Thursday, September 29, 2011

George Dumbya Taught US To Laugh at Nu-ku-lar Matters For A Very Good Reason


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Somehow I just keep remembering some rightwingnut like Ann Coulter or another of the ghastly girl lawyer/reporters (who exhibit very little professional training in those fields) who so ably are trotted out by the Faux Snooze to allay the suspicions of Mr. and Mrs. America about nuclear poisoning and state that it might even be "good" for you. (Apologies to Michael McDonald.)

Fukushima and the Battle for Truth

Large sectors of the Japanese population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination

Paul Zimmerman

September 27, 2011

Fukushima’s nuclear disaster is a nightmare. Ghostly releases of radioactivity haunt the Japanese countryside. Lives, once safe, are now beset by an ineffable scourge promising vile illness and death.

Large sectors of the population are accumulating significant levels of internal contamination, setting the stage for a public health tragedy.

A subtle increase in the number of miscarriages and fetal deaths will be the first manifestation that something is amiss. An elevated incidence of birth defects will begin in the Fall and continue into the indefinite future. Thyroid diseases, cardiac diseases and elevated rates of infant and childhood leukemia will follow. Over the next decade and beyond, cancer rates will soar.

Chernobyl was the harbinger of this heartbreaking scenario. It taught mankind the inescapable biological truths that emerge within populations internally contaminated by heightened levels of fission products. And yet, government and industry schemers attack these truths as unfounded scare-mongering. With cold indifference, they deny that Chernobyl was a mass casualty event. They turn a blind eye to a huge body of research and deviously proclaim that no evidence exists that more than a handful of people suffered harm from the Ukrainian disaster. They publish propaganda, draped in the guise of science, that dismisses the hazard of low levels of internal contamination. Believing their subterfuge to have been successful and intoxicated by their hubris, they are already positioning themselves to stage-manage the public’s perception of Fukushima.

Japan’s government, its Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Tokyo Electric  Power Company have already demonstrated that they will do everything in their power to keep citizens ignorant of what is taking place. The emerging health crisis is scheduled to be erased.

Following a time-tested blueprint worked out by prior radiation releases around the world, data relevant to assessing the medical impact of the accident will not be gathered. Radiation doses to the population will be woefully underestimated. The hazards associated with low levels of internal contamination will be obliterated from all discussions of risk.

Academic journals that support the nuclear agenda will be flooded with bogus studies demonstrating that no health detriment was suffered by the population. The heightened incidence of childhood leukemia will be attributed to some as yet unidentified virus unleashed by population mixing following the evacuations caused by the tsunami. (This theory is currently in vogue to deny that the heightened incidence of leukemia among children under five years of age living nearby to nuclear reactors is radiation induced.)


The birth defects will be summarily dismissed as impossible because the risk models upheld by the International Commission on Radiological Protection don’t predict them. The possibility that the models are fraudulently constructed escapes consideration. (See A Betrayal of Mankind by the Radiation Protection Agencies, available as a free download at http://www.du-deceptions.com/excerpts.html.)

How is TRUTH to gain ascendancy when blocked by this institutionalized matrix of deceit? What agency can possibly take the lead to accurately document the full scope of the disaster, identify its victims and those at risk, and publish trustworthy public health information? Who is going to take responsibility to protect the children? To wait for the government to come to the rescue is naive. The history of radiation accidents testifies that governments routinely betray their citizens in deference to their nuclear weapons program and the nuclear industry. No, only one alternative is open to the people of Japan. They must become proactive. They must seize the initiative and wrest control from government and industry of the “perception” of the catastrophe.

The accident at Fukushima demands that a peoples’ campaign be initiated to produce an honest assessment of the current situation, catalog the medical consequences as they emerge, and offer accurate advice as to how citizens can protect themselves. Using the internet as a platform, scientists from all relevant disciplines must band together with interested laypeople with something valid to contribute to create a widely distributed open source research project.

The evolving online encyclopedia will archive all pertinent data and preserve it from future tampering. The accident from its inception must be documented. With published reports frequently in conflict with one another, all available information, whether from government sources, citizen investigators or eyewitnesses, must be gathered for future evaluation. 

Worldwide meteorological data since March 11 must be assembled. All official and unofficial measurements of radiation in the environment, both in Japan and worldwide, must be collected and collated. This is essential information required for future epidemiological studies. Contaminated agricultural areas must be identified. Samples of all edible material for human and animal consumption must be evaluated for safety.

As suspected radiation-induced illness begins to appear in the population, healthcare providers and victims must make public their experiences. Initially, this information will be anecdotal but nonetheless invaluable. It will identify emerging trends of morbidity and mortality and define population subgroups requiring more systematic scientific investigation.   Researchers working alone or in groups must seize the initiative to pursue study in their fields of expertise and interest. (One excellent suggestion by Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility is the widespread collection of babies’ teeth to provide objective data on the geographic dispersion and uptake of strontium-90 [1].) 

