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Monday, February 28, 2011

Shallow, liberal mainstream media sanctifies empty progressive-materialist narrative critical to transnational elite's murderous Globalist agenda

From:
An empire of lies: why our media betrays us

(Redress) -- by Jonathan Cook --

Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role – if an inadvertent one – in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.

Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously...

So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?

Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.

Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decision-makers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics – who are many and powerful – say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”

In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people – more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile...

Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.

Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.

In our globalized world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.

Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well as its elite supporters around the world – including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East – are an integral element in that transnational elite.

Imperial elites and mainstream media

The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the Western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:

•That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations;
•That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general, are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation;
•That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom;
•That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom, but also a major source of our happiness;
•That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet;and
•That there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.

These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us – and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to Western publics only – to describe the natural order.

The job of sanctifying these assumptions – and ensuring they are not scrutinized – falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.

The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.

His confession has come too late – eight years too late, to be precise – to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow Western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neo-conservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.

That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.

Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.

But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” – or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it – for its own illegal and immoral ends.

Superiority complex
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.

In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders – those opposed to empire or its interests – are driven by base or evil motives.

When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.

For the Western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals...

The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the Western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding Western-style freedoms...MORE...LINK

Alex Jones takes Sheen's side to The View, manages to bring some 9/11 truth to the viewers, as well

From:
Alex Jones Culture Jams The View

(YouTube.com) -- by lonelantern --

Madoff comes clean, says corrupt federal government running a Ponzi scheme like his own, new regulatory reform "a joke"

From:
Madoff to NY magazine: Government a Ponzi scheme

Bernard Madoff tells NY magazine regulatory reform is a joke, government is a Ponzi scheme

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme.

"The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators.

The interview was published on the magazine's website Sunday night.

Madoff did an earlier New York Times interview in which he accused banks and hedge funds of being "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme to fleece people out of billions of dollars. He said they failed to scrutinize the discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.

He said in the New York magazine interview the Securities and Exchange Commission "looks terrible in this thing," and he said the "whole government is a Ponzi scheme."

A Ponzi, or pyramid, scheme is a scam in which people are persuaded to invest through promises of unusually high returns, with early investors paid their returns out of money put in by later investors.

A court-appointed trustee seeking to recover money on behalf of the victims of Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme has filed a lawsuit against his primary banker, JPMorgan Chase, alleging the bank had suspected something wrong in his operation for years. The bank has denied any wrongdoing.

Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence in Butner, N.C., after pleading guilty in 2009 to fraud charges.

In the New York magazine interview, Madoff, 72, also said he was devastated by his son Mark Madoff's death and laments the pain he wrought on his family, especially his wife.

"She's angry at me," Madoff said. "I mean, you know, I destroyed our family."

Mark Madoff, 46, hanged himself with a dog leash in his Manhattan apartment on the second anniversary of his father's arrest. He left behind a wife and four children, ages 2 to 18...MORE...LINK

Big Government-crony socialists attempt to use Wisconsin conflict to hijack Middle American/working-American populist movement

From:
Populism, Progressives and Public Unions

(By BATR) --

The divide in the Disunited States of America opened wider with the concerted effort of progressives and teacher union’s latest escape from reality. When people lament that there is little civility left in this country, they mostly refuse to face facts. There is a pitch battle for the hearts and minds of citizens. So far the public education lobby has been winning the war. Their victory is self-evident with the sorry state of literacy much less rational ability that passes for the collective consciousness of the public. The prime directive and accomplishment of the government school system is the development of a society of fools and idiots. Here, here to the union of public thugs and sophists, who work diligently to destroy the American Nation.

The Wisconsin firmament has a fine tradition of populism. Robert M. "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Sr. is a heroic figure in state and national politics. His advocacy for some admirers would claim he was a progressive, but those who understand the distinction, know he was really a populist. Jeff Taylor writes in First Principles.
"The link between La Follette-Johnson and Taft-Goldwater can be discerned when thinking of the transitional figures in the late ’30s/early ’40s when internationalists and the mainstream press were confusing people by adopting the then-popular "liberal" and "progressive" labels. Consider the fact that new "conservatives" attorney Amos Pinchot, publisher Frank Gannett, publisher Robert McCormick, businessman Robert Wood, socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and Congressman Hamilton Fish all came out of the Bull Moose-La Follette-Borah tradition of liberal Jeffersonianism within the party".
...The Washington Examiner makes a valid point. "The Left has misread the postbailout populist sentiment all along, assuming public anger was directed at the rich. But American anger, I suspect, is directed not at some people who have money or success, but at those who profit through cronyism and their connections to power".
The fundamental distinction between a progressive and a conservative populist is their view on government. As the current dispute spreads to Indiana and Ohio, the public employment unions are altogether oblivious to the meaning of "using government on behalf of the common people". The patron saint of progressive liberalism warned of the danger in, "The process of Collective Bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees.

Cited in the essay, Public Employee Unions Guarantee National Bankruptcy
"In 1959, the state of Wisconsin enacted the first state statute permitting municipal employees the right to form, join, and be represented by labor organizations. Three years later, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, which granted federal employees the right to join and form unions and to bargain collectively. The order established a framework for collective bargaining and encouraged the expansion of collective bargaining rights to state and local government employees.

The Supreme Court held in Smith v. Arkansas State Highway Employees, Local 1315 (1979), (3) however, that nothing in the U.S. Constitution requires public employers to either recognize or collectively bargain with public employee unions".
Jim O’Sullivan writes in the National Journal. "Wisconsin has done more than polarize and excite the true believers in both parties; it has served to galvanize already amped conservative populists who have increasingly discussed a "new class" of workers being forged among public employees enjoying union-rigged perks, and liberal populists who see in Madison a conservative conspiracy to end decades of hard-won rights for the working man".

What escapes the marginal intellectual integrity of so many public employees is that government never creates wealth. All taxation is theft. Mandating government schools, paid for with public funds, teaching subversive doctrines and socialist redistribution, is a primary cause of producing the walking zombies that populate this country...MORE...LINK

Empire group-think run amok: a former congressional aid confesses to the hypocritical, cynical and murderous moral cesspool that Washington has become

From:
The Immorality of Empire

(AntiWar.com) -- by Nicholas Kramer --

As I watch the popular uprisings unfold against brutal dictatorships supported by my own government, I cannot help but reflect upon the moral implications of my participation in the American empire. My crimes began almost before I can remember, but I will address only the most immediately pertinent of them here. I am a citizen of the United States of America; I pay local, state, and federal taxes; and I vote.

In the summer of 2006, I began working for a United States senator. I soon afterward composed a memo to the senator and sent it to his chief of staff and legislative director for review. The substance of my memo filled all of one typed page and was to the point. I briefly outlined some of the high costs of current U.S. foreign policy, including the expansion of presidential power to the detriment of the Congress and our system of government, damage to America’s national security and economy, restriction of civil liberties, and enlargement of the national debt. I then referred back to numerous speeches and press releases put out by my senator in which he stated that the United States could not serve as “the world’s policeman” and expressed his dissatisfaction with the high costs of war when the United States had “so many pressing needs here at home.” Finally, the memo concluded with my drastic recommendation: in light of his prior statements and policy positions, the senator might be interested in having a private briefing regarding the domestic advantages of a more constrained foreign policy (I suggested that this briefing be conducted by Ivan Eland on his principle of “offshore balancing”).

