8.02.2008

THE MOTHER OF ALL PARADOXES: THE AMERICAN SOCIAL MODEL

For most Americans, the defense of “Americanism” is indistinguishable from the defense of capitalism, aka “the free enterprise system”—its favorite euphemism. Only in America can a citizen opposed to capitalism be denounced as “un-American.”

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.

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Bush Sr's Faustian Bargain with China or How US/China Trade Threatens to Wipe Out the US Middle Class

US/China trade has benefited China and a US elite consisting of about 1 percent of the nation's total population. It should come as no surprise, then, that the origins of US/China Trade are traced to the GOP administration of Richard Nixon. It is to be expected, then, that it was George Bush Sr who laid the groundwork for this sellout of the American middle class. Fact is 'US/China trade' was never intended to benefit the average American tax payer. And it never has!

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The Lie of the Century

Reprinted in full from What Really Happened

"All war is based on deception." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.

President McKinley told the American people that the USS Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor by a Spanish mine. The American people, outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack, supported the Spanish American War. The Captain of the USS Maine had insisted the ship was sunk by a coal bin explosion, investigations after the war proved that such had indeed been the case. There had been no mine.

Hitler used this principle of lying to his own people to initiate an invasion. He told the people of Germany that Poland had attacked first. The Germans, convinced they were being threatened, followed Hitler into Poland and into World War 2.

FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn't. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack. Contrary to the official story, the fleet did not maintain radio silence, but sent messages intercepted and decoded by US intercept stations. Tricked by the lie of a surprise attack, Americans marched off to war.

President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam. There were no torpedoes in the water in the Gulf. LBJ took advantage of an inexperienced sonar man's report to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam

It is inescapable historical reality that leaders of nations will lie to their people to trick them into wars they otherwise would have refused. It is not "conspiracy theory" to suggest that leaders of nations lie to trick their people into wars. It is undeniable fact.

This brings us to the present case.

Did the government of the United States lie to the American people, more to the point, did President Bush and his Neocon associates lie to Congress, to initiate a war of conquest in Iraq?

This question has been given currency by a memo leaked from inside the British Government which clearly indicates a decision to go to war followed by the "fixing" of information around that policy. This is, as they say, a smoking gun.

But the fact is that long before this memo surfaced, it had become obvious that the US Government, aided by that of Great Britain, was lying to create the public support for a war in Iraq.

First off is Tony Blair's "Dodgy Dossier", a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a student thesis paper that was 12 years old!

The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated.

This use of material that could not possibly be relevant at the time is clear proof of a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Then there was the claim about the "Mobile biological weapons laboratories". Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, these were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction.

The chief proponent of this hoax was Colin Powell, who presented illustrations to the United Nations on February 5th, 2003.

This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.

Colin Powell's speech to the UN was itself one misstatement after another. Powell claimed that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes whose only possible use was in uranium enrichment centrifuges. Both CIA and Powell's own State Department confirmed that the tubes were parts for missiles Saddam was legally allowed to have. Following the invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise were found.

Powell also claimed to the United Nations that photos showed "Decontamination Vehicles". But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just firefighting equipment.

Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found.

Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found.

Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as "standards" for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, the US moved quickly to destroy the samples before comparison tests could be carried out.

Powell claimed that Iraq was building long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons. The only drones found were short-range reconnaissance drones.

Powell claimed that Iraq had an aggregate of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical and biological warfare agents. Powell gave no basis for that claim at all, and a DIA report issued the same time directly contradicted the claim. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq following the invasion.

Powell claimed that "unnamed sources" confirmed that Saddam had authorized his field commanders to use biological weapons. No such weapons were ever used by the Iraqis to defend against the invasion and, of course, none were ever found in Iraq.

Powell claimed that 122mm warheads found by the UN inspectors were chemical weapons. The warheads were empty, and showed no signs of ever having contained chemical weapons.

Powell claimed that Iraq had a secret force of illegal long-range Scud missiles. None were ever found.

Powell claimed to have an audio tape proving that Saddam was supporting Osama Bin Laden. But independent translation of the tape revealed Osama's wish for Saddam's death.

Colin Powell's UN debacle also included spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam's massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be rather benign. In at least one case, the satellite Powell claimed had taken one of the pictures had actually been out of operation at the time. And many questioned why Powell was showing black and white photos when the satellites in use at the time over Iraq took color images.