Methodologies, data and results need be posted online as they become available. Free access to the whole body of work must be guaranteed so as to allow scrutiny by people from all over the world. Transparency must be paramount. An open dialogue will allow divergent points of view to be fairly represented. Disagreements over research protocols or the interpretation of results will point the way to new avenues of investigation where clarification and consensus might be achieved. Objective investigation via the scientific method will be the final arbitrator of truth. The ultimate goal of this effort will be to produce an unbiased determination of the public health consequences of radiation released into the environment, assess the accuracy of current standards of radiation safety and identify how improvements can be made for the common welfare of humanity.

It is urgent that this initiative commence immediately. Data must be captured while it is remains untainted. Of particular importance is the securing of pre-accident health statistics for the population of Japan. Rates for various pregnancy outcomes; the frequency of different types of birth defects; the incidence of thyroid diseases, heart diseases, cancers and so forth, all must be cataloged.

There is good reason why this baseline data need be preserved. The history of radiation accidents is littered with examples of the outright falsification of data that has prevented an honest evaluation of the effects of low levels of internal contamination on human health. 

For instance, evidence exists that morbidity and mortality data published by the U.S. Government’s Public Health Service was altered in the wake of radiation releases from nuclear weapon production facilities and commercial nuclear power plants so as to hide cancer deaths in the population [2].

The accident at Three Mile Island, persistently painted by government and industry spokesmen as a benign event, in fact produced illness and death among humans and farm animals downwind [3,4].

After the accident at Chernobyl, hundreds of thousands of so-called “liquidators” participated in cleanup operations in close proximity to the destroyed reactor and also built a concrete sarcophagus around the reactor building to entomb the radiation. 

According to the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), in subsequent years this population was reported as having a lower rate of leukemia than the general population. Only later did it come to light that Soviet doctors were forbidden from recording leukemia in their diagnoses [5]. The Wales Cancer Registry was cited by the ECRR as excising cases of cancer from its database so as to prevent the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing facility in the U.K. from being blamed for causing illness to the population. Also mentioned by ECRR was the alteration of infant mortality figures in Germany after Chernobyl so as to mask the impact of the accident on public health [5].

Mischief has not been confined to falsifying health records. In 1957, a fire broke out in the graphite reactor at Windscale, England on the site now occupied by the Sellafield facility. The amount of radiation released and the incidence of cancer induced in the population of Ireland has remained fiercely contentious issues.

According to the ECRR, at some point after the fire, meteorological records were altered “with the apparent motive of concealing the likely location of any effects” [5]. Similarly, the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Japan suffered a devastating fire in 1995. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster [6].     

If an accurate documentation of the health consequences of Fukushima is to succeed, one condition is paramount: the project MUST retain its independence from the international agencies that currently dominate the discussion of radiation effects. The tacit mandate of these organizations is to support nuclear weapons programs and the nuclear industry, and they do so by publishing fraudulent scientific studies that downplay the hazards to health of radioactive material released into the environment. 

For example, the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and other UN organizations jointly published Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts [7]. 

This study is routinely cited as proof that Chernobyl had little impact on public health. It concluded that only twenty-eight first responders died from acute radiation syndrome and 4,000 children developed thyroid cancer, fifteen of whom died by 2002. In addition, it estimated that an additional 4,000 fatal cancers might arise in the overall population.

This sanitized version of the catastrophe was reached by the devious method of consulting only 350 sources of information, mostly published in English, while ignoring  30,000 publications and 170,000 sources of information available in languages other than English [8]. A summary of this large body of literature, published as Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, concluded that radiation-induced casualties approached 980,000 [9].

To offer a second example, a number of prestigious institutions have published disinformation on the hazards to health of depleted uranium weapons. These include WHO, IAEA, the European Commission, the Royal Society in the U.K., the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in the U.S., the Rand Corporation, and the Health Physics Society [10,11,12,13,14,15,16].

All concluded that weaponized uranium creates no adverse health effects when internalized by soldiers on the battlefield and downwind populations. Justification for this conclusion came from a survey of the scientific literature regarding uranium contamination among workers in the uranium and nuclear industries and populations exposed to elevated levels of uranium in their drinking water.

Historically, the only two types of adverse health effects documented among these populations is altered kidney function due to uranium’s chemical toxicity and cancer due to uranium’s radioactivity. But studies of veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome reveals no evidence of kidney disease. And according to models promulgated by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), the radiation dose from battlefield uranium is too low to initiate cancer. The conclusion? Case closed! DU cannot be a factor in the severe suffering of veterans or the increased incidence of cancer and birth defects in Fallujah and other areas of Iraq.

