The ‘Invisible Hand’ is picking your pocket

By Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal.

The Invisible Hand is a notion brought to us by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations. It poses that, “in a free market, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community,” cough, cough.

If you believe that, you’ll love how Smith subsequently reasoned that each individual, “maximizing revenue for himself maximizes the total revenue of society as a whole.” This gave the rich and greedy the right to plunder with impunity with the blessing of god, now as well as in Smith’s late 18th Century.

But what about those Cayman Island accounts for stashing cash without paying taxes? you ask. What about those tax-free kickbacks from government contractors to government officials? What about the government passing legislation to favor favored corporations (Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Defense, Big Insurance, Big Polluters, Big NAFTA and CAFTA, Big Investment Banks, Big Subprime lending institutions) in the global economy?

After all, theirs is “The Invisible Hand,” maximizing their wealth while, actually, picking your pocket deeply. In return, they may make nice with a hand in building a museum, a hospital, funding some educational TV, supporting some liberal cause (with less money for each than for a reactionary cause). Or they look for a cure for AIDS (making believe it wasn’t weaponized by the CIA), eliminating malaria while banning DDT, faking at making the environment cleaner while fouling it with their products. Whatever they give is to offset the dinosauric lunch they’ve made of our treasury and the international banquet of world resources.

Ah well, so it goes. Or does it? The fact is that unrestrained, i.e. “free” trade is not free. It costs us a fortune, like the Social Security Bush wanted to purloin for Wall Street in the form of private accounts and their “administration fees” (privatization). Or as Linda Bilmes of Harvard and Nobel 2001 economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia U estimate: the Iraq war will really cost much more than $3 trillion to “bring Democracy” to the Middle East while it is purloining Middle Eastern oil by force of arms — and, making money on that, too.

There are few scams, few noble causes which “The Invisible Hand” has not grabbed to cover for picking your pocket, in fact to reach down and squeeze your private assets as hard as possible while claiming it was good for you.

If that seems obscene, it is

It is more than obscene. It is illegal, reprehensible, selfish, inhuman, and the purveyor of elitist existence. For what enthusiasts call “free trade” is the imprisonment of the working world in their grip, as employees, as consumers, as human thinking, feeling beings.

Government, as any institution or individual, can’t be “free” in the abstract, without any regulation on the blind assumption that it will do good, simply while eating your legs off. That notion of free is really the jungle book version of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest.

In fact, in the almost eight years of Bush blight, we have seen the removal of regulation in pollution of air, water, and land, and seen its results. We have seen the relaxation of taxing-the-rich and trade controls, and seen the various emerging corporate scandals, most notably the now bankrupt Enron, which took thousands of employee pensions and a few real lives down with its sinking ship.

As Stiglitz himself says in his book, Making Globalization Work, ”Whenever there are ‘externalities’ — where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay or for which they are not compensated — markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have been long understood — environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, will produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, will also produce too little basic research. (Remember, the government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the Internet and the first telegraph line, and most of the advances in bio-tech.)

“But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets — that is always.

“Government plays an important role in banking and securities regulation, and a host of other areas: some regulation is required to make markets work. Government is needed, almost all would agree, at a minimum to enforce contracts and property rights. . . .”

The restoration of balanced control of government and private enterprise is at the heart of our economic dilemmas these days. Our government is totally “out of control” in respect to eliminating control. Hence the endless flow of treasury dollars into preemptive war, the non-seeking of alternative energies with any real commitment to funding; the sacking of the environment by non-friendly corporate abusers; even the total abuse and fraud, the hacking of the electoral system itself. There is no sector of our life that the perverse “Invisible Hand” hasn’t laid its corrupt fingers on, including the total neglect of the country’s infrastructure.

And so we now have private corporations taking control of state and national toll roads. What was the people’s property is rapidly being sold off to multi-national corporations that will lump the nations of the South and North Americas together like so much silly putty. Their interests are only their own corporations, as is that of the North American Union, whether it’s mining, trade, trucking, ports, or taxation. In short, the “Invisible Hand” has put our world on the table of the market like a slain carcass to auction off each piece to the highest, hungriest bidder.

It’s fighting back time

So, thank you, Mr. Bush, Cheney, Ms. Rice, et al, for turning the economic clock back to the stone-age. Perhaps this May Day, as the Freedom Socialist Party suggests, offers us the chance to take to the streets in protest, with workers around the world: the Iraqi popular resistance movement with heroic strikes by the Oil Workers Union to prevent the US from privatizing Iraq’s oil; by Palestinians in Gaza who broke through the walls of their prison and fought back at the brutal Israeli occupation. IDF Refusenicks are on the rise.

In Latin America, nationals are joining the fight against multi-nation “free trade” agreements. Support for revolutionary action is filling the air. A mostly female workforce of more than 41,000 teachers has recently shut down schools to demand smaller class sizes and doubling meager salaries. Would that their fellow teachers in America make similar demands for smaller classes and a more truthful, educative curriculum than passing standardized “Every Child Left Behind” testing.

