Cultural Revolution in the Making

I agree with Dr. Cole and his commenters. Jon Stewart is deluding himself. Against what's building up, moderation will get him- and all of us- exactly where we don't want to be.

The top 1% of the population owns 40% of the private wealth. There's the Cultural Revolution, goading the disinformed the same way they did before the last Civil War.

Roland in comments:

Why on earth is Jon Stewart calling for sweet reason at a time like this?

The top 1% isn’t listening to reason. Why should they? They got what they want. They like it this way. Unless someone makes them stop, they’ll just keep on going.

You could make a logically foolproof, superbly researched, cogently argued case for a more equitable wealth distribution, as maximizing long-term utility for everyone. But so what? Mr. or Ms. 1% would pretend to listen, nod a bit, and then reply, “Fine. Whatever. See ya.”

Sweet Reason only works when the interlocutors have some level of mutual respect. The top 1% currently has no respect whatsoever for the bottom 80%.

According to the ethical values of the top 1%, success is what makes you respectable. If you’re not successful, you’re just a loser, and simply not worth taking seriously.

If you’re not taken seriously, how can you employ Sweet Reason when discussing affairs with the top 1%? Answer: you can’t.

Or the top 1% wanna-bees. There's force behind the Cultural Revolution. Those that want it all, and can never really hope to have it, manipulated by those who have it already.

Alas, I don't think it is possible to make them stop. They own the government. They own the media. They have the world's greatest intelligence agencies, and the world's most ruthless people backing them up.

And as far as the border goes- if it gets that bad here, do you really think they will allow Canada to stay untouched?

The border might be good for awhile, but friends, if you leave, I'd advise you to keep on going. Because if it gets that bad- and if there's any money in it for the top 1%, it most assurredly will- America will suffer the same fate of every other hubristic Empire. In a nuclear world, that could get very bad indeed.

main$tream Village thought

In a nation where the main$tream denies or yawns at war crimes and smears the messenger, it's no surprise the main$tream advocates war with Iran to save the economy.

what is this "sanity" of which they speak?

Well, that's sane at least. But some of your other points? What is sane about turning your back on the Reptilian Party?

I'd really like to know.

So let's get this straight. It's not sane to want accountability from Bu$h-Cheney on the War in Iraq, and other war crime issues. It's not sane to ask if Obama is now guilty in this too. It's not sane to close Gitmo. It's not sane to uncover government crimes. It's not sane to chase down the bank$ters, either, for fraud or malfeasance. It's not sane to want to fund jobs instead of endless war.

Thanks for telling me what isn't sane. I wonder about this sanity, Jon Stewart. It strikes me as pretty crazy.

never steal anything small

the big lie on fraudclosure

Yesterday morning, I had The Misinformation Hour on TV as I got dressed for work. One of the comments that was made – “No one was wrongly thrown out of their home” — was repeated or ignored by hosts and guests alike.

This is patently demonstrably false, and yet no one challenged it.

The banks have gotten the Big Lie technique down to a science: State a lie so colossal that no one could believe anyone “has the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” In practice, adding factually accurate, but irrelevant or misleading color, helps push the lie on unsusp0ecting rubes.

The banks and their many supplicants have been successful in doing just that in the robosigning issue. Any discussion about property rights, due process, or criminal investigations into perjury are thwarted; instead, the focus is on deadbeat homeowners. And note that I am the guy who in Q1 2010 wrote More Foreclosures, Please . . .)

The misdirection is successful, and the average reader/viewer/listener has no idea how badly they are being misinformed.

Beyond property rights and due process, the issue of this legal impossibility of being wrongly foreclosed upon (absent fraud), are the bailouts. Saving broken business models managed incompetently by bad management is a recipe for more errors and angst.

Fraudclosure is a perfect example of this. When you save broken companies from their own incompetence, this is what you get.

We have no record of how many people have been erroneously foreclosed — the banks themselves are the only centralized source of that data, and they ain’t talking — but we have lots of anecdotal evidence.

The plural of anecdote is not data; what is needed is a central collection of all the anecdotal errors of false or erroneous foreclosure — someone with a national office, say a US Attorney’s or Congressman’s office...

Not gonna happen. The bank$ters own these people, too.

those who feed the madness

Money's behind the march to fascism. Don't ever doubt it.

I'll repeat my response here to Jack Crow's comment he doesn't want this country, anyway.

You live here. You have this country, and it has you.

No, there is not nobility amongst the Democrats. They are venal and corrupt. But it's the kind of corrupt that simply wants your money and obedience. You can fight that.

But what's brewing amongst the Tea Party Republicans the corporatists are stoking is a wholly different beast.



There howling madness there, a xenophobia used as an outlet for deep self-loathing and inadequacy. Instead of being a neo-Rome building a neo-empire, we could become the race of locusts some already see us as, stripping the earth bare and devouring all in our way. We both know that exists among us already.

You stand for it or against it. Voting Democrat is simply a tool to fight it for the moment. There are better, many of which I will not discuss here or anywhere it can be heard by the machine.