Another piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called "Yellow Cake" from Niger. Since Israel had bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.

This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries!

In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.

What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators are portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off stolen student papers as contemporary analysis.

And THAT shows an intention to deceive.

Lawyers call this "Mens Rea", which means "Guilty Mind". TV lawyer shows call it "Malice aforethought". This means that not only did the Bush Administration lie to the people and to the US Congress, but knew they were doing something illegal at the time that they did it.

All the talk about "Intelligence failure" is just another lie. There was no failure. Indeed the Army agents who erroneously claimed that missile tubes were parts for a uranium centrifuge received bonuses, while the Pentagon smeared Hans Blix, and John Bolton orchestrated the firing of Jose Bustani, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because Bustani was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad.

The President of the United States and his Neocon associates lied to the people of the United States to send them off on a war of conquest.

Defenders of the government will point to the cases listed at the top of the page as proof that lying to the people is a normal part of the leader's job and we should all get used to it. And because "Everybody does it" that we should not single out the present administration. But this is madness. We do not catch all the murderers, yet when we catch a murderer, we deal with them as harshly as possible, in order to deter more murderers.

Right now, we have the criminals at hand. and, while other leaders in history have lied to start wars, for the first time in history, the lie stands exposed while the war started with the lies still rages on, to the death and detriment of our young men and women in uniform. We cannot in good moral conscience ignore this lie, this crime, lest we encourage future leaders to continue to lie to use to send our kids off to pointless wars. Lying to start a war is more than an impeachable offence; it the highest possible crime a government can commit against their own people. Lying to start a war is not only misappropriation of the nation's military and the nation's money under false pretenses, but it is outright murder committed on a massive scale. Lying to start a war is a betrayal of the trust each and every person who serves in the military places in their civilian leadership. By lying to start a war, the Bush administration has told the military fatalities and their families that they have no right to know why they were sent to their deaths. It's none of their business.

Our nation is founded on the principle of rule with the consent of the governed. Because We The People do not consent to be lied to, a government that lies rules without the consent of the governed, and ruling without the consent of the governed is slavery.

You should be more than angry. You should be in a rage. You should be in a rage no less than that of the families of those young men and women who have been killed and maimed in this war started with a lie.You need to be in a rage and you need to act on that rage because even as I type these words, the same government that lied about Iraq's nuclear weapons is telling the exact same lies about Iran's nuclear capabilities. The writing is on the wall; having gotten away with lying to start the war in Iraq, the US Government will lie to start a war in Iran, and after that another, and after that another, and another and another and another because as long as you remain silent, and as long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

As long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

None.

It is time to fire the liars.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing"
.
--Edmund Burke

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U.S.C. TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 47 � 1001.
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, WHOEVER, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully�
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by ANY trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or USES any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
(b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party's counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to�
(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or
(2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.

**************************************************

SO HERE IS WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO

The Bush administration and their friends in the media want this story to go away. More than want it to go away, they are in a panic, and will do everything they can to stop it. They will use every dirty trick, every paid shill, every presstitute that they can. Already there is a report that the Michael Jackson jury is "expected" to reach a verdict just before the Conyers hearings.

So, I want YOU to copy this article off, post it everywhere. This article is placed in the public domain. Mail it to your friends. Then send it to your local media and your Congresscritters and have everyone you know do the same. Get on the phones. Flood their offices.

The term is "Viral Marketing" where you get the people who need a product to market it for you. Well, this nation NEEDS this "product". It needs to know that this war was started with lies. INTENTIONAL lies. And they need to know there is something they can do about it, and that is to start pounding on the doors of power.

Because when a flood of such messages reaches the Congress and the media, what they will hear is that there is no more time. Either they will deal with these lies and the liars, in full, or they will lose all credibility as a government and as media.

A government that lies to the people cannot be the legal government of this land. Make sure that they understand that YOU understand that the Constitution does not allow the government to lie to the people. Calling themselves the government does not make it so if they act unconstitutionally and illegally. The Constitution is the original "Contract with America" and a government that lies stands in clear breach of that contract.

MORE MEDIA CONTACTS MORE CONGRESSIONAL CONTACTS

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But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-- "The Declaration of Independence"


8.01.2008

Mind Detox XXI: Cyrano's Journal Online/Thomas Paine's Corner (Proudly Piercing the Simulacrum since 1982)

True benevolence, or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

---Joseph Addison

Please help us disperse this missive far and wide.....

