of shit Ronald Reagan was President but my grandmother who survived him by nearly thirty years cursed the Gipper and that punk assed borderline retard George W. Bush until her dying breath. The point is that most people from that particular era (never mind the ‘greatest generation’ hogwash) weren’t so easily duped, and their ability to own a home, raise a family, take vacations on one income are a testament to they way that things used to be in this country before the rats and chiselers hijacked the system.
So as one of the manly men who are largely supposed to buy into the anti-elite propaganda peddled by the fifty-million dollar a year degenerate child fucking dope addict I have always taken great offense at just how fucking stupid that the average American beer swilling, swinging dick angry white male can be. Hell, I love drinking beer (and lots of it), shooting guns (although not at unarmed animals), watching football, driving fast, hating the insipid tyranny of political correctness and ogling nekkid women but I also don’t get suckered into that anti-intellectual horseshit that makes one of those clueless, testosterone and alcohol fueled dopes who are as mad as hell but too fucking dumb to realize that they should be really mad at the millionaire lardasses like Limbaugh who are very well paid to dupe these knuckle-draggers into consistently voting AGAINST their own economic well being.
Listen dudes, there is nothing macho in being stupid and unless y’all get a clue your sex lives will continue to be comprised of drinking a twelve pack of cheap malt liquor and whacking off over the latest issue of Penthouse or whatever other fuckrag that you pick up at your local convenience store’s jack rack. Stop fantasizing about coming on Sarah Palin’s tits, stop reveling in the falsehood that everyman Joe the Plumber is a working class hero and pick up a book once in awhile, willful ignorance is not a virtue and more importantly the mind that you save may be your own.
Let’s say you live your life in splendid isolation, above events. Things seem clear to you. Unreasonably clear. You are comfortable in the embrace of the seducers. But one day real life is suddenly unleashed and hurtles toward you. To the extent you descend from your tower to the actual field of action your former image of what has happened around you is erased or seems shrouded in unreality. Emulation and fashion are the rules of the game. (As someone wrote, writers shouldn’t use words that appear often in the press!) You realize you don’t know what is happening. You feel remote. Life is remote. Your whole social class is dissipating. Your life style has vanished. Your security hangs by a thread. You are uncertain of what you are about. You come to feel that the words you speak are senseless. You come to know you have lost contact with real life. Your youth of irresistible passion and your self-assurance in your way of life have come to seem no more than the senseless flapping of the wings of a tiny bird against the maelstrom. You no longer understand time, why or how, or for how long. Uncertainty replaces your former self-assurance and cocky nonchalance. Life once seemed boundless and unlimited. Now you feel the need for a protective ring, for a new chalk circle. You begin to recognize fate, chance and causality. As time passes you no longer underestimate the significance of events and the relationship between historic events and the role of individuals. You recognize the reliance on destiny, which is not the same as hope! Though some people—for example American neocons—believe they can control history, you recognize that the attempt to change the world is also linked to destiny and time. Yet, yet, you still believe that the individual—such as Marx or Lenin or Che Guevara or Daniel Ortega—can make the difference in the chaos and turbulence of events and destiny. Though you can’t count on it, you tell yourself you are fortunate to have descended from your isolation of unconsciousness.
To awaken, to descend from isolation, is to begin a cycle of resistance and revolt that perforce must end in revolution. This is not an impossible hypothesis. For how can one realistically rely on hope and non-violent sit-ins to oppose violence in a country as violent as the United States of America—from the genocide of the original peoples to the importation of black slaves to the “seduction” of an entire people?
In such conditions, voting is not enough. Sit-ins and marches and the poll booth are not enough.
By now that newborn thinking person, descended from his former isolation, understands that globalization is US imperialism at work. Now we know that globalization is nothing less than the American aspiration to global hegemony. That globalization is the exploitation of the workingman everywhere for the benefit of a few. It is the great seduction. The great deception. The ultimate seduction.
Globalization is still an ideology. It is the old market ideology. Now we know that globalization is a story of failure. Today in a time of crisis globalization appears as the evil it has always been. The man descended from isolation knows that the world needs jobs, food and health. Globalization instead means suppression of normal local activities. Globalization defined as global democracy is elite malarkey. Exportation of American style democracy is anyway by definition anti-democratic. How can one rationally even speak of a US democracy? Moreover, globalization, especially during crisis, means loss of jobs. Europe, I experience daily, is in reality more and more terrified of globalization. Nostalgic nationalism and desperate protectionism are raising their ugly heads. The 120 Italian oil industry workers in the UK irritate British workers. The 3000 British workers in Italy cause conflict among unemployed Italians. Globalization means that strong countries become savagely stronger, weaker countries, helplessly weaker. Most certainly globalization is not progress. It is the seduction exercised by an evil elite that while it destroys planet earth promotes inequality and widens the gap between rich and poor, confirmed by the fall of per capita income in 70 countries during the last 20 years.