 As convincing as the logic of these studies attempt to be, they all suffer from fatal flaws. They all fail to acknowledge that combustion-derived micro- and nano-sized particles of uranium have unique biokinetics when internalized that are not comparable to historical types of uranium exposure, and they quit cleverly fail to take into account the most up-to-date research on the toxicology of uranium.

New research conducted since the first Gulf War has demonstrated that uranium is genotoxic (capable of damaging DNA), cytotoxic (poisonous to cells), mutagenic (capable of inducing mutations), teratogenic (capable of interfering with normal embryonic development) and neurotoxic (capable of harming nerve tissue).  This research has yet to dislodge the stale mantra that uranium is only capable of causing kidney disease and cancer. (For a thorough disclosure of the fraudulent science used to discount the hazards of DU and a summary of recent research on the toxicology of uranium, see this author’s “The Harlot of Babylon Unmasked: Fraudulent Science and the Cover-Up of the Health Effects of Depleted   Uranium”  in   A   Primer   in   the   Art   of   Deception   available   at

Mischief also infects the radiation protection community. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima conducts ongoing medical research on the health of the survivors of the atomic bombings at the end of WWII. The Life Span Study is the single most important piece of evidence used by the ICRP for setting worldwide guidelines for radiation safety. 

That radiation safety for all types of exposure and all manner of radiation-induced illnesses relies so heavily on this research is incredibly disturbing because the Life Span Study is deeply and irreparably flawed. Initiated five years after the bombings, after tens of thousands of victims succumbed to unidentified levels of radiation exposure, results are hopelessly skewed in favor of finding radiation less hazardous than it in fact is.

Further, the study can provide no meaningful information on the birth outcomes to fetuses exposed in utero.  More problematic is the fact that both the study and the control groups were internally contaminated by the black rain that showered down upon the destroyed cities after the blasts.

This unacknowledged contamination of the control group hopelessly compromises any meaningful conclusions of the rates of radiation-induced illnesses in the study group. The Life Span Study is plagued by numerous other flaws that raise serious questions as to why it has become the centerpiece of radiation standards. (For further information on this topic, consult Exhibit C in the aforementioned free download at http://www.du-deceptions.com/downloads/Betrayal_Chap6.pdf.)

The Japanese have been victimized by nuclear horror more than any other people on Earth. Today they are immersed in an imperceptible tragedy that will slowly but inevitably bring disease and heartbreak to millions. In response to this crime, a rare and courageous opportunity exists. By undertaking a national campaign to honestly document the disaster that is engulfing them, they can  lead all of humanity to break through the quagmire of deception and deceit that has allowed nuclear weapons and reactors to flourish. Truth finally has an opportunity to triumph over falsehood. In some small but significant way, this would be fitting repayment for the malevolence of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. 


(Paul Zimmerman is the author of A Primer in the Art of Deception:  The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science.  A more technical, fully referenced presentation of the fraudulent nature of current radiation standards and the coverup of the effects of depleted uranium weapons can be found within its pages. Excerpts, free to download, are available at www.du-deceptions.com.)

Anyone in the U.S. awake yet?

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

When Will You Leave the U.S.? Will It Be After the Next Unexplained Catastrophe? Israeli Paranoia Games Imperil ALL


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Remember bragging about how wonderful life was in the U.S. when you were much younger? How freeing the feeling of living in a freedom-loving land was (versus the authoritarian types of government that you studied in school and saw reported about in the news)?

Bet it never occurred to you that local police in the USA would ever feel free enough to spray a poison (mace) at young girls who were peacefully (although loudly) demonstrating in our "freedom of speech" land.





John Atcheson reports from the clown tent in Common Dreams:

Perry is merely the leading clown of nine evil clowns vying for the Republican nomination. They all seem more interested in making you afraid and making you hate than in making you laugh. They also display a contempt for reality and truth. Yet their individual lies – as destructive as they are – are small potatoes compared to the faulty map we’re using to set national policy.
We can start with Reaganomics and its toxic legacy. You know, government-is-the-problem-shrink-it-until-you-can-drown-it orthodoxy, combined with the notion that the free market is the font of all good things, if we just leave it alone and get gubmint’ off its back.
This particular bit of idiocy has been tried three times. First in the 1880’s through the 1890s, then again in the 1920’s, and finally between 1980 and 2008. Each period featured laissez-faire economic policies like low taxes, small government, deregulation, and corporate-friendly policies. And guess what?
Each period brought extreme income inequality and the inevitable economic collapse that follows.
It’s possible after the Great Depression a few folks still believed these policies could lead to prosperity. But after 2008? After going 0 for 3? In baseball, there’s a name for that: striking out.
But that’s reality. And we don’t need no stinkin’ reality.
Want another dose of reality defying mythology? How about notion that cutting debt will increase economic growth - the prevailing view of the Republican Party, and apparently Obama and the press. Has this particular antidote ever cured the patient?
Nope. Killed it, more often than not.
But that’s reality. And we don’t need no stinkin’ …
Here’s another. Trickle down economics. Seen anything trickling down, lately?
No, you haven’t. In fact, since Reagan introduced this “theory” from the back of a crumpled napkin, the income of the top 1% has doubled. Yours? Not so much. You've lost ground.
But that’s reality. And we don’t need no…
How about the idea that the rich are the “job creators?”
Again, not so much. Right now corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in assets because there's not enough consumer demand to justify hiring.
Throwing more money at the ultra rich will make them even richer, but it will have no effect on the economy until consumers start buying – and the only thing that can make that happen is a government stimulus large enough to create jobs and restore confidence.
But that’s reality. And we don’t need …
And how about the wellspring of right wing whackiness? Specifically, the notion that unconstrained capitalism is a necessary pre-requisite for freedom. That the two are joined at the hip, inseparable – that one cannot stand without the other.
This particular bit of reality-bending lunacy was popularized by Milton Friedman. It explains why, to right wingers, socialism is bad, why regulations are perceived as a commie plot (especially environmental regs), why the free market is sacrosanct, why the entire Republican Party is anti-science and in thrall to climate denial.
Each implies a legitimate role for government intervention in the market; therefore – in the minds of the wingnuts - each threatens freedom.
Here again, reality differs. With totalitarian China practicing virulent capitalism, with successful examples of social democracies, and with the advent of a new kind of tyranny – the tyranny of the unconstrained corporation – Friedman’s linkage of capitalism and freedom is revealed as nonsense.
But that’s reality and we don’t . . .
Yes we do, damn it. We do need some stinkin’ reality. We need a whole lot of it, and we need it now, or the whole damn country will follow Rick Perry or some other lying demagogue off the ragged edge of civility and into the mouths of dragons.
Are we likely to get it? Hell no.
With the mainstream media playing the part of a mute stenographer, the Democrats trembling at the first sign of opposition and coughing up our lunch money like a pre-pubic nerd trapped in the bathroom, and Citizen’s United turning our elections into a bidding war, we’re about out of stinkin’ reality.
And that makes us out of luck.

John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. He is currently at work on a fictional Trilogy that centers on climate change. Atcheson's book reviews are featured on Climateprogress.org. Email to: jbatcheson@gmail.com


Paul Krugman dissects the latest "class warfare" nonsense here (and yes, I know I've run this before, but it seems worthwhile to emphasize it again):

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.
As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.
So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

This gentleman speaks to my heart and mirrors all my concerns.

And history.

Why We Left The United States
By Bob Alexander

September 17, 2011


TVNewsLies


Because on December 12, 2000, the United States Supreme Court nullified the results of a national election and installed George W. Bush as president. And then I saw millions of my fellow Americans deliriously happy the Rule of Law was broken by the Supreme Court of the Land so “their guy” could … “win.”

That’s when I knew partisanship had ultimately won out over reality. More Americans believe in angels than election fraud. If millions of Americans could turn a blind eye to a stolen election, simply because their side stole it, and then have that coup legitimized by not only the Supreme Court … but by all of MainStreamMedia … then I knew the country I lived in was not the land of my birth.
I can’t emphasize this enough. Millions of Americans were ecstatic that George W. Bush won regardless of how he won. Unquestioning blind partisanship was more important than the law to these people. But more ominous was Main Stream Media ratifying the coup. At that moment Corporate Media proved they were committed to the destruction of our democratic republic.

That was pretty scary to witness. We’ve all heard of similar ham-fisted tactics used in banana republics south of the border … but this was happening … here.

That’s when I began formulating my Crazy Stupid People Theorem. Whoever thought the Supreme Court’s decision was part and parcel with a “Normal Transfer of Power” was either Stupid, Crazy, or … Evil. Americans who didn’t know it was essentially a coup were either Stupid, or Crazy, or a little bit of both. If anyone knew it was an outright theft of Americans’ votes … and they were perfectly ok with that … well … what else could you call it other than Evil? The subversion of our right to choose our elected representatives strikes at the heart of our country’s founding principles. But again, and this is what continues to confound me, millions of Americans thought it was just fine and dandy.

Along with millions of sane Americans … I didn’t “Move On.” I could not understand why it was so important the institutions Americans trusted most to protect its freedoms and principles had crammed George W. Bush down our throat.