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1. Evolve or die: Can we shed our moral primitivism before it’s too late? by Dr. Steve Best

Departing from his passionate commitment to animal liberation, Dr. Steve Best presents an incredibly comprehensive and convincing case that it is both morally imperative and essential to the continued existence of life on Earth that we anti-capitalists prevail....

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=713



2. The corporate disease by John Steppling

The culture of punishment cannot go much further — the culture of resentment and sadism and amnesia. It’s turning brown and wilting before our eyes. Free Tibet, send marines to Darfur, protect Israel from (fill in whoever you want) and let’s fucking well bomb Iran. Fuck ‘em, bomb ‘em. Nuke ‘em maybe. Yeah, that’s the ticket…..let’s nuke those lousy towelheaded cocksuckers. And let’s remember we are a force for good. From Belgrade to Baghdad to, probably, Tehran, the Empire spreads death and destruction.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=533



3. Sex-for-Sale at the Olympics by Suki Falconberg

The situation stems partly from the refusal to recognize prostitution as a violation of human rights. In reality, it is sexual violence toward women. But in the view of most it is simply ‘entertainment’ based on a harmless financial transaction. The desire to draw a distinction between prostitution and trafficking only masks the fact that both usually involve the same exploitations of women.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=305



4. The Toddler King’s Insufferable Reign is Doomed by Jason Miller
Under our “good stewardship,” as our current unitary executive loves to call it, the world is careening down the highway at breakneck speed with an infant at the wheel. And if he crashes before an adult can wrest control from him, we’re looking at a major accident with multiple fatalities. We’ve already pushed the world to the verge of economic collapse, the brink of starvation, the initiation of perpetual war, and impending environmental disaster.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=772

5.The Poverty of Philosophy by Immortal Technique
Radical underground rapper Immortal Technique gives us a perspective on our beloved 'capitalist central' that you won't find on Fox News or MSNBC or CNN....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Vl0peys90

6. The overlords we picked by Glen Ford
So, will the Lords of Capital accept their class extinction - their social death - as the edifices of their rule implode in utter ruin? Not likely. They’ve still got the U.S. military, bigger (or, at least, more expensive) than all the rest of the world’s armed forces, combined. The option will still remain, to seize vital sectors and regions of the planet, holding them hostage to continuing Western imperial sway. To just *take* stuff, in a hi-tech war of primitive accumulation. That was the goal of the greater Iraq adventure, until it got bogged down by pesky “insurgents.”
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=613

7. Edging into Madness by John Steppling
The media ever more desperately tries to sell products about the super rich, the lifestyles of the rich and stupid, but the frisson isn’t there, not quite, because my heating bill just went up 200% and because another kid went ballistic at the local high school, and because corporate reality makers are having a harder and harder time hiding the poisons of their products — the pseudo food and the recreational junk. The biggest growth industry in the US is self storage. What does that tell us? Junk we don’t need, food we can’t live on, and a more desperate embrace of super violence and death. It is the last gasp of a people screaming their own superiority, even as they fail at almost everything.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=586

8. Tumult by Rebecca Gibson
I feel, now, if I were assaulted again, or witness to the assault of another, I would go for blood. Kali, that hindu goddess of death and destruction, of time and change, resides in my heart now, has for years, all of these years since I learned to recognize rape. I see myself tearing flesh from bone, blood dripping from my lips, and wearing a necklace of skulls. It is not the innocent I wish to devour. I would purge this earth of it’s rapacious pretending-to-be-human werewolves, prey on the predators. I would make the world safe to be a child or a girl or a woman or a little boy.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=789

9. The Monstrosity of Animal Exploitation by David Irving
The enslavement and abuse of animals along with other ignoble activities like vivisection, trapping, hunting, slaughter, and other cruel abuses of animals are warfare’s constant attendants. After centuries they have become the accepted norms and are ingrained in our culture often involving the “best” people. Women of privilege proudly display expensive furs at church, social, and cultural functions and show no concern about the cruelty required to obtain them: steel toothed traps that bite cruelly into whatever anatomical part they manage to snare is one method; anal electrocution, neck snapping, and gassing are other favorites in the mink trade. Why does a custom that causes such immense suffering to animals not cause us to question our sanity?
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=583