When I was called into my supervisor’s office for a chat about my insubordinate behavior (see above), my violation of office politics and my ignorance of the proper hierarchy comprised the bulk of the scolding. There was almost no mention of the memo’s actual subject apart from a brief reference to my complete lack of knowledge about U.S. foreign policy; instead, there was a warning that “it’ll be quite a few years before you brief the senator on anything.”

I think it was then that I sealed my moral fate. After my rebuke, I did the sensible thing: I ignored my conscience and went back to the work of the American empire. Within a year and a half I had been promoted and regularly conducted briefings for the senator. In short, I traded my integrity, values, and, worst of all, my voice in exchange for a slightly less bumpy career path. Meanwhile, people around the world continued to suffer and die by the thousands, and all of it was in my name.

And yes, I use the word “people” deliberately—not extremists, not Muslims, not “suspected enemy fighters,” not even “collateral damage,” just people like the rest of us. Some of them may have wished us harm, and some may even have been capable of it, but nevertheless they all started out as tiny and helpless as my nine-month-old son is now and went on to live their lives, with all of their trials and tribulations. They cried for their parents as children, had their hearts broken as teenagers, and (if they got that far) emerged into adulthood just as scared and confused as the rest of us. Whatever unique course each of them took through this world, each of their distinct lives ended when they crossed paths with United States foreign policy. They died by bullet, by missile, by sanction, and by the torturer’s hand.

And I did nothing. Unlike most Americans, who at least have the comfort of knowing that our entire political process is broken and that nothing they say or do will ever be heard by those who matter, I had the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to speak directly to our elected leaders on behalf of the victims of U.S. foreign policy everywhere—for their good as well as ours. While people died, I was willing to go no further than writing one solitary memo. While people watched as their sons and daughters were murdered in front of their eyes, I closed mine—not in the face of torture or threats to my family, but in the hope of securing a positive recommendation letter and a slightly higher income. And in that moment, the countless victims of the United States government became my victims as well. Not only do I live in an open, democratic society and pay taxes to my government, but I actually participated in my government’s decision-making processes at the highest levels. I therefore take full responsibility for each death in which I have had a hand...MORE...LINK

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Perpetually cluless liberal airheads surprised to be manipulated, exploited, swindled by limousine liberal snakes

From:
Arianna Huffington's AOL deal sparks accusations of a political sell-out

(guardian.co.uk) -- by Paul Harris --

Arianna Huffington has long reigned as the queen of America's chattering classes, using her Huffington Post website as a platform to transform herself into a darling of the United States' left-leaning media elite.

But no longer. Since she announced that the HuffPo was being sold to web giant AOL for $315m, Huffington has been accused of being a political sellout and someone who made a personal fortune from the labour of thousands of bloggers who write for no pay.

America's Newspaper Guild, the journalists' union, has started a campaign to target the Huffington Post as having a business model that has done great damage by not paying contributors. It has demanded that Huffington donate some of her AOL deal profits to investing in paid journalism. "After building a media empire based on unpaid writers and republishing the works of others... we are calling on Arianna Huffington to invest in quality journalism by sharing a portion of this fortune," said the guild's president, Bernie Lunzer.

That appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears. HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz denied the website was a problem for the industry, saying: "It's both wrong and offensive to insist that the HuffPo is exploiting journalists."

But since the AOL deal was announced this month, there has been an avalanche of criticism of the website and its smooth-talking founder. "To grasp its business model... you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates," blasted Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten.

Blogger and cartoonist Matt Bors revealed that he refused a HuffPo offer to put his work on the website because it would not pay him. He called the HuffPo business model of offering publicity and exposure instead of money "abhorrent". David Carr, the New York Times media critic, mentioned the HuffPo's business practices in an article headlined "At media companies, a nation of serfs".

Even HuffPo bloggers joined the condemnation. One, RB Stuart, lamented posting content on HuffPo that she estimated was worth $25,000, writing: "Arianna not only sold her soul as well as her ship of slaves, but sowed the seeds of her demise with this act of greed and exploitation." Other bloggers said they would never write for her again and a Facebook page was set up to get the HuffPo to pay its bloggers. It was called "Hey Arianna, can you spare a dime?". Advertising Age columnist, and HuffPo critic, Simon Dumenco gleefully catalogued all the criticism in a piece entitled "Welcome aboard the anti-HuffPo bandwagon".

It is a remarkable turnaround for Huffington's image, which has long bathed in a glow of positive publicity. After founding the HuffPo in 2005, the former Republican and socialite rapidly turned it into one of the world's most influential websites and a self-declared liberal alternative to the conservative Fox News channel. It won her plaudits from new media evangelists and America's beleaguered Democrats. She became a regular pundit on cable news shows and a fixture of Democratic social circles.

But not so much now, especially after Huffington said she had always envisioned the HuffPo as more than just a politics website and said it had no overall ideology. To many observers that seemed like a deliberate rewriting of the past, and certainly a strong suggestion that AOL's corporate ownership would see it tone down the site's liberal campaigning...MORE...LINK
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Arianna Huffington with fellow celebrity limousine liberal swindler Bill Maher

Neocon/neolib rot: American domination and resources abused, plundered, mismanaged and squandered into oblivion in less than a generation

From:
How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire?

(The Telegraph) -- by Peter Oborne --

Empires can collapse in the course of a generation. At the end of the 16th century, the Spanish looked dominant. Twenty-five years later, they were on their knees, over-extended, bankrupt, and incapable of coping with the emergent maritime powers of Britain and Holland. The British empire reached its fullest extent in 1930. Twenty years later, it was all over.

Today, it is reasonable to ask whether the United States, seemingly invincible a decade ago, will follow the same trajectory. America has suffered two convulsive blows in the last three years. The first was the financial crisis of 2008, whose consequences are yet to be properly felt. Although the immediate cause was the debacle in the mortgage market, the underlying problem was chronic imbalance in the economy.

For a number of years, America has been incapable of funding its domestic programmes and overseas commitments without resorting to massive help from China, its global rival. China has a pressing motive to assist: it needs to sustain US demand in order to provide a market for its exports and thus avert an economic crisis of its own. This situation is the contemporary equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine which prevented nuclear war breaking out between America and Russia.

Unlike MAD, this pact is unsustainable. But Barack Obama has not sought to address the problem. Instead, he responded to the crisis with the same failed policies that caused the trouble in the first place: easy credit and yet more debt. It is certain that America will, in due course, be forced into a massive adjustment both to its living standards at home and its commitments abroad.

This matters because, following the second convulsive blow, America’s global interests are under threat on a scale never before seen. Since 1956, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pulled the plug on Britain and France over Suez, the Arab world has been a US domain. At first, there were promises that it would tolerate independence and self-determination. But this did not last long; America chose to govern through brutal and corrupt dictators, supplied with arms, military training and advice from Washington.