Then 234 days into Bush’s first term as president … the attacks of September 11th 2001. And from that day on … everything the Bush/Cheney regime did to distort and transform the United States of America into something … unrecognizable … was because of 9/11. It all came down to 9/11 … period. The buck stopped there.

And as we were all walking around in a daze, coated with the ash of human beings and pulverized concrete, we were spun into the Ultimate War Crime; wars of aggression. As Chris Hedges wrote, “ … We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens, and soon hundreds, and then thousands, and later tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Then the dawning realization … the 9/11 trigger mechanism that caused Hell on Earth for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq … was a grotesque lie. This was the ultimate Horror piled upon horror.

Hundreds upon hundreds of statements from members of the Senior Military and Intelligence Services, Law Enforcement, Government Officials, Engineers, Architects, Pilots and Aviation Professionals, Professors, 9/11 Survivors and Family Members, Artists, Entertainers, and Media Professionals, are on record saying the Official Account of 9/11 is: "False", “Impossible”, “A Bunch of Hogwash”, “Total B.S.”, “Ludicrous”, “A Well-Organized Cover-up”, “A White-Washed Farce”, “Absurd”, "Fatally Flawed", "Not Possible.”

The lies the Bush/Cheney Regime told us that led our country into The Ultimate War Crime were predicated upon the lies the government previously told us about the attacks of 9/11.

As Ralph Lopez wrote, The biggest problem with the 9/11 Truth Movement is where it leads: a place dark and evil beyond imagination. … when hundreds of American military officers, pilots, engineers, and CIA veterans stepped forward to say they believed the official story to be a monstrous lie, I was shaken to the core.The conspiracies led to the deep dark hole that we are ruled by criminal psychopaths.

This is about as bad as it gets. We knew the government covered up how and why 3,000 people died on 9/11, and then went on to use the attacks as an excuse to do everything we find reprehensible today. And again … corporate media ran cover for the government.

If we can’t believe the government’s cover-up, we’re left with three options:

Conclusion One: They Made It Happen.
Conclusion Two: They allowed it to happen.
Or …
Conclusion Three: The attacks of 9/11 were possible because of massive incompetence on the part of the Bush/Cheney Regime.

If Incompetence is the least offensive rationale to explain the actions of the Bush/Cheney regime, then … why has there been no accountability?

Involuntary manslaughter is an unintentional killing that happens during the commission of a misdemeanor or because of gross negligence or carelessness. According to Federal sentencing guidelines, Involuntary Manslaughter is punishable by 6 years in prison.

Shouldn’t someone (or a lot of someones) from the Bush/Cheney Regime be prosecuted for the gross negligence that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people? Not in post-9/11 America.

But while we struggled to map out just exactly what a post-9/11 America looked like … another stolen presidential election knocked us to our knees.

We knew it was stolen in Ohio. We knew how it was stolen. And once again the corporate media buried the truth by ignoring it. And the blind partisan Crazy Stupid People rejoiced in the prospect of “Four More Years” of the Bush/Cheney Regime.

Throughout it all the majority of Sane Americans made the same strategic blunder over and over and over again. We were used to signing petitions and having protest marches. We treated these people like they were politicians. But the Bush/Cheney gang were not politicians. They were Gangsters and Thugs. Politicians periodically bend to the will of the people. Thugs. Don’t. Care. These people wipe their ass with petitions. When Dick Cheney was told that two-thirds of Americans said the war in Iraq was not worth it, Cheney replied, "So?"

That’s who we were dealing with. Gangsters who completely ignored the will of the people. We could write all we want, and call all we want, and demonstrate all we want … but by following their rules … we had the unlimited freedom to be ineffectual.

The Republican Machine, aided and abetted by Corporate Media, stole the presidency of the United States twice. Together they started two wars and have killed over a million people. How could we think they would back off and play nice because we all wrote scathing e-mails or marched in protests? They were Thugs. We were supposed to arrest Thugs, put them on trial, and if guilty, put them in jail. But we didn’t do that.

We decided to hope instead. We hoped the Bush/Cheney Regime wouldn’t completely destroy the country before 2008. We hoped the same corrupt voting systems that delivered us George W. Bush would magically allow us the autonomy to elect someone to save us from “the Evil-doers.” We hoped a Constitutional law professor would restore the Constitution. But most of all we hoped, for the first time in living memory, that a politician would deliver on his campaign promises.
The policies of the Bush/Cheney Regime are still in place under the Obama administration. We still have the wars of aggression and occupation. Innocent people are still killed every day. We still hold prisoners in Guantanamo Bay who after almost ten years have yet to be charged or tried for any crime. The Bush/Cheney/Obama Regimes have given away trillions of dollars to people who engineered the largest financial swindle in recorded history. And they, along with our honest-to-god war criminals, continue to walk free, unindicted, unaccountable, and above the law.