Now the foe of your former self, you come to see that anything smacking of the status quo is evil. You see that earth is and has always been the planetary killing fields of all forms of life. You become aware of the super secrecy of Power, especially American Power. Secrecy is at the helm, secrecy for each component of Power. You learn that no one really knows what the fuck American troops and those of its reluctant, vanishing allies are doing in Iraq. In that respect, you realize, Power is virtual and therefore secret. Power operates in a secret world of virtual reality. Though that rings technological, it is also real. And it is the source of evil. Churchill could have been speaking of Power in general when he said, “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Power accuses its enemies of its own faults. Marx too charged that the secrecy attached to his theories was only the reflection of human stupidities.
BEAUTIFUL REBELLION
Despite the continuous reassurances of the seducers out to get us, things just don’t seem to work anymore. Though it is a truism that many people don’t work and yet get richer, that is not what I have in mind. Instead I wonder about the USA. Did the USA-Home-of-the-Free thing ever work? Was it flawed from the start? Was there always the stain? Were they always rich and the rest, poor. Was there always their goodness, their god-fearingness, their evil hidden deep, deep in the profundities of their super goodness and self-righteousness.
A curiosity: In recent times I have noted a rebellion of objects. I happen to touch a glass awkwardly, not hard at all. Yet it falls from the rack. It breaks into pieces, it seems on purpose. A suicide. Splinters rebound back up at me, slithers in my hands and on my cheek. I stand bloodied above the suicidal glass. What was the problem? What had I done to deserve it? Well, I admitted, I washed it haphazardly, without soap and tossed it into the rack. I wondered what special attention a glass needs. That glass rebelled, like animals sometimes rebel; a dog bites a human or the proverbial mule refuses to move. And now planet earth too is rebelling against occupation by human beings. One has to conclude that, yes, there is a human stain.
Will another violent American revolution take place within our lifetime?
In my opinion it is possible that a revolution will eventually be needed again to eliminate tyranny, enforce the laws of the land and restore American order.
Thomas Jefferson was brilliant and there is no doubt that he is historically right.
“You should never put your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.” -Henrik Ibsen
“When you invite people to think, you are inviting revolution.” -Ivana Gabara
“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” -Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
“Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.” -Albert Camus
“…the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” -T.E. Lawrence
“Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” -Mao Zedong
“Never listen to a revolutionary, the bastards are always trying to change things.” -Patrick Yen
If you happen to be among the top one percent of the nation, then, Bush has done a fabulous job for you. He’s has enriched you and your type. You benefited from 911 which made possible Bush’s agenda of aggressive war, dismantling the Constitution, and packing the courts. You should be proud and probably are.
Bush is just a figurehead. In the words of an excellent documentary that tries to explain the inexplicable: the fix was in! Bush is ‘president’ because he is a Bush and because he represents you —but only if you happen to be among the top 1 percent of the population. If not, you are outta luck! Bush has done his job on his bosses behalf. Everyone else is outta luck. It’s a comprehensive and deliberate program:
wage resource wars in the middle east, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran specifically;
enrich the Military/Industrial complex which represents America’s last ‘export’: state-sponsored terrorism;
dismantle the Constitution and the electoral apparatus through subversion and institutionalized vote theft;
establish a precedent by which the ‘executive’ may rewrite the laws passed by Congress;
pack the courts such that the rights of individuals and lowers classes are completely ignored and violated with disingenuous decisions which often, of late, simply ignore several hundred years of Anglo/American jurisprudence, the precedents established by our onw US Supreme Court, and the very letter of the law itself.
In Bush’s words: “The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!” If you happen to be among the top one percent of the nation, then, Bush has, indeed, done a fabulous job. The ‘revolution’ must begin with a restoration of the ‘rule of law’ which Bush has subverted with signing statements (decrees) and executive orders. Greg Palast is, once again, on the trial of a ‘President’ who has come out of the closet, i.e, Bush openly flouts the very source of US sovereignty: the people themselves. In a phrase: Bush doesn’t give a shit that or about you.