Even in overworked China, thousands protest or strike each day for improved working and living conditions. Pressure for a state-run trade union federation to take necessary steps is looming. All of us have to slap “The Invisible Hand” hard before it swipes all bargaining chips from the table. In the US, labor leaders should give their angry workers a chance for CEOs to hear their complaints. Stop cozying up to management. Rank-and-file organizing is shaking up and energizing the United Auto Workers and the Service Employees International Union. In Seattle, leaders have created a multi-union activist caucus. Amalgamated Transit Union members also now have a rank-and-file caucus in their local.

As “The Invisible Hand” of a visibly out-of-control Capitalism shows itself taking away benefits, job stability, health care, retirement plans from employees, the workers, their unions, their representatives have to slap that hand and fight for justice. We need to fight against the desperation of poor people from Egypt to Mexico to Haiti to the good old USA. We are many, they are few. It is the people’s muscle that gives “The Invisible Hand” its strength and power. And we can take it away as well. Let that message be heard loud and clear in every dark corner of this country and the world.

The Bumps under the Blanket and the Suicide Flu.

From the Smoking Mirrors blog.

Sometimes it is hard to know what to talk about. You come to that point where you feel like you’ve talked about everything you could think of and you don’t know where to go next. There’s some kind of massive cleanup operation going on recently. A number of British policemen were found dead. A hooker and a madam wind up hung- the latter said she would never commit suicide. A CIA man gets shot to death by police. There’s some kind of Danny Casolaro virus going around.

Underneath the covers of this brave new world are unidentified bumps traveling back and forth as if there were a rat orgy going on beneath. All we see are bumps. There are no faces and no names, until you read about somebody stabbing themselves in the back thirty times and then caving in the top of their head with a hammer in a frenzy of suicidal depression. The bumps keep moving and the bodies keep appearing somewhere else.

It’s hard to imagine this is all about some kind of exposure of the major villains. Everybody knows that Dick Cheney and his associates are a pack of whores so why would anyone be surprised that they hang out with whores? Who could imagine that the mass media which massages the common mind would ever print anything that the big whores wouldn’t like? If you told me that Dick Cheney raped and murdered pre-pubescent school girls and then barbecued and ate them I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I imagine that the only reason he wasn’t doing something like this on a regular basis is that he was getting a much better body count in his other efforts.

If you told me that Bennie Netanyahu and the Likudnicks celebrated Seder by dressing up in the skins of Palestinian women and danced around singing Hava Nagila while trampling the skinned and dying women underfoot, I wouldn’t bat an eye. They wouldn’t bat an eye doing it, unless it was part of the vamping. And if they did it as part of a promotion for a Tel Aviv supermarket opening it would be a big hit but you wouldn’t hear anything about it because no one would report it so… what gives?

After the murder of JFK thirty some people connected to the case died under mysterious circumstances. Books have been written and films shot that juggled the incidents in various ways and it didn’t come to anything. A lot of people have died in mysterious ways. Vincent Foster remains a curious mystery as does that of Dr. David Kelly. Here’s a little list and you might enjoy this excerpt. It’s my favorite.

April 10, 1987: Shani Warren, 26

–Expertise: Personal assistant in a company called Micro Scope, which was taken over by GEC Marconi less than four weeks after her death.

–Circumstance of Death: Found drowned in 45cm. (18in) of water, not far from the site of David Greenhalgh’s death fall. Warren died exactly one week after the death of Stuart Gooding and serious injury to Greenhalgh. She was found gagged with a noose around her neck. Her feet were also bound and her hands tied behind her back.

–Coroner’s verdict: Open.

(It was said that Warren had gagged herself, tied her feet with rope, then tied her hands behind her back and hobbled to the lake on stiletto heels to drown herself.)

Then there’s the rather longer list of those who appear to have died mysteriously because of some connection to Bush or Clinton. Then there are all those dead microbiologists and there’s even that babysitter for Marvin Bush complete with other mystery connections.

Now… I’ve got other lists besides these and, no doubt, you- the reader, can find even more. People are getting wacked or experiencing spontaneous insanity resulting in strange and fatal behavior. Maybe the deaths are a warning to others. Maybe it’s some kind of flu. Maybe it’s necessary to protect our freedoms from those who hate our freedom.

My favorite coincidence is the fact that two Bush Brothers presided over the two states with the highest number of executions and who diligently went about seeing them done and, on occasion, yukking it up, as Bloody George did with Karla Faye Tucker.

I keep hoping for a military coup and a special Ceausescu moment for the administration but that doesn’t appear to be among the bumps moving under the covers. I keep hoping some world leader will stand up before the U.N. and dramatically accuse the real perpetrators of 9/11 with the evidence we have and maybe some of the evidence that we don’t but that doesn’t’ seem to be a bump under the covers either. I keep hoping for an international sit-down strike that stops the engines of the world and continues until what needs to be done gets done… not much happening there either. Every now and then some organization proclaims a day to step away from the machine and maybe some people do but nobody notices and nothing gets reported.

