4.12.2008

America’s Ruling Clique

Neoconservatives derive much of their political strength from the portrayal of big government as the enemy of the people: a belief that plays only too well in America. Big government is indeed the enemy of the people when it does not serve the people’s interests, or when it betrays them.

Where the neoconservatives and the chicken hawks have been spectacularly successful is in the field of perception management. The super rich—or the ruling clique—constitutes no more than 0.1 percent of the US population. Yet they control the mainstream media, every branch government, the electoral process and the country’s major financial institutions.

Thus, 99.9 percent of the people are being manipulated and cannibalized by a tiny but powerful minority. It is the interests of this powerful minority that are served by government and it is their interests that are defined as the national interest or as national security; and it is hardly benign. Robbing the poor to pay the rich causes irreparable harm to the victim.

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The Fight for Gauley Mountain

Coal keeps the lights on and the workers locked in darkness

By Bob Kincaid

I live in Fayette County, West Virginia, the heart and soul of West Virginia's whitewater rafting tourism industry. Thousands and thousands of people come here every year to raft the New and Gauley Rivers. They roar down gorges as old as the earth itself, past the ghost towns that are all that's left of the mine wars of a century ago; towns where Mary Harris "Mother" Jones worked to organize the slaves of the coal industry: Thurmond and Glen Jean and Brooklyn and Cunard and Hawks Nest and Prince and McKendry; places that are little more than wide mossy spots by the riverside, with a few squared stones marking where entire generations played out. These are the Tombstones and Dodge Citys of Appalachia.

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Canary Nation

In times past, before technological wonders replaced them, canaries were kept deep down in the earth to warn miners of poison gas and other disasters. Even as profit-greedy mine owners ignored safety regulations and exploited employees to the breaking point, a humble little song bird was the link between life and death-- between the malfeasance of corporate prosperity, the brutal truth of nature’s reality, and capitalism's inevitable devouring appetite. Those who labor and suffer beneath the sweet song of danger these days seem to have forgotten the ghosts of a century ago, when labor raised our democratic boat on a tide of the American Dream.

Applying that simple analogy to the American empire, it is apparent that the economy is our mine shaft:“Maybe now is when the real dark period begins. Sure the last seven years of the inept Bush regime have been miserable and shameful, sure we've been humiliated, mortified a thousand ways from Sunday by an administration that would yank the legs off a dog if it meant a thank-you note from Dubai.”

“But now Bush is in his final year. This is both the good news, and also the very, very bad news. Because we are now in the death throes of the worst administration in modern history, entering the period of serious consequences, of economic collapse, environmental impact, record oil prices, international recoil, rashes, boils, inexplicable vomiting. Fun for the whole family. “

“Know this for a fact. Bush does not care. He is detached, supercilious, viciously ignorant of anything but how beautifully he has served his corporate masters, of how he has raked in billions of dollars for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and Exxon and the coal industry, mercenary armies and military manufacturers and his dad's Saudi friends. He is on no one's side but theirs, and he always has been.”

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You Can't Handle the Truth

Two truths denied by nation and media: 1) Bush and Cheney are war criminals; 2) 911 was an inside job. In the meantime, unless something is done, Bush will have led this nation into another bloody, criminal war crime: an attack --possibly nuclear --upon Iran. It is the nature of evil that Bushco has compromised many otherwise good Americans now powerless to act because they have fallen into the spider's web.

As the US economy slips inexorably into a black hole from which they may be no escape, Bush plots another ruinous war. Some 232,000 jobs have been lost in the past three months and still the American people, the media, the Congress kowtows to the worst administration in American history. Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Deck chairs were re-arranged on the Titanic. Cowards whistle past grave yards. Americans cower in the suburbs.

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