As Michael in NY wrote . . . in October 2009, “ … my belief is that the American system has lost its capacity for reform.I’ll take that to the next step … the American system has lost its capacity to govern. Corporate interests under the guise of Partisanship über alles.
And as Paul Craig Roberts wrote the other day, Obama regime appointee Cass Sunstein, a Chicago and Harvard Law School professor, thinks the 9/11 movement, for challenging the official “truth”, should be infiltrated by US intelligence agents in order to shut down the fact-based doubters of government propaganda. When a law professor at our two most prestigious law schools wants to suppress scientific evidence that challenges government veracity, we know that in America respect for truth is dead. The notion that a country in which truth is dead is a “light unto the world” is an absurdity.

I find that nothing short of terrifying. And real solutions are nonexistent.

And so . . . after 10 long years, and finally having enough money … we left. It may be completely illusory, but it feels like we have a future here. It feels more substantial than … hope. It feels like we finally have come home.

Regards,

Bob Alexander
Founder of Superbeans.com


By Gilad Atzmon
Some may be surprised to learn that Israel and most Israelis actually want the Palestinian initiative to go ahead and to succeed. They want a Palestinian State because this is the only solution that would save the 'Jews only State' from a demographic meltdown.
By Philip Giraldi
 What the FBI uncovered was a massive and highly focused campaign referred to by the Israelis as "perception management," but which the CIA would refer to as a covert action.

Nonpartisan Examiner
Examiner.com
On Bullsh*t, Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 best-seller, defines “bullsh*t” as saying whatever necessary to dictate an audience’s interpretation of a subject. Bullsh*t is comprised of lies of omission and commission, of course, but shifts as needed to maintain the desired dictatorship (the literal “say” of what people perceive).
Frankfurt observes that bullshit is more prevalent in politics than ever before, has zero respect for the truth, and is intentional and ongoing to replace facts. He explains in the video.
Frankfurt provides academic permission for Americans to use “bullsh*t” to describe US “leadership” obvious use of bullshit in debt, economic, and war policies.
Use this academic term at your command.
The American public struggles with political and US corporate media bullshit to discern fact from spin.
“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” -  unsourced and attributed to Andrew Carnegie
Here are leading US “leadership” areas of bullshitting the American public:
  1. Congressional reports disclose that all “reasons” for war with Afghanistan and Iraq were known to be lies as they were told.
  2. avoiding the obvious answer of ending an Orwellian "debt supply" and replacing it with money. A national debt is simply bullshit.
  3. a million children a month to die of preventable poverty, even though historically ending poverty reduces population growth rate and the investment is less than 1% of the developed nations' gross national incomes (GNI).
  4. Orwellian unlawful wars, including using depleted uranium weapons to damn victims with continuous misery and death.
  5. tortureextrajudicial assassinations (including against American citizens) and indefinite detentions
  6. destruction of the US Constitution into a form of government closest to fascism and nowhere near a constitutional republic.
  7. literally throwing Americans onto the streets rather than take any of a dozen acts to allow them to stay in their homes.
  8. intentional unemployment, crime, infrastructure decay, fear, anger, depression (both economic and psychological) rather than create money for full employment.
  9. allowing 45,000 Americans to die every year from lack of health care, even though universal single-payer saves the nation $100-$300 billion every year.
With all respect, these bullsh*tting literal psychopaths in US “leadership” knew/know exactly what they're doing. A psychopath has a veneer of social grease thinly covering vicious acts.
The bullsh*tters’ last strands of support are dissipating; cognitive dissonance of the American public is embracing the “emperor has no clothes” facts.
The good news is that every step "leadership" takes down their path of deceit and destruction, they become easier to see for what they are.
We will win with critical mass of public recognition of what’s right in front of everyone to see (and smell).
You, citizen, have unique opportunity to contribute your unique, beautiful, and powerful self-expression to building a brighter future if you choose the intellectual integrity and moral courage to do so.
Please do.
Millions will live or die, billions will have a life worth living or misery, and trillions of dollars of power are directed at our collective choice.

Saturday 24 September 2011

William Rivers Pitt



Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, speaks at the Florida P5 Faith and Freedom Coalition Kick-Off event at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Florida, September 22, 2011. (Chip Litherland / The New York Times)
I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

- George Bernard Shaw

I have been saying this for years upon years, but it bears repeating: the most awesome, fearsome, and effective weapon in the arsenal of the modern Republican Party is their total, utter and complete lack of shame.

That weapon - the ability to say or do anything, literally anything, even as it flies in the face of on-the-record comments made just the day before, or contradicts thousands of votes cast in congresses past - is the equivalent of a battlefield-deployed tactical nuclear weapon. It clears the field, but good, and if everything is ashes in the aftermath, so be it.