Some strange shit is going on behind the stage. We know that high government officials around the world are engaged in large pedophile rings. We’ve seen the evidence in The Franklin Coverup. We’ve seen the evidence in The Dutroux Case. We’ve seen evidence of high government officials in Britain involved in the same. We’ve seen it all over with more links than in all the chains they wrapped around all of the children before they tossed them into the sea.

With all these wars that have been proven to have been based on lies and the myriad connections of various governments in the distribution of Afghanistan opium; made possible by the Afghanistan war and with the broad daylight genocide of the Palestinian people it’s a no brainer to assume that some really evil people are running the world.

Of course, the general public is daily treated to ongoing variations of Liebowitz porn and the subtle molding of a nation of Jon Benet’s all sexed up for the apocalypse. High schools hold proms with ‘pimps and ho’s’ motifs while decrying the breakdown in moral fiber which amounts to so much roughage passing through the cosmic colon. The Walrus and the Carpenter aren’t going to run out of oysters or tears.

People are getting fat and slow and stupid. Every little tic and twist now has a pharmaceutical remedy and a support group to nurture and glorify their tribulation. It’s a world of dysfunctional Jesus clones weeping with Oprah and saving the world.

Something is going on and it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what it is. Did bad aliens take over? Is Satanism the new Christianity? Is there something in the water or the air? Is it the GWEN system? Is it a combination of all of these and more? It’s suffocating and like a heavy narcotic dream. It’s not having any effect on the bumps moving under the blanket but we don’t know what those are. The bodies keep showing up and the subway to Hell keeps running while the sidebars on the car say Disney World.

It doesn’t look like everybody is going to wakeup before the usual horrible result occurs. I’m at a loss to think what anyone can do besides hunker down under the radar until the harvesting is over. I wish it looked more like we were about to turn the corner into a healing and long awaited light. It could happen I guess but there is no light where those bumps are moving and not much hope that anyone is going to rip the covers off.

I don’t like having to end something like this with such a mournful tone. I know it will straighten itself out because it always does, if only for awhile. Something tells me though that we are on the verge of terrible events; events more terrible than we have seen before.

ABOUT THAT REBATE STIMULUS CHECK FROM GEORGE W

Source: Allen L Roland’s Radio Weblog.

George W Bush’s so called stimulus check to all Americans is a joke and meant only to pacify the masses and uneducated while the Cheney / Bush crime syndicate continues to fleece the economy: Allen L Roland

Here’s how to use your rebate ~

As you may have heard, the Bush Administration said each and every one of us would now get a nice rebate of $600 dollars. A rebate which will obviously go to savings, debt and bills and virtually none will be spent to stimulate the economy ~ which is in the midst of a Bush recession, which is following a failed Bush occupation and an equally illegal and failed Bush war.

So, in many instances, the Bush stimulus will just be stimulating the banks ~ that are already being bailed out !

But what would happen if we actually spent it ?

If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, all the money will go to China.

If we spend it on gasoline it will all go to the Arabs, if we purchase a computer it will all go to India, if we purchase fruit and vegetables it will all go to Mexico, Honduras, and Guatamala, if we purchase a good car it will all go to Japan, if we purchase useless nicknacks it will all go to Taiwan and none of it will help the American economy.

If you’re not outraged ~ you’re on life support.

All the president’s liars

Fun new game! Which TV news “military expert” is really a whore for the Bush administration? (Hint: all of them

By Mark Morford, SF Gate:

Did it work? Were you duped?

Were you calmly and methodically and rather nefariously led to believe that maybe, just maybe, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the rest, right along with tales of soldier suicides and torture and staggering civilian body counts and the utterly disastrous Bush military policy weren’t really all that bad after all?

Did you watch any CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, lo, these past five or six years, listen to the pundits and ponder the wise, informed comments of all the military experts the networks brought on to discuss Iraq policy, then conclude that maybe this war, this appalling invasion might actually be positive, that maybe the surge is working and torture ain’t all that bad and the democracy is taking root and America is proud and perky and victorious once again?

Did you believe any of it? Because oh my God, they sure as hell worked us over like a rabid dog works a hunk of gristle.

Who are “they,” exactly? Why, they’re the newly discovered and rather unexpected fraternity of expert BS artists, a highly specialized group known to gullible Americans as stoic, stern-faced retired generals, colonels, majors, military advisers, former Pentagon officials, the ones you’ve heard and seen on TV news for years, but who are known to the Bush administration as a delightfully dishonest gaggle of preferred liars, lackeys, shills, puppets and mouthpieces for Dick Cheney and Donny Rumsfeld and Dubya himself.

The truth is as sad as it is revolting: You have been lied to, again and again, perhaps even more than you imagined, in a rather unexpected way, perhaps like no other time in American history, in a more carefully orchestrated and widespread effort than any presidential administration has managed to attempt in the past.

Here is the New York Times, still managing to do what it does best despite the era of dying newspapers and disrespected journalism, running a simply astonishing piece on all the dishonest “military consultants” who’ve appeared for the past half decade on every major network — and yes, Fox adores these liars best of all — to discuss Iraq, surges, U.S. military strategy, the works.