10. The War, the Truth, and the New York Times by Anwaar Hussain
Every canon of the United Nations and the 1945 Nuremberg Charters, the International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions has been shot to doll rags by this criminal cabal in its willful, premeditated genocide of an innocent people and what does the American media leviathan call it? Bad enough!?
http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=280

11. THE RUSSIANS ARE BACK! by Gaither Stewart
The common enemy for Americans and Germans alike was Communism and the USSR. When I say “Americans,” of course, I mean the American ruling oligarchy, the US ruling class, not the masses, who, benighted for generations, are essentially propagandized by the corporate media to love or hate whomever or whatever such privileged class deems necessary to their strategic goals. Long before the war started, as is true for all class wars, some American political leaders (as well as British) began to consider WWII as a war against Communism not against Nazi Germany and sided with the Nazis against the Communists. According to one view of history, the war against Communism began with the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Germany and Japan had fought the first part of the war; from 1945 the USA took over.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=584

12. Like the Little Satans We Are by Jason Miller
Aside from the pragmatic concern that in so doing we’re fouling our nest so badly that we’re eventually going to be smothered by our own shit, there is a moral component to consider as well. As luminaries like Inge and Singer have reminded us, our heinous and reprehensible collective actions towards non-human animals readily invite and substantiate comparisons between us and Nazis or the Devil.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=800

13. Cynthia McKinney Deserves Your Support, Obama Does Not by Glen Ford
In Obama’s endlessly conditional world, withdrawal from Iraq must be done “responsibly” - meaning, in actuality, that the U.S. must retain the power to keep the Iraqis “responsive” to American military, economic and political demands. A U.S. military pullout (of who knows how many troops, since Obama has always been elusive on the question) must be “honorable” - meaning, it should not give the appearance of weakness or admission of criminality. Most important, the U.S. must emerge from the withdrawal (or reduction, or draw-down, or other conjure-word) in a position of “respect” - a total impossibility, unless respect actually means evoking terror throughout the neighborhood at the very thought of ever again provoking the Americans into violating the laws of modern civilization.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=573

14. PLEONEXIA (For Whom the Bell Tolls) by Viola Ransel
These bastards have been around the block before.This time the parasites planned ahead.Laws have been passed. Detention camps builtfor when their feeding on us drives us over the edge.
This time around there won’t be a New Deal.This deal’s called Take It or Leave It.There’s no limit now to how far you can fall.The Social Safety Net has proved too inconvenient.
Lessons The People should have learned....
http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=536

15. THE COMMUNIST BUGABOO by Gaither Stewart
Like terrorism, Communism has been the excuse for emergency laws in the Philippines and Peru as in Chile and Argentina. Emergency laws, special prisons, torture, the sky is the limit in the war against the Communist bugaboo.....But what is Communism today? Why is the word so frightening? In the minds of non-Communists, Communism is associated with the former USSR. In reality, Communistic ideas are as old as man: a social system characterized by the community of goods and the absence of private property. This is what some political anthropologists have termed “primitive communism.” Such ideas marked the organization of the first Christian communities. Jesus Christ himself is often pinpointed as the first Communist. And Christianity itself–even today–properly understood and practiced, would entail a form of communism in many personal matters.
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=776

Sami El Haj, Al Jazeera journalist, tells his story of 6.5 years in Guantanamo

I highly recommend you take the time to read the whole thing. This is the corruption of our government, done in our names, with our tax dollars. - Ed.

Standing straight and tall, an impressive and deeply introspective man, Sami El Haj walks with a limp and the help of a walking stick. Neither laughter nor smiles light up the refined face of this man, old before his time. A deep sadness pervades him. He was 32 years old when, in December 2001, his life, like that of tens of thousands of other Muslims, became a horrific nightmare.

He endured horrendous suffering. Weakened by a hunger strike which lasted 438 days, set free on the 1st May 2008, he greets you attentively and with a gentle manner. He calmly tells you of a world whose paralysing, suffocating horror is beyond your comprehension.

He is the first of the released detainees from the camps built by the Bush administration at the Guantánamo Bay naval base to be authorised to travel.

"I came to Geneva, the city of the United Nations and freedom, to ask for the law to be respected, to demand the closure of the Guantánamo camp and secret prisons, and to demand that this illegal situation be brought to an end", he says calmly. The word has been uttered. Everything is "illegal"; everything is false, manipulated, absurd and Kafka-esque in this war waged essentially against those of the Muslim faith.