The momentous importance of the last few weeks is that this profitable, though morally bankrupt, arrangement appears to be coming to an end. One of the choicest ironies of the bloody and macabre death throes of the regime in Libya is that Colonel Gaddafi would have been wiser to have stayed out of the US sphere of influence. When he joined forces with George Bush and Tony Blair five years ago, the ageing dictator was leaping on to a bandwagon that was about to grind to a halt.

In Washington, President Obama has not been stressing this aspect of affairs. Instead, after hesitation, he has presented the recent uprisings as democratic and even pro-American, indeed a triumph for the latest methods of Western communication such as Twitter and Facebook. Many sympathetic commentators have therefore claimed that the Arab revolutions bear comparison with the 1989 uprising of the peoples of Eastern Europe against Soviet tyranny.

I would guess that the analogy is apt. Just as 1989 saw the collapse of the Russian empire in Eastern Europe, so it now looks as if 2011 will mark the removal of many of America’s client regimes in the Arab world...MORE...LINK

Authentic conservatives should self-identify as "constitutionalists" to distinguish themselves from neocon frauds

From:
Neocon Control

(The New American) -- by John F. McManus --

...What is it that those who call themselves conservatives are trying to conserve? In years past, some would have insisted that the term “conservative” had been defined by Russell Kirk in his The Conservative Mind (1953), or by Senator Barry Goldwater in his Conscience of a Conservative (1963). Both of these seminal volumes are still admired in most CPAC circles, and the names of both men are regularly invoked at CPAC gatherings. But the direction toward which many current conservatives have been steering the movement cannot reasonably be equated with the principles enunciated by Kirk and Goldwater.

Among the essential hallmarks of conservative thought set forth by Dr. Kirk are belief in transcendent truth — the Divine Law and the Natural Law — as well as the idea that one has an obligation to posterity and futurity to uphold the Christian moral order bequeathed to us by our nation’s Founders. He also maintained that the great conservative minds fought against the prevailing “liberal” trend of our age that seeks to centralize and concentrate all power into the hands of the unitary state. He was a firm believer in the constitutional principle that the federal government has been granted minimal powers that are, in James Madison’s words, “few and defined.” Along with our Founding Fathers, Kirk saw imperial ambitions and foreign entanglements as mortal dangers to our Republic.

Senator Goldwater, likewise, hewed to a philosophy that adamantly opposed the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusions into virtually every area of our lives, and its usurpations of personal, local, and state responsibilities. And he saw increasing national indebtedness and the squandering of ever more of our citizens’ wealth by Washington, D.C., as a deadly trend that must be reversed. Over the past few decades, however, many “conservatives” not only joined the liberals in praising Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but enthusiastically endorsed the federal government’s accelerated wasteful spending and egregious usurpations.

Already existing confusion about who is and who isn’t a conservative grew when the two Presidents named Bush and their appointees were regularly labeled “conservative” by the media. Both Bushes openly supported larger government, a soaring national debt, and a deepening of international entanglements. They could hardly identify with what Kirk and Goldwater had written years earlier. Journalists Fred Barnes, William Kristol, David Brooks, George Will, the late Robert Bartley, Charles Krauthammer, and numerous other pundits have claimed, or have been awarded, conservative status while generally adhering to and expounding political, economic, and moral principles that one would not associate with traditional conservative thought. Among politicians, Newt Gingrich leads the pack for talking the conservative talk but refusing to walk the conservative walk. It ought to be obvious that jamming such an amalgam of books, authors, political leaders/staffers, journalists, academicians, and others under a single conservative umbrella can’t be done.

It appears there simply is no longer any agreed-upon definition for “conservative,” just as there isn’t one for “liberal.” Yet there is need for a label to identify traditionally minded Americans, one that can substitute for the watered-down appellation “conservative.” We suggest “constitutionalist,” signifying adherence to the document created by our Founding Fathers, the one overwhelmingly accepted by the first Americans, and one so cavalierly sworn to by so many. In other words, go to the U.S. Constitution for what Americanism means and skip using “conservative” to describe anyone.

In the Constitution of 1787, one finds strictly limited government, non-intervention in the affairs of other nations, and — because of a near-total absence of restraints on the American people — conditions allowing for more individual freedom than mankind had experienced in all of history. This is what conservatism once meant, but not anymore. In fact, even though the Constitution still exists, and even though government officials, military leaders, and others solemnly swear to adhere to its provisions, the document is regularly ignored by most — even by conservatives.

Over the past several decades, while the conservative label has been applied almost willy-nilly, the stage has been set for something else to emerge. That something else is neoconservatism. Happily, this brand of political thinking has been narrowly defined — by none other than the man who is widely touted to be its “godfather.” In his 1995 book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, the late Irving Kristol wrote:
It describes the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group … (which gradually gained more recruits) toward a more conservative point of view: conservative, but different in certain respects from the conservatism of the Republican party. We … accepted the New Deal in principle, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that then permeated American conservatism.
There you have it, and it comes from the godfather himself. Neoconservatives seek unconstitutional, socialistic big government (à la Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal) while they champion America’s meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, even to the making of war. They have succeeded in making repugnant any slight leaning toward, or even mention of “isolationism.” Change that once-useful term to “non-intervention in the affairs and wars of other nations” and most Americans will nod in agreement. But many have been scared away from such good sense by fear of being labeled an “isolationist.”...

According to their own leaders, neoconservatives want government programs to deal with any and all problems, meaning they want a larger and more intrusive and socialistic-style government. In keeping with their desires, they favor spending enormous sums of money, some of it financed by onerous taxation and much of it acquired through borrowing. Increasing the National Debt, a necessary consequence of outlandish spending, has been a regular item in the neocon agenda...MORE...LINK

Creative destruction, left-wing style: Left-liberal social-engineering psychopaths love open borders and massive population transfers

From:
Labour Party Immigration Tidal Wave Has Swept over UK

(The New American) -- by James Heiser --

According to a report published by MigrationWatch UK, the nation’s current immigration rate of approximately a migrant a minute arriving in Great Britain could mean that by 2060, “white British” would be a minority in the United Kingdom. This fundamental, demographic shift is not an accident; rather, the watch group asserts that it is the result of a deliberate policy of the Labour Party.

According to the report, Mass Immigration — Labour’s enduring legacy to Britain, the influx of foreigners — both legal and illegal — has occurred at a rate that staggers the imagination:
Under Labour 3.2 million foreign citizens arrived in Britain, about 80% from outside the EU, whilst nearly one million (941,000) British citizens left. The immigration figures show 300,000 from the new EU member states although the Labour Force Statistics (which include those here for less than a year) give about 500,000. Net immigration from the EU15 was 300,000 over the same period. Illegal immigration is additional — estimated at between 600,000 and 1.1 million. Foreign immigrants continue to arrive at almost one per minute — the overwhelming majority from outside the EU.
Given the fact that the current population of the United Kingdom is a little over 61 million, the demographic shift that has taken place since 1997 is quite significant, and that shift will likely continue for many years to come no matter what changes in immigration policy take place in the near future.