Here is the Times revealing, after two years of battling the Defense Department to release the 8,000 pages of incriminating documents by way of instigating lawsuits and leveraging the Freedom of Information Act — and barely even then — that this entire dour fraternity of deceitful military cretins has been in service of BushCo since Sept. 11 — and still is, to this very day.

To clarify: Whenever you’ve seen one of those dour-faced retired generals discussing details of U.S. war strategy on MSNBC, chances are staggeringly good he was/is in the pocket of Rummy or Cheney. Whenever a wise old colonel has appeared on Fox or CNN or CBS News to say the surge is working or troop morale is strong or that all those suicide bombings aren’t really so bad, chances are overwhelmingly good that he is lying outright and you’re hearing exactly what Donald Rumsfeld wanted him to say. Isn’t that refreshing?

The Times story is simply astounding. Up and down the line, from major to general to colonel to every sort of expert they have, it’s the same story. Over and over again, presented “tens of thousands of times” and totaling countless hundreds of TV and radio hours, it’s been a near constant stream of calculated deception and misrepresentation and bogus pro-Iraq spin. Neutrality? Fair analysis of the war? Criticism of Bush? Not a chance.

You may ask: Why would they do such a thing? What’s in it for the generals and the colonels to lie outright to the American populace and the embarrassingly blind news networks, to whore their credentials and trash their distinguished reputations in favor of defending a lost war and useless president?

That’s easy: Access. Access to the White House, to the corridors of power and influence; access to the perks and the pals and snifters of brandy, the backroom handshakes, the business deals, the hugely lucrative military contracts, the sweet, sweet piles of cash and privilege and power awaiting them if they just toe the line and keep their real opinions to themselves. Also worth mentioning: Many are military men down to the bone. Failed war and inept commander in chief or no, they will defend any U.S. military operation, simply because it’s a U.S. military operation. It’s just automatic.

Reminds me, in a depressing sort of way, of that gaggle of Big Tobacco CEOs who banded together not long ago in a hilarious attempt to convince the nation — and the courts — that cigarettes aren’t all that bad and there’s little evidence smoking causes cancer or impotence or death, and in fact small children really love secondhand smoke and so do puppies and flowers and Jesus, and if you want to have fun sometime, walk into a hospital nursery and fire up a fresh Marlboro and blow that yummy smoke straight into the faces of the newborns. Watch them squirm with delight!

Except wait, no, it’s not like that at all. One major difference: Big Tobacco execs are professional liars, de facto and a priori and understood. It’s what they do. Not even the most ardent smoking advocate would trust one those jackals as far as he could throw him into a vat of chemotherapy drugs.

Different, at least in theory, with these high-grade military men. They have a potent aura of trustworthiness, fairness, decency. They are f—ing generals, for chrissakes, and hence we like to think of them as straight-talking, no-BS working men whose word is solid and whose authority unquestionable and therefore no wimp-assed monkey-faced president or scabrous Defense secretary could make them say something they didn’t actually believe.

Wrong. Oh, how horribly wrong.

So I ask again, did it work? Was America duped? Well, yes and no. There’s little doubt that this insidious, sustained PR attack — and make no mistake, it was/is an attack on the American people; such calculated “psychological operations” aimed at U.S. citizens are actually very illegal, though it’s enormously difficult to prove so in court — swayed millions of Americans, gave fuel to the preemptive attack argument, inflamed (and still inflames) the warmongering right, scammed the media, fanned the pro-war fires for years before the public recoil finally kicked in.

But oh, kick in it did. This is the fascinating thing. Even all those high-ranking military experts lying like well-decorated dogs in one of the most impressive, appalling PR campaigns in American history could not keep Bush from collapsing, could not prevent Americans from learning the real facts of the failed war and toxic presidency — eventually.

And maybe this is a good thing. Because now, given the scope of the Bush administration’s lies — the true scale of which we may never fully know — the recoil is even more forceful than it ever might’ve been, the anti-neocon, anti-Bush revolt is potent and heartening and enormously helpful to the Democratic cause, perhaps far more than if Bush and his cronies had told the truth in the first place.

Then again, if they had been the slightest bit honest, if Bush had even a hint of integrity, we’d never have launched this staggeringly botched, futile war in the first place, and maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now, with the American experiment under Bush far less of an experiment and far more of a cyanide tablet.

Remember: They Are Liars

From TruthOut.org:

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, “enough to kill several million people,” according to a page on the White House web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 500 tons, which equals 1,000,000 pounds, of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of nearly 30,000 munitions capable of delivering these agents.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of several mobile biological weapons labs.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was operating an “advanced” nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq had been seeking “significant quantities” of uranium from Africa for use in this “advanced” nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes “suitable for nuclear weapons.”

They lied.

They claimed America needed to invade, overthrow and occupy Iraq in order to remove this menace from our world. “It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country,” went the White House line, “to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

They lied.

“Simply stated,” said Dick Cheney in August of 2002, “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Liar.

“Right now,” said George W. Bush in September of 2002, “Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of nuclear weapons.”