The GOP exploits terrorism because the GOP is and always has been bankrupt morally and intellectually. A rich party monetarily, the GOP is utterly bereft of ideas or hope. The GOP encouraged fear of communism and was, arguably, it’s sole beneficiary. Even so, the GOP, increasingly radical under Ronald Reagan, raised other bogey men: drugs, porn and terrorism.
GOP efforts against porn and drugs would fail, it’s own membership being among the worst offenders. With the collapse of the ‘Soviet Union’, the GOP would be left with a single bogey man: terrorism!
Nevertheless, Ronald Reagan still felt it necessary to maintain a ‘cold war’. According to Tom Gervasi in ‘The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy‘, Reagan lied to the American people when he told them that the Soviet Union had ‘outstripped the United States and established a military superiority’. Reagan, who tripled the national deficit and double the federal bureaucracy would exploit our fears of ‘commies’ to justify huge expenditures which had the effect of enriching military contractors. It cannot be merely coincidental that the rise of the American ‘military/industrial complex’ was and remains nearly inversely proportional to the fall of every other American industry: steel, automotive, electronics et al. With the decline of the very heart and soul of American economic strength came America’s transformation into a fascist state characterized by growing inequalities of wealth and income, the rise of the Military/Industrial Complex, and the role of the CIA as ‘enforcer’ for the establishment.
There is evidence that members of the same CIA/Cuban exile community participated in the killing of PResident John F. Kennedy in 1963. We also know that the CIA’s 1980 contra program later managed to get Luis Posada Carrilles out prison in Venezuela. They put him to work for Felix Rodriguz, who was reporting directly to then Vice-President Bush’s office. As Felix Rodriguez told the press, “We needed him.” He as referring to Carrilles, the terrorist airplane bomber. The Iran/Contra scandal revealed the very curious situation in which Vice-President George Bush, supposed in charge of the country’s top anti-drug task force, was involved with the drug running contras. IN the early 1980s, Bush travelled to Panama to meet with Noriega, who was then cooperating with the “Black Eagle” operation that supplied arms to the contras and was using Panamanian airstrips. In the mid-1980s, the CIA had a falling out with Noriega, apparently because he refused to cooperate with its plans for the invasion of Nicaragua. The Contra resupply operation was then shifted to the Ilopango airbase in El Salvador, and Felix Rodriguez was put in charge. (Testimony and evidence presented in the Milian Rodriguez trial and to the Kerry Committee showed that the Medellin cocaine cartel was making payments through Felix Rodriguez, buying access to the contra air transport program that was being run out of Ilopango.) Hard evidence, international telephone records for example, proves that Rodriguez was reporting several times a week to Vice-President Bush’s office. –John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The US Role in the New World Order, ISBN: 0-89608-395-0
‘Terrorism’ is not just a symptom of the decline, it has played several major roles. Terrorism is the new bogeyman, the ‘ringer’ for a communist threat that probable never existed but is beyond credible exploitation. Terrorism is much, much more: it is an ill-defined and incredibly convenient pretext by which the GOP may wage an Orwellian perpetual war, in fact, a series of oil wars, that John McCain says may last ‘10,000 years’. Terrorism, moreover, has become the convenient means by which all opposition to our fascist regimes are marginalized, demonized, and, in worse cases, silenced forever. Draconian measures insisted upon by Bush authorize him to incarcerate without charges, phone calls or habeas corpus anyone suspected of being a ‘terrorist’. That means the ‘Bill of Rights’ is dead. It means the separation of powers is dead! Coupled with his use of ‘signing statements’ to rewrite laws, Bush rules by decree. The GOP, aiding and abetting Bush, has now created in the United States an absolute dictatorship the purpose of which is the enrichment of some one percent of the nation to the exclusion of every other class. War on Terrorism’ Ronald Reagan’s infamous tax cut of 1982 is high upon a list of many milestones along the US path to fascism and dictatorship. It turned America into a banana republic, a nation of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
1982 was the worst year since the Great Depression, with -2.2 percent growth. Why should that be? The private sector knew about the tax cuts well in advance. Many conservatives argue that impending changes in tax rates affect corporate behavior; for example, when the rich learned in 1986 that capital gains would be raised in 1987, they took all the appropriate counter-measures in 1986. Then why did this not occur in 1981, with news of massive tax cuts on the horizon?Furthermore, by 1982 there had already been enormous cuts in the capital gains tax, the most sacred tax cut that conservatives hold dear. Between 1978 and 1982, the top rate on capital gains was cut from 39 to 20 percent. And the top rate on unearned income fell from 70 to 50 percent (mirroring a similar rate cut in earned income).–Steve Kangas, Liberalism Resurgent
Goppers, impotent in the face of facts, desperate to point to something, anything positive about the regime of Ronald Reagan, cite a ‘peace time expansion’ following Reagan’s recession of almost two years. In fact, every Democratic President has outperformed every GOP President since World War II.