The press release issued by MigrationWatch UK places the responsibility for the mass immigration at the time of the release of the study at the doorstep of 10 Downing Street:
The report shows that in the years before Blair’s government net immigration was running at around 50,000 a year, but in 1997 the floodgates were opened and numbers quadrupled with the result that over three million migrants came to Britain and stayed here plus, perhaps, a further one million who came and stayed illegally. At the same time nearly a million British citizens left the country.

This is in sharp contrast to Labour’s 1997 election manifesto which declared that “Every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception.”

"This has been a clear failure of democracy due in large part to the left’s deliberate tactic of stifling reasoned debate with accusations of racism," said Sir Andrew [Green, former British diplomat and founding chairman of MigrationWatch UK]. "In the years to come immigration will be seen as Labour’s great betrayal."
The implications behind such statistics are staggering: Approximately 6.5 percent of the current population residing in the United Kingdom has come to that nation by immigration — legal and illegal—in the past 14 years. The impact of this shift on the future of the UK is magnified by the flight of British citizens abroad during the same time period. MigrationWatch endeavored to put the immigration tidal wave in perspective:

But when you consider that three million extra people on this island equates to the creation of three cities the size of Birmingham, seven the size of Manchester or 20 the size of Harrogate with all that that means for the pressure on our roads, railways, housing, infrastructure, the environment, schools, hospitals and the general quality of life[,] it gives some idea of the scale of what Labour has bequeathed to us all.

According to the report, the overwhelming response of the people of the United Kingdom to this influx from abroad is a desire to see it reduced:
In February 2010 the Department for Communities and Local Government published its “Citizenship Survey.” This was a major exercise based on a sample of 10,000 adults in England and Wales and an additional sample of 5,000 adults from minority ethnic groups. It found that 77% thought that immigration should be reduced, including 53% of all ethnic minority groups and that only 5% thought it should be increased. 51% thought it should be reduced “by a lot,” including 25% of all ethnic groups.
...MORE...LINK

A criminal racket that controls government regulators runs the biggest banks on Wall Street, and Americans still wonder why their country is in ruins?

From:
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
(Rolling Stone) -- by Matt Taibbi --

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing...MORE...LINK

Saturday, February 26, 2011

America's hollowed-out, plundered and squandered manufacturing base: who did it and why, and how can it be restored?


From:
Manufacturing’s Dismal Decade

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

Last year, Barack Obama committed his administration to doubling U.S. exports in half a decade.

The good news: He is on the way. U.S. exports of goods and services grew in 2010 by 16.6 percent.

Bad news: U.S. imports, starting from a higher base, surged by 19.7 percent.

Result: The U.S. trade deficit in 2010 worsened by 33 percent, rising from $375 billion to $498 billion, the largest percentage increase in a decade. If Obama keeps this up, he may prove as big a disaster for U.S. manufacturing as his predecessor, although these are big shoes to fill.

As he has each February for years, Charles W. McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled the stats on the industrial decline of his country under our free trade presidents. Here are but a few numbers for the decade from December 2000, the month before George W. Bush took the oath, to December 2010, the end of Obama’s second year.

In that decade, America ran a total of $6.1 trillion in trade deficits, more than our entire economic growth. To finance those 10 years of deficits, America had to borrow $1.553 billion every day.

And we wonder why China owns America.

In 2010, our trade deficit in manufactures alone rose 27 percent to $416 billion, far exceeding our trade deficit in crude oil. A decade of such deficits in manufactures has devastated the industrial states.
From December 2000 to December 2010, 22 states lost a third or more of their manufacturing jobs. Massachusetts, New York and Ohio lost 38 percent of their manufacturing jobs, New Jersey 39 percent, North Carolina 42 percent, Rhode Island 44 percent, Michigan 48 percent.

Political result: Free trader John McCain lost all seven, including the formerly “red” states of Ohio and North Carolina.

Trade in autos, trucks and parts, an industry in which America was dominant in the lifetime of many of us, tells the story.

Last year, the United States ran a trade deficit in autos, trucks and parts of $110 billion. The deficits with Germany, Japan, South Korea and Mexico account for that entire total...

Does it matter that manufacturing in America now accounts for one-tenth of our economy and one-tenth of our labor force, figures unseen since before the Civil War?

If you read the history of Britain in the industrial age, of America from 1865-1945 and of Bismarck’s Germany, you will think it does. If you listen to the scores of thousands of economists, none of whom ever built a great nation, you may think it does not matter who produces what where.

Is it possible America could become again the dominant manufacturing nation she was from 1880 to 1980? Not only possible but easy to accomplish — and within a decade.

Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, has half the answer. “We should offer tax credits or a five- to 10-year tax holiday to companies, domestic or foreign, that want to set up or expand a factory in the U.S.”

How would we finance it? As most foreign nations impose value-added taxes averaging 20 percent on U.S.-made goods that enter their countries, put a tariff of 20 percent on all foreign goods.

Hundreds of billions would suddenly pour into the U.S. treasury. Imports would slowly shrink. Production in America would soar.

That’s how Hamilton, Madison, Clay, Lincoln, McKinley and T.R. did it, before America forgot how she became great...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

The elitist, internationalist ideology of Globalism is behind the dismantling of America’s industrial and manufacturing base.

Globalism has succeeded in the economic overthrow of the country so fabulously because it is a synthesis of both extreme Capitalist and Marxist ideology, and hence successfully appealed to elements of both Left and Right.

The Left regards open borders, liberal international progressivism, and the general imposition of atheist-materialism all to be humanitarian imperatives.

The Capitalist Right regards international finance and corporatism, open borders for low labor wages, the war-profiteering complex and international wars necessary to sustain it, and imposed dollar hegemony to be economic imperatives. There also exists a strong component of atheist-materialism on the Capitalist Right as well.

Thus, the two have synthesized into the Globalist ideology, which is built upon greed, blood, humanitarian fraud, and stubborn, utopian ideological fanaticism.

We need to return to America-first, secured and defended borders and markets, free enterprise nationalism that charges for access to America’s mature markets, rewards companies that create American jobs, and punishes companies that shift U.S. jobs overseas.

The expression “You can’t serve two gods” applies equally to elites who want to see themselves simultaneously as patriotic Americans and aristocratic, internationalist “citizens of the world.”

Like the haughty English imperialist elites who imploded their Empire by spreading their country too thin and viewing themselves as superior aristocrats capable of governing the world, arrogant, modern American Left-Right internationalists and Globalist elites feel they are entitled to rip off the country, enrich themselves and squander America’s resources and good credit built up by generations of responsible Americans, all under the guise of a fraudulent humanitarianism.