Liar.

“We know for a fact,” said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in January of 2003, “that there are weapons there.”

Liar.

“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction,” said Colin Powell in February of 2003, “is determined to make more.”

Liar.

“We know where they are,” said Donald Rumsfeld in March of 2003. “They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, south, west and north somewhat.”

Liar.

“The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about,” said Paul Wolfowitz in March of 2003. “Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.”

Liar.

“No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were,” said Condoleezza Rice in June of 2003, “where they were stored.”

Liar.

“I have absolute confidence that there are weapons of mass destruction inside this country,” said Gen. Tommy Franks in April of 2003. “Whether we will turn out, at the end of the day, to find them in one of the 2,000 or 3,000 sites we already know about or whether contact with one of these officials who we may come in contact with will tell us, ‘Oh, well, there’s actually another site,’ and we’ll find it there, I’m not sure.”

Wrong.

“Before the war,” said Gen. Michael Hagee in May of 2003, “there’s no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found.”

Wrong.

“Given time,” said Gen. Richard Myers in May of 2003, “given the number of prisoners now that we’re interrogating, I’m confident that we’re going to find weapons of mass destruction.”

Wrong.

“Do I think we’re going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do,” said Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton in May of 2003, “because I think there’s a lot of information out there.”

Wrong.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, is about to give testimony before the Senate regarding the current state of affairs in that battle-savaged country. He is a political general, one of many America has seen and heard over the last five years, one who would leap nude from the Capitol dome before telling the real truth about matters in Iraq … or who would speak using words fed to him by liars, and thus be wrong.

Remember: they lie. They all lie, from the top man down to the bottom. If their lips are moving, a lie is unfolding. If they say water is wet, get into the shower to make sure.

They lie.

Period.

End of file.

---

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 08 April 2008

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know“ and “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.” His newest book, “House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation,” is now available from PoliPointPress.

Sanitizing The War On Terror – Part 2

Via Signs of the Times:

“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.” – Dresden James

In part one, I promised I would get pure and simple with the truth about the war on terror. I posited that if the average person were to be furnished with real facts about the war on terror, conditions necessary for a radical change in the status quo on this planet could be created. What form such a change would take is not readily determinable, although a decent amount of chaos could be expected.

I understand that many people have trouble believing that the average person can ever wake up to the reality of the world around them. Nourished almost since birth on a diet of lies and disinformation, not to mention chemical-laden food and drink, we could be forgiven for concluding that their destiny as cannon fodder for the pathocrats is all but assured. The problem with this theory however is that there is no way to prove it.

Even if all life on this planet were soon extinguished in a nuclear war or a cometary bombardment, (evidence of cometary bombardment having been deliberately concealed for centuries), that is still not conclusive evidence that humanity should long ago have been consigned to the scrap heap of cosmic history. We can’t, in good conscience, dismiss the possibility of a change in the course of human history (even a last minute one) until we have done all we can to dispel the fog of illusion that blurs the lines between real and false.

Pick any relevant topic, one that floats your boat or gets your goat, research it, and in one way or another publicly Truthify it. It really is that simple. Spend less time as a harbinger of irreversible doom and more as a public warning system. You may be surprised to realise how amenable people are to the unofficial view of reality. I realise that opinion polls are usually more reflective of what the political elite would like us to believe than actual public sentiment, but a recent poll in the US rings pretty true to me:

Most Americans say U.S. on wrong track, poll says

More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.

The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.

That’s a pretty decent trend and evidence that the average Joe may still possess a semi-functioning BS meter. What if you were to email or print out that CNN article and pass it around to your friends, and what if you followed it up with this:

Cheney On Two-Thirds Of The American Public Opposing The Iraq War: ‘So?’

This morning, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, ABC’s Good Morning America aired an interview with Vice President Cheney on the war. During the segment, Cheney flatly told White House correspondent Martha Raddatz that he doesn’t care about the American public’s views on the war:

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Notice Cheney covering for his arrogance by dismissing “fluctuations” in public polls and ignoring the fact that polls have been “fluctuating” in a very specific direction since 2002. Could it not be cogently argued that Cheney’s despicable attitude poses a much greater threat to the American way of life – government by for and of the people – than that posed by the alleged “Muslim terrorists”? After all, there are no Muslim terrorists in the White House…

It is not hard to see that it may be easier than anyone thinks to influence public opinion, if only a few people at a time. Nor is it hard to see how easily a discussion of this nature could be used to introduce the most essential information of all – psychopaths and the fact that they have taken control of this planet and our very lives.

All that is necessary for the delivery of a potentially powerful punch to the wall of complacency and inertia surrounding the masses is a little research and networking by enough genuine truth seekers.

I don’t care how inured a person is in the American or any other way of life – show them the above poll data and other public opinion data from around the world and show them Cheney’s contemptuous attitude towards the people, and it will register. Only the most self-depreciating, obsequious authoritarian could be left indifferent. That introduction is the first step, the first opening.