Reptilians Take Congress for Halloween

Trick or Treat



Monkeyfister thinks the bank$ters have won. There are estimates- not for the American public to read- that the reality is far worse than anyone will admit. But don't bother hoarding food and ammunition. The bank$ters own the Pentagon, and the toys they developed under Darth Rumsfeld make even AK-47s look silly.




"It can't happen here" say you. Let's hope you're right.

more things to look forward to with Tea Partying in 2011

104 Republicans In Congress Want To Privatize Social Security

Heckuva job, Larry!

...

perhaps an unfortunate reply.

this land ain't your land, this land ain't my land

...if the Congresscritters end birthright citizenship.

One wonders what the Company will do with all of us? Reservations? Concentrations camps? Soylent Green?

the most qualified

So what's an architect and profiteer of the mortgage meltdown bubble doing appointed as the One's National $ecurity Advisor?

Security, Securities, they're all the same thing. Once more, a Goldman-Sachs fox is rotated into a henhouse management position. In the coming austerity you can count on the Praetorians still getting their paychecks.

The American Dream

George Carlin, "...you have to be asleep to believe it."



Yes, I've linked to it before, but once is not enough for Carlin the Great, and who knows? Maybe the willfully ignorant might decide to wake up someday.

plumbing the way tricky Dicky would have liked

with plausible deniability...

Greenwald:

After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies, brutality and inhumanity that drove America's role in the Vietnam War, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger infamously plotted to smear his reputation and destroy his credibility...

This weekend, WikiLeaks released over 400,000 classified documents of the Iraq War detailing genuinely horrific facts about massive civilian death, U.S. complicity in widespread Iraqi torture, systematic government deceit over body counts, and the slaughter of civilians by American forces about which Daniel Ellsberg himself said, as the New York Times put it: "many of the civilian deaths there could be counted as murder."

Predictably, just as happened with Ellsberg, there is now a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health -- all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks. But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media...

True enough, but let's not be premature on identifying this chain of command. The hacks at The New York Pravda or CNP (Cable News Pravda, what else?) aren't getting their orders from previous Executive Office occupants any more than they're getting them from the current occupants. They aren't just doing this to preserve their reputations or their sources of information, although as cheerleaders for the endless war they're certainly doing that.

Follow the money. Follow the money. The real puppeteers are those that are profiting from the endless war, the ones who decided to use 9-11 as a new Pearl Harbor, whether they planned ahead of it like Cheneyburton or simply used the militarization for fun and profit like Goldman-Sachs. They don't have to give the order for the hit on Assange. They have too many sycophants ready to do it for them.

n-dimensional chess only profits the players

...so I am in no way comforted in hearing that by letting the Reptilians win the DINOcrats gain.

And the example they give? Newt and Slick Willie? More punditocratic fecal matter spoon-fed to the gullible to appease their pwners.

This comment by Phoenician in a time of Romans on this $ystem-gaming:

...One of the best ways, of course, is to create one side with all the cash, make it look like two sides, and prevent any meaningful authentic third side from coming into play. If voters are given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, well, you don’t really care which they choose.

Bonus points if you can get the more easily excited screaming that Tweedledee is the Devil…

Check, and mate.

when you act as you think, it's the missing link

Synchronicity is what we are being programmed against.

via Avedon, the question raised by Dead Head Daisy:

...Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment?

Where is the Left in these harsh economic times?

I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself; their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves.

In fact, most have NOT.

The Left is therefore doing it FOR the poor bedraggled working classes... not for themselves. (They do not feel personally disenfranchised, they feel they are speaking up FOR the disenfranchised.)

And this is why they keep getting it wrong...

Well, yeah. That, and the Company's ad men.

War and Rumor of War

Ian Welsh tells me I can either be a liberal or a Democrat.

Either/ or, huh? That's a fallacy to me. How about a third option like "none of the above".

Evidence has it Obama is guilty of many war crimes. He's a Company man, stoking the Company war machine. Like him, the Democratic Congress loves the Endless War and is largely bought by the bank$ters, too. Don't give me all that silliness about Hillary. She, and her Big Dog before her, were simply slicker than Obama. Don't forget who brought Larry Summers to the table in the first place. Don't forget who started blowing the financial bubbles in real estate, with the help of Cisneros.

But I voted for that Dog twice, and Al Gore, too, although I think Al Gore is a fraud. But I'd vote for him again, or Hillary, if she ran against a Republican.

Yes, voting for the Democrats is simply putting off the day the Republicans get control of the national $ecurity state again, voting the Democrats in will only allow the fascists to tighten their grip unnoticed by the main$tream.

Why do I want to vote for the Democrats? Over Republicans?

Because the deterioration of society accelerates faster under the Republicans. Because it really is the economy. Because with time under Democratic administrations a greater fraction of the people are able to feed their kids. Because this isn't a perfect world, and although I'd damn sure vote for one if it was out there, I think the $ystem is owned by the Company.