So long as effective spin makes the news cycle, it's a victory for them, and screw the people who get hurt.

The GOP wins when that is the contest, and that is all they care about...and the awful irony comes when the very people getting screwed are up on their feet cheering after the deal goes down, because "their team" won the day.

Watching these recent GOP debates has cracked me up for any number of reasons, but nothing can top watching those millionaires square off in an attempt to prove who among them is the most "folksy," the most in tune with the working stiff. Mitt Romney, whose personal fortune roars deep into nine figures on the left of the decimal, actually claimed he was a middle class guy during a recent campaign appearance.


Ah, yes, the irony again...just think, if people banking nine figures of personal wealth were actually considered middle class, all of our problems would be solved, right?

Or something.

Which brings us to the subject of "class warfare." The term has been a favorite broadside of the right-bent rich-people-first set going on forty years now, and in times past has always reaped them rich rhetorical benefits. We're a classless society here in America, don'tcha know, so accusations of "class warfare" have all too often sent lily-livered liberal-leaning politicians scuttling for the exits, for the apology, for the eventual retreat.

Oh no, it isn't class warfare, this is only fair...which earned, invariably, a reply of "CLASS WARFARE SOCIALISM WHAAARGARBLE" . . . which, in turn, earned another hasty retreat instead of a proper and just reply.

Which is, should have always been, and should now be: kiss my ass, you leech, you bloodsucker, you greedy whore, you war profiteering glutton, you disgrace, you betrayer of America.

Oh, I know the argument. I know it as well as the spit I leave on the sidewalk when there is a bad taste in my mouth. The rich are better than us, they are the ones making the jobs, they have earned their esteemed position through a Randian process of natural economic selection, etc...except for the sneaky fact that a large number of these "business titans" inherited their wealth, and today increase their wealth not through hard work, but through favorable interest rates and even more favorable tax rates on money that is already in the bank.

The top-earning businesses in America today, across the board, are wallowing in record profits, and yet somehow hiring is stagnated. Why is that?

Could it be that these titans are holding off on hiring in order to affect the number of jobless Americans, so as to influence public opinion as we head into an election season? God almighty, to have such astonishing reach...to be able to keep millions out of work in order to put one black guy out of a job...now that's real power.

Class warfare, indeed.

Poverty has increased locally and nationally across the board, joblessness is reaching Great Depression-era levels, and millions have lost houses to those whose own homes resemble castles, to those who are secure in both funding and foundation. Money does not disappear. It has to go somewhere; what is lost is always found. Most all of us have spent the last several years losing money hand over fist, while Forbes tells us that the richest among us have increased their wealth by vast amounts in one year.

Try to contain your shock.

There is work available for the doing, on infrastructure and new technology fields and any number of other areas, but the GOP majority in the House of Representatives won't have any of it, because their marching orders are to screw the American economy in as many orifices as are available to try and unseat the sitting president. Period, end of file, and if you still think that isn't their intention, I have a big red bridge over San Francisco Bay to sell you.

Class warfare? These cretins have the unmitigated gall to accuse other people of class warfare?

It is a wonder of American politics, this absolute and astonishing lack of shame on the part of the modern GOP. They have spent the last thirty years stifling a minimum-wage increase, they blocked legislation to help 9/11 responders pay for very present health concerns, and spent the latter part of this last week trying to screw disaster relief funding for people who lose homes to tornadoes, floods, wildfires and earthquakes.

They hate Social Security and Medicare down to their gold-plated bones. Now they are deliberately and intentionally stifling the very economy they themselves tore up, for no other reason than to win the next election.

How are they doing it? Money and power, power and money, and be damned to those who suffer for their desires.

Psssst...it is class warfare: full-throated, no-bullshit class warfare, and the rich ones whining about it are the ones who are winning. Be on your own side for a change of pace. They got the guns, as a man once said, but we got the numbers.

It is class warfare, and has been for a generation. We've been losing, badly.

For now.
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Monday, September 26, 2011

Austerity Coming! Wall Street Uprising NOW (Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest)



(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)



From Kay in Maine we get some insight into why there is so little media coverage:

The Natives Are Getting Restless: Occupy Wall Street Continues! occupywallstreetarrest3
(image found on Democracy Watchdog Action Network)

Where’s the “liberal media”? You would think the liberal media would be down there in NYC making sure every inch and hour of the Occupy Wall Street was recorded for the nation and the world to see, but so far, CRICKETS.

You see, there’s a rumor that has gone around for decades now that the media is liberal and we should not trust it. Liberal to me means the media is all about telling the truth, but yet, the natives are getting restless and they’re rising up against Wall Street, because the Wall Street whores have fucked over America and the world (they’ve given America & the world a venereal disease!), and we have to go to Facebook to find out the latest on these protests!