Read full story


Hersh: To provoke war, Cheney considered proposal to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians and shoot at them

Why anyone would voluntarily sign on to work for these psychopaths is beyond me. - Ed.

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

Read full story

The 'down side' to an attack on Iran

The understatement of the century. - Ed.

WASHINGTON - Amid rising speculation about the possibility of an Israeli or United States bombing attack on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this month, a major study produced for the US Air Force by a top defense think-tank concluded that US military action against Iran was "likely to have negative effects for the United States".

Read full story

IDF continues to murder Palestinian children

17 year old Yousif Amira, who was shot in the nearby Nil'in village on Wednesday evening, has been pronounced clinically dead, Palestinian medical sources in the central West Bank city of Ramallah told IMEMC on Thursday morning.

Read full story

Neocon flap highlights Jewish divide

WASHINGTON, Jul 30 (IPS) - A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the U.S. Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.

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Israeli wingers push for Bibi

Israel's ultra nationalist parties yesterday seized on Ehud Olmert's decision to stand aside as prime minister to push for an early election, which would most likely return the hawkish Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the helm.

Read full story

Decapitated bus passenger: man was 'totally calm' during attack

They're out there. - Ed.

BRANDON, MAN. - A young man travelling on a Greyhound bus was stabbed to death and beheaded by a stranger in a horrifying act of apparently random violence.

Read full story

US Military covers up murder: says soldier beat herself to death

Are they covering this up to protect the killer, or is this just to preserve the fairy tale that our military consists of nothing but boy scouts instead of the truth -- that the ranks are infested with mentally damaged people. Some have self-selected themselves into the service expressly to fulfill their desire to kill people, and others have been destroyed by the US military machine. Was this one a pure psychopath? An ideal soldier? A killing machine who couldn't stop himself from coloring outside the lines? - Ed.


If Gen. Petraeus says things are rosy, they are. Questioning his integrity is an attack on all the men and women who serve in our military. The same holds true for the brave Army investigators who, when confronted with the evidence surrounding Lavena Johnson's death, ruled it a suicide.

Read full story

More information here.

Why we don't have viable alternative fuel and electric vehicles

Ask the sheikh who flew his Lamborghini 6500 miles to Britain for an oil change.


If this is what the Sheihk spends on an oil change, I wonder how many politicians he owns, outright???

As the oil begins to run out, the alternative solutions that have existed for decades—and others—will emerge.

Read full story

7.31.2008

Right-wing pathologies revealed after Adkisson shooting at Unitarian Church

by John Dolan

When Free Republic forum posters learned that the gunman was from their own demographic, out came the conservative madness.

A classic drama full of hatred, ignorance and irony played out this week in the forum section of right-wing Web site Free Republic, as "Freepers" tried to make sense of a church shooting in Tennessee that killed two parishioners and wounded many others.

Read full story

Charles Hugh Smith: Oversupply and Compression: How the median house price will fall from $215 to $70K

I am constantly amazed (yes, I know I shouldn't be) by how many otherwise intelligent people expect housing to "recover" next year. I shouldn't be surprised, of course, because fantasy and hope are the key traits of all post-bubble busts.

Thus we had analyst after analyst in 2001 and 2002 calling "the bottom" in the Nasdaq, even as it fell from 5,000 to 3,000 to 2,000 and then finally to 1,000.

Read full story


Solari: Navigating toward a financially intimate world

Catherine Austin Fitts' website.

Solari: How to find and evaluate a local bank

A. Identify Local Banks

1. Get the list of the banks and credit unions in your area from your local Yellow Pages. Delete names that you know to be large banks, including names on the Solari US Banking Tapeworm 20 List.

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Congress should rescind the State of Emergency declared by Bush

The White House suspended the Constitution and implemented Continuity of Government Plans on 9/11, based upon a declared state of national emergency. Bush has continually renewed the declared state of emergency up to and including today. See this.

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Judiciary Committee approves resolution holding Rove in contempt of Congress

The House Judiciary Committee has voted 20-14 to approve a contempt of Congress resolution against former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove for his failure to appear after a Congressional subpoena.

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The NYT: Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable

Scathing because it's true. - Ed.

by James Petras

On July 18, 2008 The New York Times published an article by Israeli-Jewish historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians – 12 times the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi holocaust:

“ Iran ’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel ’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.”