We don’t need these pompous ass elites. Let’s cut them and their self-serving, pretentious internationalist Globalism loose before they plunder and squander until the country implodes as did both the British Empire and Soviet Union, a combination of which the U.S. government has become.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Unpatriotic, Israel-first snakes in Congress and media want cowering Obama admin to bow even lower than it already has

From:
The Veto from Hell

(AntiWar.com) -- by Philip Giraldi --

Last Friday’s American veto of the United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank illegal was not only shameful, it was possibly the low point of the already foundering Obama presidency. To be sure, United States UN Ambassador Susan Rice accompanied the veto with a stirring rendition of "I’ll cry tomorrow" as she described how the Obama White House really is opposed to the settlements. Really. Rice argued that supporting or even abstaining on a resolution criticizing Israel, however mildly framed, might setback the peace process, which, as she well knows, died completely over six months ago. But let’s not get hung up on the details. Rice should have said instead that her boss in the White House is so afraid of the Israel Lobby that he has to ask permission when he goes to the bathroom. At least that would have been completely credible, something you can believe in from an Administration that has otherwise delivered squat to the many voters who supported Obama in hopes that he might actually be interested in peace in our times.

And Obama has a lot to be afraid of, mostly from the old knife in the back trick from the Israel boosters in his own party. "This is too clever by half," said Representative Anthony Weiner. "Instead of doing the correct and principled thing and vetoing an inappropriate and wrong resolution, they now have opened the door to more and more anti-Israeli efforts coming to the floor of the UN." Representative Nita Lowey agreed, "Compromising our support for Israel at the UN is not an option."

And over at the GOP side of the House, shortly before the veto, the new Chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen criticized the resolution: "Support for this anti-Israel statement is a major concession to enemies of the Jewish State and other free democracies. Offering to criticize our closest ally at the UN isn’t leadership, it’s unacceptable." And just to make sure that Israel will have the money to expand its settlements, last Wednesday sixty-seven freshmen Republican House members sent a letter to their party’s leadership supporting full funding of aid to Israel. The letter cited the lawmakers’ "recognition that the national security of the United States is directly tied to the strength and security of the State of Israel."

Nice one, Anthony, Nita, Ileana and all those new congressmen who were elected because they promised to do some budget cutting, but I don’t detect anything about what the American national interest might be, just a bit of nonsense about "support for Israel," "our closest ally," and even more ridiculous bleating about how arming Israel makes America safer. In fact, none of you even mentioned the United States. Excuse me, I thought you dudes were serving in the US Congress, not the Knesset, but I might be wrong about that.

And lest anyone go wobbly on support of Israel there was the usual media claque screaming outrage because Rice had dared to criticize the settlements policy even though she was casting the veto. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post put it nicely "The US representative, while reluctantly casting a veto, joined the pack of jackals that seek to make Israel the culprit for all that ills (sic) the Middle East."

For those who have been asleep a la Rip van Winkle for the past twenty years, let us recap what has been going on in this country. There is an extremely dangerous domestic enemy out there, and it isn’t the naturalized Muslims that the redoubtable Congressman Peter King is investigating. It is an organization that calls itself the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC. AIPAC is the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington, by far. It was founded in the 1950s with the support of the Israeli Foreign Ministry to create an organization that would lobby for sustained American financial, diplomatic, and military support of Israel, but, curiously, it has never been required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA, which would require full public disclosure of finances – details of income and expenditures – as well as periodic reports on the nature of the relationship between the organization and the foreign government in question.

AIPAC is the focal point of the Israel Lobby in the United States...MORE...LINK

Billionaire, Big Government crony banksters in bed with Democrats object to federal spending cuts

From:
Wall Street sees House GOP cuts as 'drag'

Tribune Washington bureau -- by Lisa Mascaro

WASHINGTON — The spending cuts approved by House Republicans would act as a drag on the U.S. economy, according to a Wall Street analysis that added new pressure to a raging political debate in Washington.

The report by the investment company Goldman Sachs said the cuts would reduce the growth in gross domestic product by up to 2 percentage points this year, essentially cutting in half the nation's projected economic growth for 2011.

The report, prepared for the company's clients, represents the first independent economic assessment of a congressional budget fight that could lead to a government shutdown as early as next week.

Nonetheless, Republicans are unlikely to retreat from their insistence on more than $60 billion in reductions in federal spending as a condition of continuing funding for the government through the rest of 2011.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said the Goldman report represented "the same outdated Washington mindset," comparing it to the thinking behind the 2009 Recovery Act that released federal funds to counter the effects of the recession.

But Democrats quickly seized on the report as a validation of their arguments against Republican cuts.

"Just as the economy is beginning to pick up a little steam, the Republican budget would snuff out any chance of recovery," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

What a surprise: Wall Street banksters in bed with the Big Government Fed and the Democrat Party, who make hundreds of millions for clerical tasks like managing government bond sales to pay for all the spending, don't want the taxpayer-thieving gravy train to end. And lo-and-behold, there's Chuck Schumer, who no doubt gets fat "political contributions" from has bankster buddies, greasing the skids for the entire scam.

This is how Big Government and crony, government-connected big business, including fascist defense industry contractors, contribute to socialist outcomes that always end either in bankruptcy, or mass murder, or both.

These greedy, unpatriotic mooches don't care about this country or its financial solvency; all they care about is short term profit and lining their own pockets and getting rich at the public trough so they can retire to the tropics, or to some financially viable country that hasn't let parasites like this take over the system.

And the richest of them all, the international bankers like Goldman Sachs, are in bed with the Democrat Party, supposed defender of the working class.

What a disgusting fraud.

--------------------------

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Turning democracy and representative government into an extortion racket that robs taxpayers and future generations of Americans

From:
Alinsky in Madison

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

As a large and furious demonstration was under way outside and inside the Capitol in Madison last week, Barack Obama invited in a TV camera crew from Milwaukee and proceeded to fan the flames.

Dropping the mask of The Great Compromiser, Obama reverted to his role as South Chicago community organizer, charging Gov. Scott Walker and the Wisconsin legislature with an “assault on unions.”

As the late Saul Alinsky admonished in his Rules for Radicals, “the community organizer … must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.”

After Obama goaded the demonstrators, the protests swelled. All 14 Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to paralyze the upper chamber by denying it a quorum. Teachers went on strike, left kids in the classroom and came to Madison. Schools shut down.
Jesse Jackson arrived. The White House political machine went into overdrive to sustain the crowds in Madison and other capitals and use street pressure to break governments seeking to peel back the pay, perks, privileges and power of public employee unions that are the taxpayer-subsidized armies of the Democratic Party.

Marin County millionairess Nancy Pelosi, doing a poor imitation of Emma Goldman, announced, “I stand in solidarity with the Wisconsin workers fighting for their rights, especially for all the students and young people leading the charge.”

Is this not the same lady who called Tea Partiers “un-American” for “drowning out opposing views”? Is not drowning out opposing views exactly what those scores of thousands are doing in Madison, banging drums inside the state Capitol?

Some carried signs comparing Walker to Hitler, Mussolini and Mubarak. One had a placard with the face of Walker in the cross hairs of a rifle sight. Major media seemed uninterested. These signs didn’t comport with their script.

In related street action, protesters, outraged over Congress’ oversight of the D.C. budget, showed up at John Boehner’s residence on Capitol Hill to abuse the speaker at his home.

And so the great battle of this generation is engaged.

Between now and 2013, the states are facing a total budget shortfall of $175 billion. To solve it, they are taking separate paths.