I don't think you can be part of the $ystem if you aren't.

There is a real difference between politicians who know they're evil, rue it, and try to muddle through the best they can, and politicians who are simply ignorant and evil, or intelligently sociopathically evil.

FDR lied us into World War II and brushed aside civil rights. He also helped create jobs that fed a desperate nation, regulated the bank$ters, planted a billion trees as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, effecting a massive ecological change that likely kept the midwest from becoming the same kind of desert as the middle east and (unbeknownst to him) delaying global warming.

Or maybe he only slowed down the inevitable- the feudalization of American society, the pauperization of a nation, the decay of the environment. Maybe we should just lie down, slash our wrists, and let the crocodilian Republicans devour us.

I think the way to avoid the inevitable is to, you know, avoid it.

Vote Democratic in November. Maybe we'll pithe the big reptiles when they aren't looking.

No Witnesses

...surviving, that is.

...the Justice Department on Monday said that it would not seek murder charges against Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater armorer accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice president on Dec. 24, 2006. Justice officials said that they were abandoning the case after an investigation that began in early 2007, and included trips to Baghdad by federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to interview Iraqi witnesses.

The government’s decision to drop the Moonen case follows a series of failures by prosecutors around the country in cases aimed at former personnel of Blackwater, which is now known as Xe Services. In September, a Virginia jury was unable to reach a verdict in the murder trial of two former Blackwater guards accused of killing two Afghan civilians. Late last year, charges were dismissed against five former Blackwater guards who had been indicted on manslaughter and related weapons charges in a September 2007 shooting incident in Nisour Square in Baghdad, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed.

Interviews with lawyers involved in the cases, outside legal experts and a review of some records show that federal prosecutors have failed to overcome a series of legal hurdles, including the difficulties of obtaining evidence in war zones, of gaining proper jurisdiction for prosecutions in American civilian courts, and of overcoming immunity deals given to defendants by American officials on the scene...

Besides, how can you conduct a global War on Terra without legally immune mercenary storm troopers?

Or patriotic slave labor?

...Easily tens of thousands of blacks served the Confederacy as laborers, teamsters, cooks and even as soldiers. Some estimates indicate 25 percent of free blacks and 15 percent of slaves actively supported the South during the war. Why? Blacks served the South because it was their home....

That, or being loyally hung or gut shot if they didn't. Patriotism is an 'Merikan moral value. The Iraqis still throw roses at our mercenaries when they come into town from the oilfields, too, and doubtless decline to witness against Blackwater/ Xe/ Orcs, Inc. because of their own patriotic love.

"...You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?"

Well, yeah sure you betcha, dimples.

She's not simply stupid. She's deeply ignorant, and likely it's self-enforced. There are deep psychoses in those baby brown eyes and that pearly white smile.

obviously did not play well with others

General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired in the Bu$h administration, too. But this occurred under Clinton:

Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger’s table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.

During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.

At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?”

The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, “Of course we can ...” which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.

“You can?” was the excited reply.

“Why, of course we can,” I countered. “Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go.”

The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. “I knew I should not have asked that....”

“No, you should not have,” I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. “Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America.”

Obviously he could not fit in or function in Petraeus Caesar's Pentagon not being a Team Merika playah.

glorious, ain't it?

As Chris Floyd calls him, the most decorated General who's never won a war has another victory for the advocates of the Long War:

BAQUBA, Iraq — Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents.

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency...

Now one thing that's only been mentioned in The New York Pravda is that "the end of combat operations" in Iraq has only been possible because we've pulled out of the cities and consolidated our troops and mercenaries around the oilfields. That, and we've been paying the Sunni a lot of cash to stay off our backs.

Looks like the price of "peace" just went up, and the Pentagon paymasters don't have the spare change budgeted for it yet.

But be of good cheer for the war machine. After all, as Petraeus Caesar told the One, "You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting ... You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

You know it's all about the Glory of the Struggle for these guys, and, of course, the money in their pockets, for the rest of their lives.

it's no surprise they've got it exactly backwards

When Germans start saying some things you had best be a little alarmed.

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

In a speech in Potsdam, she said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work.

Mrs Merkel's comments come amid recent outpourings of strong anti-immigrant feeling from mainstream politicians.

A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners".

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country... We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality.

"And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

In her speech, the chancellor specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany" like Christianity and Judaism...

Although in both Germany and Europe muslims may soon be required to sew a yellow crescent moon on their clothes...

The issue that all the Righteous right, whether in Germany or living right here gloss over that it's multinational corporations ruining society. Their quest for nearly free labor leads to the export of good jobs everywhere, and the import of cheap labor everywhere. It leads to slave labor among those able to hold on to work in virtually every industry, and an aspiring class of people with all the morals and restraint a school of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

However, this is all very good news to the military-industrial complex in 'Merika.

Not only can they continue scapegoat the brown people, if they really start freaking again, they can bomb and re-invade the Germans with impunity, too.