And supply-siders are careful to note that Reagan’s was the longest peacetime expansion since World War II. In truth, the Kennedy-Johnson expansion was longer: 106 months compared to Reagan’s 92.1 Of course, there was a war in Vietnam, which gives supply-siders an excuse to dismiss it because wars are beneficial to the economy. But they are beneficial because governments engage in Keynesian borrowing and spending during them (which could be directed to social services as well as war). Unfortunately for supply-siders, it was really Keynesianism that produced the longest economic boom since World War II.–Steve Kangas, Economic Performance
The Reagan tax cut robbed millions of financial and class status but worse: the hope that they might rise above poverty, better their lot and finance the education of their children. The plight of the very poor has only gotten worse since 1980 with a short-lived respite in Clinton’s second term. What had been the ‘lower middle’ has slipped off into poverty. About one percent of the population owns more than the bottom 90 percent combined.
Historically in fascist regimes, a burgeoning population of ‘the poor’ represent to the power of military/industrial establishments a never-ending source of slave labor. If the American citizenry will not awaked from this nightmare, the worst is yet to come. Can anyone believe that the construction of FEMA camps at secret locations throughout the US is indicative of a federal agency diligence doing its job when, in fact, it was AWOL during Katrina! In summary, the GOP has ‘hollowed out’ the US economy. That Ronald Reagan is primarily to blame for this is the very reason he is idolized by American fascists. “He made us feel good about ourselves”, they swoon. Certainly, Hitler had the same effect on his supports as he rose to power, an opposite effect when the shit hit the fan! In the meantime, the Military/Industrial complex filled the void left by the dissolution of American industries –steel, cars, refrigerators, and electronics, all which are now imported, primarily from China and Japan.
America’s number one export is ‘death’. US adventures in the Middle East are done at the behest and for the benefit of the defense establishment. US military adventures serve three purposes: 1) the theft of ‘oil’, the energy source of choice for most nefarious reasons; 2) the employment of in the industry of death; 3) the maintenance of the GOP in power by marginalizing the opposition as ‘terrorist’. As raison d’etre for perpetual war, ‘terrorism’ beats the pants off ‘communism’ any day. Many in the GOP are probably scratching their heads and wonder: “why didn’t we think of this earlier???” Addendum: What happens when the ‘dictator’ is allowed to arbitrary rescind –by his unlawful decree –the protections of the US Constitution (a ‘goddamned piece ofpaper’) Due Process of Law and some 400 years of common law and Anglo-American jurisprudence and respects for the law!
GREENVILLE COUNTY, S.C. — An 18-year-old was punched in the face 13 times by a deputy police officer, whose dashboard video camera caught the incident on tape, WYFF Channel 4 News reported.The video shows undercover Deputy Brian Tollison pulling over a truck driven by a drug suspect and beating the teenage driver while what appears to be a back-up deputy held down him down.Once back-up deputies arrived, 18-year-old Jeremy Rucker was pulled out of the truck and tasered and kicked while lying prone on the ground.Sheriff Steve Loftis fired Tollison, who also faces criminal charges for the incident, which took place May 15.”The fact that Deputy Tollison took his closed fist and struck the suspect in the face 13 times in my opinion was excessive,” Loftis said.The other deputies involved have not been charged.Needless Brutality: Video shows police punching teen 13 times in face, then tasering him
We must simply DEMAND that Bush and Cheney, the entire cabinet and key appointees, complicit enablers and anyone else in any position who has assisted, aided, financed in anyway monetarily or with valuable consideration, or in any way abetted by omission, the unlawful, treasonous, and murderous activities, decisions, plans, orders, decrees, signing statements or policies that have been connected in anyway with the overt and demonstrable subversions of the rule of law, specifically the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and US Codes prior to their unlawful alteration by signing statements ordered by Bush and effected upon his order! Down with traitors, tyrants, mass murderers, war criminals and bald-faced liars!
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