Illinois voted to raise taxes by two-thirds and borrow $12 billion more, $8.5 billion of it to pay overdue bills. The Republican minority fought this approach, but was outvoted and accepted defeat.

Wisconsin, however, where Republicans captured both houses and the governor’s office in November, and which is facing a deficit of $3.6 billion over the next two years, has chosen to cut spending.

Walker and the legislature want to require state employees, except police, firemen and troopers, to contribute half of their future pension benefits and up to 12.6 percent of health care premiums.

Wisconsin state workers and teachers enjoy the most generous benefits of state employees anywhere in America. According to the MacIver Institute, the average teacher in the Milwaukee public schools earns $100,000 a year — $56,000 in pay, $44,000 in benefits — and enjoys job security.

More controversially, Walker would end collective bargaining for benefits while retaining it for salaries and wage hikes up to annual inflation. This would ease the burden on local governments and school districts faced with the same budget crisis but less able to stand up to large and powerful government unions.

Other new governors like John Kasich of Ohio are looking at the Wisconsin approach to save their states from bankruptcy. They, too, are now facing massive street protests instigated by Obama and orchestrated by his agents operating out of the DNC.

The Battle of Madison, where Obama, Pelosi, the AFL-CIO, Jackson, the teachers unions and the Alinskyite left are refusing to accept the results of the 2010 election and taking to the streets to break state governments, is shaping up as the first engagement in the Battle for America. What will be decided?

Can the states, with new governments elected by the people, roll back government to prevent a default? Or will the states be forced by street protests, work stoppages by legislators, and strikes by state employees and teachers to betray the people who elected them? Will they be forced to raise taxes ad infinitum to feed the government’s insatiable appetite for tax dollars?

In short, does democracy work anymore in America?...MORE...LINK
-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

I believe in the rights of private unions, but government unions are nearly entirely an extortionist racket: give us what we want, or we will withhold essential services (although in the case of public school teachers, their “services” are no longer essential at all, and largely amount to liberal, cultural Marxist brainwashing at the expense of the 3 R’s and basic education.)

As commented above, public employee unions entering into taxpayer thieving conspiracies with corrupt politicians (we’ll vote for you, you deliver the gold-plated goods) are in no way democratic, but rather fascist. Worse, they are robbing future, unborn generations of Americans to feather their own nests, because it’s now all going on the taxpayer credit card.

Ironically, these are the same types who wail “We’re doing it for the children.”

Yes, the fascist Wall Street banksters, corporatists and “national security” exploiting swindlers rob the taxpayers and future Americans at the national level as well, but all that proves is that we live in sick, cynical times, governed by an unconscionable, morally defective generation of “leaders” who have turned democracy (and the country) into an extortion racket.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Spoiled, entitled Political Class and its cronies from Wisconsin to Washington to Israel demand U.S. taxpayer-thieving largesse continue forever

From:
An End to Foreign Aid

(The American Conservative) -- by Jack Hunter --

Government of clowns: Alleged "fiscal conservatives" in Establishment GOP nearly as big a joke as Dems when it comes to spending cuts

From:
GOP Uses Flyswatter to Defend Against Incoming Debt Missile

(The New American) -- by Bob Adelmann --

Even with only modest cuts in the continuing resolution bill offered by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, it is highly unlikely to see the light of day when the Senate returns from recess, just before the March 4th deadline. Despite strong rhetoric from House Speaker John Boehner who said “When we say we’re going to cut spending, read my lips. We are going to cut spending, ” this reminded one of the identical words (“read my lips”) uttered by Republican Presidential candidate George H. W. Bush in 1988, which cost him his chance for re-election in 1992 when he voted for higher taxes the year before. Boehner’s words also generated a protest of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who accused Boehner of threatening to shut down the entire government unless the House’s agenda was accepted.

Some of the weak-kneed votes on various issues included a proposal by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) to cut the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts by an infinitesimal $21 million. That squeaked through in a 217-209 vote. A proposal to cut subsidies to the poor in the amount of $390 million didn’t set well with members of the house who decided to restore $50 million of it. One vindictive but otherwise inconsequential vote carved out $15 million from the Presidio Trust, located in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district. An effort to cut $558 million from special education funding was voted down by 249-179. Even a cut of $447 million from Amtrak was voted down 250-176.

One interesting vote that did pass initially was to defund a $450 million project to build an engine for the Pentagon’s F-35 warplane — a weapon that was opposed not only by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and also by President Obama — but if it had passed, would have been built near Speaker John Boehner’s district in Ohio.

Late last week several other proposals were pending, such as blocking ObamaCare funding, and stopping the FCC from enforcing its “net neutrality” policy. Rep. Mike Pence wanted an amendment to defund more than 100 Planned Parenthood clinics around the country. But GOP Republicans were only too happy to “restore” funds for their favorite projects, such as $298 million for police hiring grants, $80 million for economic development, and $510 million to help fire departments train and equip firefighters.

There was one victory, so far: in a 228-203 vote the stalwarts in the House voted against spending $10 million to build a sewer project in Tijuana, Mexico.

Resistance to some of these alleged cuts came from unusual places. On the Capitol Steps last Thursday Arthur and some Muppets showed up along with supporters of continuing funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Paul Tonko ((D-N.Y.), Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). According to Markey, cuts to the CPB budget represented “an ideological attack on public broadcasting. ” Rep. Lowery couldn’t resist her opportunity to expand on Markey’s inanity: “How long with it take for some people to learn that people want Congress to focus on creating jobs, not laying off Bert and Ernie.” She managed that, it is reported, with a straight face.

Others more serious about the fate of the republic being targeted by an incoming debt missile of gargantuan proportions included Gov. Mitch Daniels (Indiana) and Gov. Chris Christie (New Jersey). They both recognize that even if the budget cuts of $61 billion being proposed by the House were ever passed into law (no chance, thanks to the Senate and the current occupant of the White House), they would only represent a rounding error in the grand scheme. With a nearly $4 trillion budget, a cut of $61 billion is 1.6 percent of the total, and only 4 percent of the current $1.5 trillion deficit...MORE...LINK
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A government of self-serving opportunists and clowns: Portrait of post-nationalist, post-patriotic, neocon/neolib-occupied Washington?

Zionist-owned Washington defies all of its allies and the rest of the world, renders America evermore weak and irrelevant--all for the Jewish state

From:
Hang you head in shame, O Peace Prize laureate

(Veterans Today) -- by Stuart Littlewood --

The Nobel award, said Barack Obama at the time, was “an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations” and must be shared with everyone who strives for “justice and dignity”. Where was the justice and dignity in the sad story of America’s UN veto?

Having blocked the United Nations Security Council draft resolution on Friday, which would have condemned Israeli squatter colonies as illegal, Obama has now written America completely out of the script on Middle East peace.

Many will see it as a blessing that the US has so spectacularly disqualified itself from serious discussion, and that Obama has finally lifted the scales from the eyes of all those who unwisely invested high hopes in him.

Netanyahu’s office was cock-a-hoop and said Israel was “deeply grateful” to be let off the hook and as a reward the delinquent promises to be a good boy and “pursue negotiations vigorously” with the Palestinians. The US veto made it clear that “the only path to such a peace will come through direct negotiations and not through the decisions of international bodies”.