Widespread awareness of psychopathy is essential. Understanding psychopathy provides answers to so many of the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of the current deplorable state of life on planet earth. In the hidden details of the war on terror, the cold treachery of the psychopathological mindset is laid bare – its horrifying contribution to human suffering revealed.

In Part 3 we’ll put some of those details under the microscope.

©Red Pill Press

By Joe Quinn

Flashback: Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes

From CNN.com

President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.

The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.

He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said

Tuesday’s discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request.

“The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism,” Daschle told reporters.

But, Daschle said, he has not agreed to limit the investigation.

“I acknowledged that concern, and it is for that reason that the Intelligence Committee is going to begin this effort, trying to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened,” said Daschle, D-South Dakota.

“But clearly, I think the American people are entitled to know what happened and why,” he said.

Cheney met last week in the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees and, according to a spokesman for Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Florida, “agreed to cooperate with their effort.”

The heads of both intelligence committees have been meeting to map out a way to hold a bipartisan House-Senate investigation and hearings.

They were discussing how the inquiry would proceed, including what would be made public, what would remain classified, and how broad the probe would be.

Graham’s spokesman said the committees will review intelligence matters only.

“How ill prepared were we and why? We are looking towards the possibility of addressing systemic problems through legislation,” said spokesman Paul Anderson.

Some Democrats, such as Sens. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, have been calling for a broad inquiry looking at various federal government agencies beyond the intelligence community.

“We do not meet our responsibilities to the American people if we do not take an honest look at the federal government and all of its agencies and let the country know what went wrong,” Torricelli said.

“The best assurance that there’s not another terrorist attack on the United States is not simply to hire more federal agents or spend more money. It’s to take an honest look at what went wrong. Who or what failed? There’s an explanation owed to the American people,” he said.

Although the president and vice president told Daschle they were worried a wide-reaching inquiry could distract from the government’s war on terrorism, privately Democrats questioned why the White House feared a broader investigation to determine possible culpability.

“We will take a look at the allocation of resources. Ten thousand federal agents — where were they? How many assets were used, and what signals were missed?” a Democratic senator told CNN.

– CNN Capitol Hill Producer Dana Bash and CNN Correspondents Jon Karl and John King contributed to this report.

January 29, 2002

When a Great Power Goes Mad

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/032808.html

An obvious reason why the mainstream US press can’t handle the Iraq truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other US officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals, says Robert Parry.

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what’s transpired.

So, you have President George W. Bush, the chief author of this catastrophic war, declaring that “normalcy is returning back to Iraq” even as fighting rages across much of the country and rockets rain down on the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bush’s comment invited comparisons to the acronym coined by U.S. Army soldiers during World War II: SNAFU for “situation normal, all f*cked up.”

In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS Frontline two-parter on “Bush’s War” which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration’s good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution – a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking.

The chief interviews for the program were with former Bush administration officials and with journalists – such as Michael Gordon and John Burns of the New York Times whose influential reporting helped set the stage for the war – and with Bob Woodward, whose Bush at War was a generally flattering account of Bush’s decision-making.

Remaining outside the frame of mainstream U.S. debate was any serious examination of the war’s fundamental illegality.

During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Yet, Frontline and other mainstream U.S. news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people “the accumulated evil of the whole” – and committed the “supreme” war crime.

An obvious reason why the mainstream U.S. press can’t handle this truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other U.S. officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals.

To accept that reality would, in turn, create a moral imperative to take action. And that would require a great disruption in the existing U.S. power structure, which hasn’t changed much since Bush won authorization from Congress in October 2002 to use force and then invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Not only are Bush and Cheney still in office – and two of the three remaining presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, voted for the war – but the roster of top Washington journalists remains remarkably intact from five years ago.

Iraq War hawk Fred Hiatt still runs the Washington Post’s editorial pages where you can still read the likes of Charles Krauthammer, David Ignatius, Richard Cohen and a bunch of other columnists who pushed for the war.

The same is true for the New York Times’s op-ed page, where writers like Thomas Friedman have prospered despite their erroneous war judgments and where one of the few changes has been to recruit prominent neoconservative William Kristol, who has used his column to chide Americans who won’t hail Bush’s courageous war leadership.

Deeper Trends

In evaluating this corrupt political/media elite, a historian might want to go back even further and wonder how someone as eminently unqualified and unfit as George W. Bush became president of the most powerful nation on earth.

How did a technologically sophisticated country like the United States with a relatively free press get led down this dangerous path? Why did so many American voters in 2000 believe made-up stories about Al Gore’s supposed delusions, like the apocryphal quote, “I invented the Internet”?

Indeed, how did a seemingly endless supply of myths and half-truths take root in the American psyche?

Going back even a bit further, how were Americans sold on the happy tales of Ronald Reagan’s presidency as the blood of U.S.-supported dirty wars in Central America and elsewhere was washed from the nation’s memory bank?

Why in a media environment with 24-hour cable news programming has intelligent dissent against U.S. foreign policy been so marginalized and excluded? Why are editors and producers so afraid of allowing some of these voices to be heard? How has such a destructive “group think” been allowed to take hold?