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The Father of Lies

by Philip Giraldi

The first historian, the Ionian Greek Herodotus, known as the "father of history," has also been called the "father of lies" because of his reluctance to spoil a good story with the truth. Today the neoconservatives twist history to fit their political agenda.

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Hussein Al-Alak: It's Chilling

2008-07-23 | What is more chilling, then reading a weekend newspaper and viewing a selection of pictures that were taken during World War Two, from the perspective of NAZI officers which depicted them during leisure time in a European concentration camp.

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Israel's PM to step down

Which nutbag do we get next? The vicious shrew Livni or the pure psychopath Netanyahu? - Ed.

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Scandal-hit Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced Wednesday that he will not be his party's leader going into the next election.

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Stike in Iran still possible, US tells Israel

This is unbelievable. Look at the way the Israelis must be gingerly handled because we might not, on second thought, launch WW III on their behalf. If people had any comprehension of the true consequences of striking Iran, they'd be duly horrified how we coddle the Israelis instead of telling them to pound sand. - Ed.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense chief, is visiting as Washington is perceived to be softening its stance toward Tehran.
By Paul Richter and Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Bush administration officials reassured Israel's defense minister this week that the United States has not abandoned all possibility of a military attack on Iran, despite widespread Israeli concern that Washington has begun softening its position toward Tehran.

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7.30.2008

Stranger Than Fiction

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates taught his students that the pursuit of truth can only begin once they start to question and analyze every belief that they ever held dear. If a certain belief passes the tests of evidence, deduction, and logic, it should be kept. If it doesn't, the belief should not only be discarded, but the thinker must also then question why he was led to believe the erroneous information in the first place.

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Aide to US Sen. Jim Webb found dead from apparent gunshot wound

Authorities in Botetourt County this morning discovered the body of a well-known Democratic operative and U.S. Senate aide along U.S. 220, dead from an apparent gunshot wound.

The body of Frederick W. Hutchins Jr., 26, of Roanoke was found shortly after 7 a.m. along southbound U.S. 220 by a Botetourt County deputy who had stopped to check on a vehicle parked on the highway's shoulder, according to the sheriff's office.

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USAF General, Thomas L Tinsley, dead from gunshot wound to the chest

Interesting Coincidence: Tinsley’s previous boss, Michael “Buzz” Mosely, resigned in the wake of the Minot Nukes incident.

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$1000 to ask Pelosi a question

We'll gladly pay you $1,000 to ask Nancy Pelosi a question.

Pelosi told "The View" today that she'd impeach Bush if anybody knew of a crime he'd committed, just as she told Ed Schultz a year ago. Here's a list of crimes (PDF) drawn up by Conyers 2.5 years ago. And here's a list of crimes (PDF) from Kucinich's articles of impeachment drawn up by Elizabeth de la Vega.

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Scoop: The people, the press, and the case for impeachment

The July 25, 2008 House Committee on the Judiciary hearings focused on the Kucinich resolution calling for the impeachment of President Bush. In his resolution, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) argues that Bush knew that the Iraqis had no weapons of mass destruction, yet claimed that they did in order to justify the March 2003 invasion. The "fraudulent misrepresentations," as they're referred to in the resolution, cost lives, compromised national security, and represented a clear abuse of constitutional power. The evidence supporting these claims is highly persuasive.

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Glenn Greenwald Interview with Daniel Ellsberg

GG: Welcome to Salon Radio With Glenn Greenwald. …

My guest today is Daniel Ellsberg who was the key figure in the Pentagon Papers controversy in the early1970s and who was one of the key figures in government in the 1960s and early1970s and today is really one of the most incisive commentators on a whole variety of current political issues.

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Scott Ritter: Acts of War: The war between the US and Iran is on

American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions that took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.

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US is on brink of survival crisis, according to Moscow

MOSCOW. July 29 (Interfax) - Moscow thinks that the United States could face a serious domestic crisis in the near future.

"The U.S. is on the brink of a mass crisis of surviving," a source with the Russian Foreign Ministry told journalists on Tuesday.

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Russia takes control of Turkmen (world?) gas

From the details coming out of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and Moscow over the weekend, it is apparent that the great game over Caspian energy has taken a dramatic turn. In the geopolitics of energy security, nothing like this has happened before. The United States has suffered a huge defeat in the race for Caspian gas. The question now is how much longer Washington could afford to keep Iran out of the energy market.