Some people will do anything to stop the United Nations getting a grip on the crisis. It would be more than a tad inconvenient to the crazed Greater Israel project. No doubt the champagne corks were popping in the US-Israeli Combined Ops headquarters as the Zionist luvvies danced late into the night to celebrate their victory.

The resolution, besides condemning the continuation of settlement activities and other measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Territory, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions, demanded that Israel ceased forthwith and fully respected all of its legal obligations in that regard.

The US argued that although it opposes Israeli settlements, taking the issue to the UN would only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state solution. Why that should be the case wasn’t explained. Nor was the reason why negotiations should be re-started in the teeth of Israel’s uncompromising territorial objectives and clear dislike of peace.

It seems, from what US ambassador Susan Rice says, that craven Washington cannot bring itself to call Israel’s settlements on stolen Palestinian land what they really are – illegal – and is only prepared to label them “illegitimate”, presumably in case the correct term ruffles too many Israel lobby feathers.

Falling back onto the administration’s familiar double-speak, Rice explained that the veto “should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity” but the US thinks it “unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians”.

In other words, the United States would much prefer to have the Israel-Palestine question resolved by arm-twisting behind closed doors, in the guise of “direct talks”, than let the Security Council intervene with another binding resolution.

This latest resolution had nearly 120 co-sponsors and the other 14 Security Council members voted in favour. There are reports that Washington earlier threatened to slash aid to the Palestinian Authority if it wasn’t withdrawn, as if to remove any lingering doubt as to the crooked purpose of America’s meddling. When this failed the US, as one of the five permanent council members with blocking power, struck it down.

In doing so, the United States has advertised itself to the whole wide world as the willing tool of Zionist ambition and branded itself an enemy of Palestine and of all other countries threatened by the Israeli regime...MORE...LINK
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Monday, February 21, 2011

Insatiable Big Government banksters and warmongers now sinking fangs into U.S. middle class and poor to keep their violent pyramid scheme financed

From:
Wall Street versus the Poor and the Middle Class: Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War

(GlobalResearch.ca) -- by Paul Craig Roberts --

Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.

Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.

The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose--the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment...

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay...

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no breaks on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime...MORE...LINK

America most imperiled not by foreign elements, but by nation-bankrupting, Empire-profiteering domestic ones

From:
A Foreign Policy for The Tea Party

(The American Conservative) -- by Jon Basil Utley --

The British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and even the Romans are examples for America. England’s empire was ruined by the costs of two world wars.

The Ottomans of Turkey depended on borrowed money, the last empire to do so. Rome went down because taxes became so high that citizens welcomed the barbarian invasions as a way of escaping Roman tax collectors. Today, they are gone, but we can learn from their failures.

We may not see ourselves as having an empire, but with some 800 military stations abroad and two unending trillion dollar wars, we do. Even a great and blessed country can become an empire when it extends itself, even with the best intentions, into the farthest corners of the world.

These are perilous times. Our future, in the words of Senator Tom Coburn, “is as uncertain and tenuous as at any point in our history.” The Tea Party represents probably the last hope for reform — for stopping ruinous government spending, reining in our out-of-control bureaucracy, and saving our constitutional freedoms. I believe that our movement must also take a stand for the principle in Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.”

James Madison’s often quoted dictum, “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” reflected a view that was widely shared by the Founders. That concept was a basis for our Constitution’s provision that only Congress can declare war. Yet, today, America’s presidents start wars as if they were kings in old Europe. (Those wars, it should be noted, were a major reason our forefathers risked all to leave Europe.)

Washington is full of interests that profit from wars; support for wars cuts across party lines. U.S. involvement in the war on Serbia about Kosovo was started by a Democrat president and supported by most establishment Republicans in the Congress. (Outside of Washington, the war had little conservative support. A majority of newly elected Republicans in Congress, freshmen and sophomores, voted against it.)

Barack Obama owes the 2008 Democratic nomination and most likely the election to the fact that he opposed the Iraq war backed by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush – yet, once in power, he now follows most of the same foreign policies as President Bush. Yearly military spending is far higher even than the $700 billion shown in the budget. An analysis by Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute shows that it is well over $1 trillion — over a million times a million dollars — if one includes intelligence, homeland security, nuclear weaponry, and other hidden items...

Tea Party supporters are solidly pro-defense. They need not be awed by the Defense establishment which is bloated beyond imagination and bankrupting our nation. Washington must prioritize issues and reform spending. Senator Coburn has said that the military industrial complex has made weapons too expensive for America to buy. This is because inputs are spread around congressional districts to make work, such as the F-22 that had parts made in 42 states.

Advocates of high levels of military spending often argue that America should have the same percentage of its economy devoted to the military as during the Cold War. They even compare Islamist radicals to the Soviet Union, with all its nuclear missiles, half of Europe in its servitude, and with vast leftist networks in Europe and America supporting its goals. It is absurd to suggest that the Islamist threat is at or near the level of the Soviet threat.

To a great degree, it is America’s own policies which generated the hatred against us. It is not unpatriotic to suggest so, any more than to say that U.S. welfare policies fostered dependency or that U.S. government regulations pushed banks to issue subprime loans. America is the greatest country in the world, but often our government makes mistakes that harm our legitimate interests.

As Pat Buchanan famously said, “They are over here because we are over there.” Few Americans remember or even know about the memorable inquiry on 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996) by Leslie Stahl to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the human cost of a half million Iraqi children dying of starvation and disease during the Clinton Administration’s economic blockade of Iraq — a tragedy that occurred after we bombed Iraq’s irrigation, electricity and sanitation systems during the first Iraq war. Albright’s famous answer was, “Yes, we think it was worth it.”

During the Presidential debates, Ron Paul was the lone candidate to spell out the real reasons America is hated and was attacked. Yet today we see President Obama continuing most of the Bush war (and homeland security) policies. He has not even closed a single overseas base. His actions show how powerful and entrenched are the pro-war forces in Washington...MORE...LINK

Nationalism crucial to successful Egyptian revolt against foreign interlopers and their Mubarak regime stooges and parasites

From:
Nationalism, Democracy, and the Arab Awakening

The difference between Egypt and Iran
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

The revolutionary wave sweeping through the Middle East promises to topple sclerotic Arab regimes throughout the region, but there is a marked difference between, say, Egypt and Iran – and the difference is the nationalist factor.

In Egypt, the people rose up against a US-supported dictatorship which had ridden on their backs for 30 years. It’s interesting to note that the regime, in the latter stages of the revolt, resorted to dark hints that the protesters were being run by mysterious “foreign elements.” And, indeed, there was a foreign element that played a key role – I would argue the key role – in Egyptian politics, and had been doing so for the past 30 years, albeit not on the side of the pro-democracy forces: namely, the US government. Washington gave over $60 billion in mostly military aid to the regime of Hosni Mubarak, enabling him to stay in power far longer than he would have otherwise managed.