One of the obvious answers is fear – at least fear that one’s career would be irreparably damaged by wandering too far outside the safety of the herd.

And while running with that herd, it’s understood that there’s much greater safety in veering right, given the well-funded conservative attack groups that have devoured the careers of many independent-minded journalists who refused to bend.

(I’ve tried to address this history in my books, including Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, as well as at Consortiumnews.com.)

Well-Spoken Madness

While many Americans – both inside and outside Washington – recognize these real-world constraints on how politicians and journalists address issues, the larger consequences are less understood.

What these trends have done over the past three decades is not just shift the dominant U.S. political/media system to the right. Nor have they just constructed a “group think” that excludes reasonable points of view that challenge the conventional wisdom.

The cumulative effect of this willful conformity and this informal censorship has been to engender a form of collective madness at the decision-making levels of the U.S. government — and within the upper echelons of the news media.

But it is a flexible form of insanity in which reality is alternatively banished – as it was in the early phases of the Iraq War, from WMD “mushroom clouds” through “Mission Accomplished” – and then is brought in for retooling when matters get too far out of control, when the jarring gap between the official line and the truth starts to destabilize the national political consensus.

In listening to the measured tones of the Frontline narration – not to mention the well-dressed ex-government officials and the well-spoken mainstream journalists – I was left with the feeling that a new synthetic “reality” was being lowered in to replace the older discredited version.

It was as if the bloody madness that President Bush inflicted on the people of Iraq – aided and abetted by many witting and unwitting American accomplices – was being drained of its crimson hue and stripped of its human horrors.

Forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed. Forget the innumerable lives destroyed and the millions displaced. Forget the bizarre forms of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widespread mistreatment of detainees at other Iraqi prisons.

After all, we were being told, the war’s architects were honorable and reasonable men and women who were trying to do the right thing, but sadly they were undermined by bureaucratic inertia, back-biting and, yes, incompetence. It was just one big SNAFU.

But, with a few changes here and there – a new general or two, a tweaked counter-insurgency strategy, some more U.S. soldiers and a bit more patience – everything will work out just fine.

No need for national guilt. No need for accountability. No reason to purge the editorial offices of leading newspapers and TV networks. No reason to talk about impeachment or war-crimes tribunals for committing the “supreme” crime against world peace. No need for any of that.

As President Bush said on March 27, “normalcy is returning back to Iraq,” if you don’t take note of the mayhem all around. One might add that a similar form of “normalcy is returning back to Washington,” if you don’t take note of all the lies and the self-deceptions.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush”, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, “Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq” and “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ }are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Is Cheney betting on Economic Collapse?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13851.htm

Wouldn’t you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you’d know whether his “deficits don’t matter” claim is just baloney or not.

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney’s financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.

The article is called “Cheney’s betting on bad news” and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in “a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation.”

Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in “Old Europe”. As Blackburn sagely notes, “Not all ‘bad news’ is bad for everybody.”

This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the “Bush Economic Plan” is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation’s wealth from one class to another. It’s also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn’t have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.

Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is “intentionally” skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney’s portfolio?

It doesn’t. And, one thing we can say with metaphysical certainty is that the miserly Cheney would never plunk his money into an investment that wasn’t a sure thing. If Cheney is counting on the dollar tanking and interest rates going up, then, by Gawd, that’s what’ll happen.

The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP.

This is lunacy. No country, however powerful, can maintain these staggering numbers. The country is in hock up to its neck and has to borrow $2.5 billion per day just to stay above water. Presently, the Fed is expanding the money supply and buying back its own treasuries to hide the hemorrhaging from the public. Its utter madness.

Last month the trade deficit climbed to $70 billion. More importantly, foreign central banks only purchased a meager $47 billion in treasuries to shore up our ravenous appetite for cheap junk from China.

Do the math! They’re not investing in America anymore. They are decreasing their stockpiles of dollars. We’re sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted with gay marriage amendments and “American Celebrity”.

The American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out by cutthroat corporations who’ve abandoned their country to make a fast-buck in China or Mexico. The $3 trillion housing (equity) bubble is quickly loosing air while the anemic dollar continues to sag. All the signs indicate that the economy is slowing at the same time that energy prices continue to rise.

This is the onset of stagflation; the dreaded combo of a slowing economy and inflation.

Did Americans really think they’d be spared the same type of economic colonization that has been applied throughout the developing world under the rubric of “neoliberalism”?

Well, think again. The American economy is barrel-rolling towards earth and there are only enough parachutes for Cheney and the gang.

The country has lost 3 million jobs from outsourcing since Bush took office; more than 200,000 of those are the high-paying, high-tech jobs that are the life’s-blood of every economy.

Consider this from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) June edition of Foreign Affairs, the Bible of globalists and plutocrats:

“Between 2000 and 2003 alone, foreign firms built 60,000 manufacturing plants in China. European chemical companies, Japanese carmakers, and US industrial conglomerates are all building factories in China to supply export markets around the world. Similarly, banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies are building R&D and service centers in India to support employees, customers, and production worldwide.” (“The Globally integrated Enterprise” Samuel Palmisano, Foreign Affairs page 130)

“60,000manufacturing plants” in 3 years?!?

“Banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies”?

No job is safe. American elites and corporate tycoons are loading the boats and heading for foreign shores. The only thing they’re leaving behind is the insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children into perpetuity and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state.

Welcome to Bush’s 21st Century gulag; third world luxury in a Guantanamo-type setting.

Take another look at Cheney’s investment strategy; it tells the whole ugly story. Interest rates are going up, the middle class is going down, and the poor dollar is headed for the dumpster. The country is not simply teetering on the brink of financial collapse; it is being thrust headfirst by the blackguards in office and their satrapies at Federal Reserve.

Worried Yet? Saudis Prepare for “Sudden Nuclear Hazards” After Cheney Visit

http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2008/03/worried-yet-saudis-prepare-for-sudden.html

I. One Tick Closer to Midnight
Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council — the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle — is preparing “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors,” one of the kingdom’s leading newspapers, Okaz, reports. The German-based dpa news service relayed the paper’s story.

Simple prudence — or ominous timing? We noted here last week that an American attack on Iran was far more likely — and more imminent — than most people suspect. We pointed to the mountain of evidence for this case gathered by scholar William R. Polk, one of the top aides to John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to other indicators of impending war. The story by Okaz — which would not have appeared in the tightly controlled dictatorship without approval from the top — is yet another, very weighty piece of evidence laid in the scales toward a new, horrendous conflict.

We don’t know what the Saudis told Cheney in private — or even more to the point, what he told them. But the release of this story now, just after his departure, would seem to be a clear indication that the Saudis have good reason to fear a looming attack on Iran’s nuclear sites and are actively preparing for it.

II. A Nuclear Epiphany in Iran?
And they certainly should be bracing themselves. A U.S. attack on Iran will come suddenly, and if it is indeed aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities — a “threat” being talked up again with new urgency by both Cheney and Bush lately — it has the potential for unimaginable consequences. As we noted here in a previous piece:

Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat’s brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports….And when this attack comes – either as a stand-alone “knock-out blow” or else as the precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq – there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he picks up the phone, he says, “Go” – and in twelve hours’ time, up to a million Iranians could be dead.

This potential death toll is not pacifist hyperbole; it comes from a National Academy of Sciences study sponsored by the Pentagon itself, as The Progressive reports. (Although Bush’s military brass like to peddle the public lie that “we don’t do body counts” of the enemy, in reality, like all good businessmen they keep precise accounts of their production outputs: i.e., corpses.) The Pentagon’s NAS study calibrated the kill-rate from “bunker-busting” tactical nukes used to take out underground facilities – such as those which house much of Iran’s nuclear power program.

Another simulation by scientists, using Pentagon-devised software, was even more specific, measuring the aftermath of a “limited” nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan, the magazine reports. This small expansion of the Pentagon franchise would result in stellar production figures: three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Bush has about 50 nuclear “earth-penetrating weapons” at his disposal, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Nor is the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran mere “liberal paranoia.” Bush himself pointedly refused to take the nuclear option “off the table” this week. But what’s more, Bush has made the use of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his “National Security Strategy of the United States,” issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming the criminal principle of “pre-emptive” attacks on perceived enemies which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess, Bush declared that “safe, credible and reliable nuclear forces continue to play a critical role” in the “offensive strike systems” that are now a key part of America’s “deterrence.”

In the depraved jargon of atomic warmongering, a “credible” nuclear force is one that can and will be used in the course of ordinary military operations. It is no longer to be regarded as a sacred taboo. This has long been the dream of the Pentagon’s “nuclear priesthood” and its acolytes, going back to the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, a strong faction within the American power structure has been afflicted with a perverted craving to unleash these weapons once more. An almost sexual frustration can be discerned in their laments as time and again, in crisis after crisis, their counsels for “going nuclear” were rejected – often at the very last moment. To justify their aberrant desire, they have relentlessly demonized an ever-changing array of “enemies,” painting each one as an imminent, overwhelming threat, led by “madmen” in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, fit only for destruction. Evidence for the “threat” is invariably exaggerated, manipulated, even manufactured; this ritual cycle has been enacted over and over, leading to many wars – but never to that ultimate, orgasmic release.

Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of American power….

And they have found a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard strutting in the Oval Office. Under their sinister tutelage, Bush has eviscerated 40 years’ worth of arms control treaties; officially “normalized” the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear states; rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan; and is now destroying the last and most effective restraint on the spread of nuclear weapons: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The treaty guarantees its signatories – such as Iran – the right to establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran – whose nuclear program undergone perhaps the most extensive inspection process in history – must end its lawful activities. Why? Because the country is led by “madmen” in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with weapons they may or may not have.

So the NPT is dead. As with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is coming….

The nuclear sectarians have waited decades for this moment. Such a chance may never come again. Will they let it pass, when with just a word, in just twelve hours, they can see their god rising in a pillar of fire over Persia?