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Capitalism Under Assault

The system is busted. That much is clear. Now many people are experimenting with alternatives. Roberto Mangabeira Unger has long been one of those on the cutting edge of fundamental reform. Finally he has the chance to change the course of history.

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Khudari: The anti-siege ship will sail to Gaza regardless of Israel's fears

GAZA, (PIC)-- MP Jamal Al-Khudari, the head of the popular committee against the siege, stated Tuesday that the ship which is scheduled to leave Cyprus for Gaza to break the Israeli siege will sail despite the fears voiced by Israel towards this anti-siege voyage.

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7.29.2008

Neuroscience, National Security, and the "war on terror"

Operating with little ethical oversight, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been tapping cutting-edge advances in neuroscience, computers and robotics in a quest to build the "perfect warfighter."

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Paul: US would back Israeli strike on Iran

Former US presidential candidate Ron Paul says should there be an Israeli strike on Iran over its nuclear work, it would not be unilateral.

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Gates omits Israel from 'close' US allies

!!????!!!! - Ed.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has signed an official defense strategy document which fails to mention Israel in a list of close allies.

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Bush will issue a mass pardon

Seriously, I would be totally thrilled if we got to this point without some horrors intervening first. - Ed.

Before leaving office George W. Bush will issue a mass pardon, the largest collection of presidential pardons in American history. Bush will pardon himself, Vice President Cheney, and a long list of officials involved in torture, eavesdropping, destruction of evidence, the CIA leak case and a range of potential crimes.

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Thar She Blows: The Last Hurrah for the Banking System

by Mike Whitney

The Bush administration will be mailing out another batch of "stimulus" checks in the very near future. There's no way around it. The Fed is in a pickle and can't lower interest rates for fear that food and energy prices will shoot to stratosphere. At the same time, the economy is shrinking faster than anyone thought possible with no sign of a rebound. That leaves stimulus checks as the only way to "prime the pump" and keep consumer spending chugging along. Otherwise business activity will slow to a crawl and the economy will tank. There's no other choice.

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Q&A: Hamas curbing groups firing rockets

Interview with Mohamed Bassyouni, head of the Egyptian Shura Council's Foreign Relations Committee

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Chertoff comes from long line of Talmudic Rabbis

America's new "Homeland Security Czar" Michael Chertoff doesn't like to talk about his childhood very much, probably because much of it was spent in Israel. Given the fact that his mother was an Israeli citizen, and that Michael is also an Israeli citizen (probably a dual-national), it is hard to imagine that given the intense Zionist and Talmudic character of his family that he would not have visited Israel on several occasions as a child.

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Still at Code Yellow, DHS 'fears' 11 months of 'heightened alert'

With 99 days until the presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security is raising vague concerns about possible terrorist attacks in the US or abroad.

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Humans are 'infovores' whose minds hunger for new information to assimilate

Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information?

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Censored Iraq: 5 years, millions dead including 4,000 troops, but almost no images

Baghdad - The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war.

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7.28.2008

Cryptogon: America's Army: Free video game, social engineering platform, and surveillance tool

This video game is nothing less than an automaton that shapes and then harvests teenage minds so that the U.S. Army can repurpose their bodies years later.

I’ve looked at a lot of evil in my days, but this is palpable, murmuring, inky black evil; complete with automated meme delivery and driving, metrics, surveillance. Out the other end drops some number of carbon based lifeforms, with brains at one end, assholes at the other, and trigger fingers usually attached to their right hands. The Army must lick its chops when these kids sign on the dotted line. Not only are the recruits already brainwashed, but they did it to themselves, on their own time.

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US warns Israel - there will be no 'USS Liberty Pt II'

This recalled to my mind the interesting tidbit that Fallon and McConnell were both on the USS Saratoga in the Mediterranean Sea during July 1967, when the Liberty was attacked. - Ed.


For the last 41 years, Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty has been a taboo topic about which neither the Jewish state nor the US has allowed free and open discussion. Like a paid-off judge in the service of organized crime interests who pounds his gavel on the bench, for the last 4 decades Israel and her supporters in the US government have bellowed ‘case closed’ and have raked over the coals anyone–including the survivors of the attack themselves–from arguing otherwise. Realizing the tidal wave of outrage that would occur if the American people were to come of age and lose their innocence in realizing what Israel did in murdering 34 American servicemen 4 decades ago in a premeditated attack, (to say nothing of the cover-up perpetrated by the US government) it has been on the list of forbidden topics……until recently.