Not only that, but this massive outpouring of dollars effectively handed control of the nation’s economic life to the military, which now controls as much as 30 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product. Internal US government communications, revealed by the invaluable WikiLeaks, show diplomats complaining about the Egyptian military’s resistance to economic liberalization, but Washington failed to comprehend how US policy entrenched the military high command as a major player in the Egyptian economy.

Mubarak’s appeal to nationalist sympathies failed because he, and not the protesters, was seen as the agent of a foreign power: namely, the United States. While economic and internal political factors almost certainly sparked the upsurge, it was nationalism – in part energized by resentment of the dictator’s American patrons – that managed to sustain it and ultimately carry it forward to victory. Protesters carried Egyptian flags, and appealed directly to the army as the protector of the nation against Mubarak. In Bahrain, too, the protesters carried their national flag, and made an appeal to the military – this latter with decidedly deadly results. In any case, however, the nationalistic sentiment exuded by the pro-democracy forces is a defining feature of the most successful uprisings – to date, Egypt and Bahrain – while in Iran (and, to some extent, Libya) the situation is more complex...MORE...LINK
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Friday, February 18, 2011

The U.S. is not mired in the Middle East for oil, but rather for swindling, self-serving, ideological Globalism and Zionism

(By Chris Moore, LibertarianToday.com) -- Pat Buchanan recently wrote a column listing the litany of U.S. policy and war failures in the Middle East, and their corresponding consequences, which have led to domino revolts and demands for sovereignty and self-determination across the territory, mostly in in nations festering under the yoke of American and Israeli (Zionist) hegemony for so long.

He asked a question at the end of his column, which predictably brought out some left-liberal/neoliberal and neocon commenters, with their pre-fab red-herrings as to why Big Oil or access to oil was entirely to blame for America's many blunderings in the Middle East, and not Zionism.

Buchanan asked: "The U.S. press is transfixed by all this [upheaval], but a question arises: What vital interest of a United States staring at bankruptcy would be imperiled if we got out of the way, stopped fighting these countries’ wars and paying these countries’ bills and let these people determine their own future for good or ill?"

The first Zionist shill to arise was commenter Greg Panfile, who quickly responded:
The answer to the rhetorical question at the end is, of course, none. Amidst all the noise about ideologies and governmental forms in the area, and the sentimentality for and against various religions, territories and ethnic groups, the only operative fact that truly impacts the US is preserving its line of supply for oil, while it lasts. That will be kept open, by force if needed, so long as we need it and have at least one ally, or can conquer one relevant country, in the area. Other than that it is a coterie of politicians, theoreticians, ideologues, and sentimentalists working their rice bowl. ‘Twas ever thus.
The next Zionist shill, one Jane Eisner, echoed Panfile's rhetoric about the U.S. "preserving its line of supply for oil," and then added a little warmongering neocon spin of her own:
The answer? Oil! At $200 a barrel, the US is engulfed by depression. That’s just what Iran wants and friends like the Saudis, Kuwait and the Emirates prevent. Wonder why you did not even mention them. Wouldn’t you argument collapse if you did?
The truth of the matter is, access to and control of affordable oil has next to nothing to do with why we are in the Middle East, and in fact the price of oil has skyrocketed since America escalated its presence there. Oil is a readily available commodity, and we could have bought it affordably from anyone, as we did throughout the Cold War, had we not sought to squash the Middle East.

And once upon a time we could, and did, even drill our own oil efficiently and affordably (which of course, conflicted with the left-wing, "Green" eco-swindle agenda, and just like the "dirty" industrial economy of America's past, has been methodically squeezed and terminated.)

No, the real reason we are mired in the Middle East is not for oil, but rather for neo-imperial, ideological Globalism (we must impose "progressive" secular statist-liberal-capitalism upon the world) and its twin, ideological Zionism (we must impose “tolerance” for Jewry -- i.e. Jewish supremacism/Zionism -- upon the world).

The reason certain elements seek to scapegoat the oil industry is because the Establishment Left and Right in the U.S. are each complicit in both ideological Globalism and ideological Zionism, and Establishment liberalism in particular (the traditional seat of Jewish-American factions) seeks to hoodwink its own supporters in order to keep its strong Jewish Zionist contingent (clearly a quasi-fascist element) from being exposed and flogged by more earnest liberals into the neocon Right. It does this by using Big Oil as a straw man.

Indeed, neoconservatism is nothing so much as formerly left-wing Jewish Zionist elements preemptively setting up nesting grounds in the Right by joining quasi-fascist "national security" complex Big Government conservatives, knowing full well that sooner or later even thick-headed liberals will catch on to the self-serving Zionist swindle, and the corrupt liberal Establishment will have to throw the Jewish Zionists under the buss, or themselves be discarded.

And of course, possessing crypto-Israel first, Judeo-Christian ideological Zionists of its own, the Establishment neocon Right certainly won’t call the Establishment liberal swindlers on their lies; what are they going to do, condemn them for being Israel firsters when the Establishment neocon/national security-complex Right is itself guilty of that brand of treason?

Indeed, what each side has in common is that they are both epic swindlers, because neither Globalism nor Zionism nor their attendant warmongering serves the interests of average Americans, but rather serves the interests of a narrow subset of socialist-elitist and government-connected crony elements who profiteer from both Globalism and Zionism at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, and of future generations of Americans.

They are each guilty of treason because they put their own short term profit and Globalist and Israel-first ideology ahead of the long term interests of the country. In fact, their treachery and treason is the reason that America, which came out of the Cold War head and shoulders above any would-be competitors the world over, has fallen so far, so fast, and has plundered and squandered the American people's good credit across the globe.

But then, what other outcome could any country expect when it is governed by a particularistic, narrow and hostile elite hell-bent on serving its own selfish and greedy interests at the expense of the long-term interests of the average citizen?

Why did Hillary appoint a known influence peddler and possible anti-American spy to a high-level position on the AfPak front?

From:
A Marc Too Far

(The American Conservative) -- by Philip Giraldi --

Hillary Clinton has appointed Marc Grossman her special AfPak representative to replace Richard Holbrooke. Readers of TAC might well recall the Grossman saga as related by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. Per Edmonds, Grossman was involved in suspected illegal activity connected to the Turkish and Israeli governments and was under investigation by the FBI.

Part of Sibel Edmonds’ interview went as follows, picking up the account after Grossman had to return to the United States from Turkey:
GIRALDI: So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He’s rewarded with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position to do favors for “Turkish interests”—both for the Turkish government and for possible criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI monitors that individual’s phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.

EDMONDS: Correct.

GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…

EDMONDS : $14,000

GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It’s also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as “agents of influence.”

EDMONDS: Yes, that’s correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Grossman has denied involvement in any illegal activity, but the charges made by Edmonds have never actually been refuted. Unless Edmonds is lying, there presumably is an FBI file on the Grossman case. So the question becomes, did Hillary Clinton check out Grossman to determine if the charges made by Sibel Edmonds have any validity or not? If she did not, she is guilty of gross dereliction of duty and might be responsible for placing a possibly corrupt individual in a position that is critical to the conduct of US foreign policy. So what is it Hillary? What did you do?...LINK