Seriously, what is wrong with this picture?????

When liberals protest Wall Street, they get arrested…

occupywallstreetarrest1occupywallstreetarrest2

. . . but when the lame-o tea bags protest anything, they get non-stop 24/7 media coverage and a ton of respect!

Eighty people arrested so far for Occupying Wall Street.

Isn’t that great? Oh, but it’s okay for a tea bag to bring a loaded fucking gun to greet President Obama with at a protest rally!

What is going on here? I think we all know the truth: THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA IS RIGHT WING! Always has been. Remember when Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were rolling around between the sheets? Non-stop coverage by the media!

Remember when George Bush lied America into an illegal war with Iraq based on fake/fraudulent/forged evidence? No investigations done by the media to stop this illegal war!
See the difference? I do.

On my Facebook page I recently asked this, Where’s the tea party? I thought they were all about truth and justice? Ha! You couldn’t find one dried up tea bag at these protests because they side with the Billionaire Koch Brothers and the wealthy hedge fund manager who started the tea party movement. See?” 

. . . and the one and only response I got from one of the teabaggers on my Facebook was, “because it doesn’t matter”.

Wha? It doesn’t matter??? IT DOESN’T MATTER??????? WTF! Seriously, the tea bag party is about as useful as a piano is in catching a fish!

What is the lamestream media afraid of? Why aren’t they covering these protests 24/7? Is it because they’re in the fucking bag with the billionaire Nazis of America and don’t want Americans to truly understand of what these assholes have done to our nation and the world?

You betcha!

ARREST THE FUCKING HEDGE FUND MANAGERS, THE BANKERS, THE WALL STREET INSIDERS, THE OIL SPECULATORS…………..but don’t arrest the Americans who are trying to bring their crimes to the surface!
Oh, and media? START COVERING THE REAL AMERICA PLEASE!

(Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Paul Krugman

You gotta give Paul Krugman props for taking the idiot's abuse and continuing down the path of reason and restraint in the face of fools' nonstop adversity.

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.

As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?
And on the "No Soup For You!" Austerity front?

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated by calls for fiscal austerity. By slashing spending and reducing deficits, we were told, nations could restore confidence and drive economic revival.

And the austerity has been real. In Europe, troubled nations like Greece and Ireland have imposed savage cuts, even as stronger nations have imposed milder austerity programs of their own. In the United States, the modest federal stimulus of 2009 has faded out, while state and local governments have slashed their budgets, so that over all we’ve had a de facto move toward austerity not so different from Europe’s.

Strange to say, however, confidence hasn’t surged. Somehow, businesses and consumers seem much more concerned about the lack of customers and jobs, respectively, than they are reassured by the fiscal righteousness of their governments. And growth seems to be stalling, while unemployment remains disastrously high on both sides of the Atlantic.

But, say apologists for the bad results so far, shouldn’t we be focused on the long run rather than short-run pain? Actually, no: the economy needs real help now, not hypothetical payoffs a decade from now. In any case, evidence is starting to emerge that the economy’s “short run” troubles — now in their fourth year, and being made worse by the focus on austerity — are taking a toll on its long-run prospects as well.

Consider, in particular, what is happening to America’s manufacturing base. In normal times manufacturing capacity rises 2 or 3 percent every year. But faced with a persistently weak economy, industry has been reducing, not increasing, its productive capacity. At this point, according to Federal Reserve estimates, manufacturing capacity is almost 5 percent lower than it was in December 2007.

What this means is that if and when a real recovery finally gets going, the economy will run into capacity constraints and production bottlenecks much sooner than it should. That is, the weak economy, which is partly the result of budget-cutting, is hurting the future as well as the present.

Furthermore, the decline in manufacturing capacity is probably only the beginning of the bad news. Similar cuts in capacity will probably take place in the service sector — indeed, they may already be taking place. And with long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression, there is a real risk that many of the unemployed will come to be seen as unemployable.

Oh, and the brunt of those cuts in public spending is falling on education. Somehow, laying off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers doesn’t seem like a good way to win the future.

In fact, when you combine the growing evidence that fiscal austerity is reducing our future prospects with the very low interest rates on U.S. government debt, it’s hard to avoid a startling conclusion: budget austerity may well be counterproductive even from a purely fiscal point of view, because lower future growth means lower tax receipts.

What should be happening? The answer is that we need a major push to get the economy moving, not at some future date, but right now. For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad. And it’s not just pointy-headed economists saying this; business leaders like Google’s Eric Schmidt are saying the same thing, and the bond market, by buying U.S. debt at such low interest rates, is in effect pleading for a more expansionary policy.

And one more truly resonant essay spoke to me recently.

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