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If Iran is attacking, it might really be Israel

by Phillip Giraldi

The Benny Morris op-ed in the NYT last Friday should provide convincing evidence that Israel really really really wants an attack against Iran sooner rather than later. Morris is close to the Israeli government and his case that Iran must be bombed soon and with maximum conventional weaponry to avoid using nukes later was clearly intended to push the United States to do the attacking. The likelihood that Dick Cheney is almost certainly supportive of a US pre-emptive strike and might well be pulling strings behind the scenes, possibly without the knowledge of the Great Decider, makes the next several months particularly significant if a war is to be avoided.

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The Venezuelan-Russian Alliance?

by Richard Skaff

In this epoch of globalization where authoritarianism has prospered, elitism has conquered, false flag operations have ascended, liberty has shriveled, war has prevailed, and true democracies have vanished [2], a handful of sovereign nations are trying to survive the whirlpool of the new world order by arming themselves and by making unholy alliances that will prolong their sovereignty and survival.

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PressTV branded terrorist, is the alternative media next?

US House Resolution 1308, introduced June 26, seeks to blacklist several TV channels as 'Specially Designated Global Terrorist' (SDGT) organizations. These would include Iran's TV stations, including PressTV.com

This attack on the First Amendment is VERY worrying. Where will this end ? What about the Alternative Media web sites, and search engines, which might highlight reports issued by PRESSTV, and other news outlets which aren't controlled by neo-cons ?

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Scott Ritter: Why is America so crazy?

More Scott Ritter and his crystal clear vision.

s o s: Conference to discuss, and lay plans for obtaining, prosecutions of high level US war criminals

A two-day conference on obtaining prosecutions of high level American war criminals will open September 13th, in Andover, Mass. The conference will explore the legal grounds for, and plan for, obtaining prosecutions of President Bush and top officials of his Administration for war crimes.

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Les Vis: The strange moments of these remarkable times

If someone were to ask me to define God, I would say, "Imagine the highest and deepest, most piercing and enveloping love. Then imagine you are on a highway out in the Midwest. On some of those highways you will sometimes see signs for a Las Vegas casino called Harrah's. Well, you might see one in Bangor, Maine that says the distance is thousands of miles. Further on you see a sign which says 'God; one million light years.' That is how that feeling describes God in terms of definition and I am a million light years from there as I sit here now." That's the best I can do but that is probably wrong too because I am a million light years from my best as well. I hope I have satisfied your curiosity... it is that close.

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Crystal Ball Gazing: Visualize the Dow at 6,000

by Mike Whitney

Last Wednesday, at an improvised press conference, George Bush gave what may have been the most comical performance of his eight year presidency. Looking like the skipper on the flight-deck of the Hindenburg, Bush tried his best to reassure the public that "all's well" with the economy and that everyone's deposits were perfectly safe in the rapidly disintegrating US banking system. Leaning lazily on the presidential podium, Bush shrugged his shoulders and said,

“My hope is that people take a deep breath and realize that their deposits are protected by our government. We're not seeing the growth we’d like to see, but the financial system is basically sound."

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McKinney blazes NC trail with incendiary speech

Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has moved from blue to green, and similarly, she demonstrated her move to the left side of the political spectrum in a speech she gave in Durham: "It's time to move from protest to resistance."

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The Pentagon and Oil

by Sarah Meyer

Nick Turse wrote, on Tom Dispatch (17.07.08): “For years, "oil" and "Iraq" couldn't make it into the same sentence in mainstream coverage of the invasion and occupation of that country. Recently, that's begun to change, but "oil" and "the Pentagon" still seldom make the news together. “

SOHBET KARBUZ has been following “Oil” and “the Pentagon” since 1999. Karbuz’ most complete article, US Military Energy Consumption- Facts and Figures, with extensive footnotes, was published in May 2007 on Energy Bulletin.

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Life in the post political age

by Joe Bageant

Every now and then I am fortunate enough to communicate with someone who has near complete insight into our political process, why things happen and where it seems likely to be headed. Recently I received this brilliant analysis from a high powered political consultant whose name is withheld for obvious reasons. He/she has to live and work in the political world and for either party. In any case, I found it breathtaking in its fundamental analysis and its clarity — clarity being no easy thing to accomplish is the swamp of media-consumerism-politics.
– Joe Bageant

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