Bacevich's Second Principle to Abate Militarism

“… revitalize the concept of the separation of powers. Here is the second principle with the potential to reduce the hazards by the new American militarism.”
“In all but a very few cases, the impetus for expanding America’s security perimeter has come from the executive branch.” “The result, especially in evidence since the end of World War II, has been to eviscerate Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which in the plainest language confers on Congress the power “To declare War”.”

The New American Militarism: how to abate it

Andrew J. Bacevich is a Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam Veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel and is a member of the Council on foreign relations. He is the author of several books, including ‘The Limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism’.
He is not a liberal.
He is not a Democrat.

Having read Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’, I would like to share his proposed means, which ‘rests on ten fundamental principles’ by which to abate ‘the present day militaristic tendencies’.

“First, heed the intentions of the Founders, thereby restoring the basic precepts that animated the creation of the United States and are specified in the Constitution that the Framers drafted in 1787 and presented for consideration to the several states. Although politicians make a pretense of revering that document, when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into t e habit of treating it like a dead letter. This is unfortunate. Drafted by men who appreciated the need for military power while also maintaining a healthy respect for the dangers that it posed, the Constitution in our own day remains an essential point of reference.”

Whistle-Blowers: A Conversation with Ellsberg and Dean

FORA.tv - Whistle-Blowers: A Conversation with Ellsberg and Dean

Impeach the Supreme Court 5

Corporations are NOT the people! In fact, they are not people at all.

Get a free bumper sticker to protest the recent 5 to 4 decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate funding for election campaigns.
src="http://www.peaceteam.net/imgs/sc_200x69.gif">

Read what Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has to say about corporate influence in Washington. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
And visit the 'Change Congress' website.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig

Senator Lieberman Goes Orwellian

Sen. Lieberman: “If We Don’t Act Preemptively, Yemen Will Be Tomorrow’s War”

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman suggested the United States should preemptively attack Yemen in light of the failed airline bombing.

Sen. Lieberman: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there. I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”

So, according to the Senator, unless we go to war - that is, engage in unlawful state aggression - we'll have to go to war.

Well, Senator, talking shite seems to have worked for your efforts to protect the massive insurance companies you serve from adverse affects of health care reform. Perhaps your military/industrial masters will reward you for similarly boosting their bottom line at the expense of the American and Yemeni people.

Noam Chomsky - The Contours of World Order: Fifty Years of the United Nations

Iraq and Afghanistan wars; where's the accountability?

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, in Washington, DC. Joining us now from Florida is Paul Craig Roberts. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department under the Reagan administration. He was an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Mr. Roberts. When President Obama decided not to prosecute, there were obviously a lot of considerations, both domestic politics and otherwise. But certainly one of the critical pieces of it, if you're going to prosecute, it seems to me that you start with the question of was the Iraq war illegal, was international law violated. And if in fact the Iraq war was waged on deliberate misinformation, it's hard to think of a crime that would be more serious than that. But if Obama were to open that can of worms that the Iraq war is illegal, then the continued occupation of Iraq's illegal, and it puts the entire US foreign policy in the region in a completely different light. So speak about President Obama, his view of the world as articulated in the campaign, this decision not to prosecute, and essentially not just continuing Bush policy in Iraq, but now we can see, more or less, a Bush policy in Afghanistan.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, ECONOMIST AND COLUMNIST: Yes. Well, I can't say why he made the decision he made. All I can say is that the consequence is that we now have a precedent that neither the president nor the vice president are subject to law, they're outside the law, they can violate the law with impunity. This is a [inaudible] development. I can't think of anything worse to happen to the United States than to establish legally that the rulers are not subject to law. The entire history of liberty in the Anglo-American world, it was to tie the rulers down and make them subject to law, to bring the king under the law. So now we've reversed this thousand-year struggle and we've made the rulers unaccountable to law. This is a terrible thing. I'm sure there are all kinds of political and other arguments made, all sorts of interest groups, but this is the outcome. But there was really no discussion of this. And what this shows is that the American people, the political people, the legal professions, that what was really at stake—they had no idea what was really at stake. And to say that some silly war, which actually probably was an act of treason, since it was apparently based on deception—. You know, the British right now are holding these inquiries. They already know that it was based on deception, and they're trying to find out how they can prevent that from happening in the future.

JAY: Part of what's come out early in the inquiry is that it was very clear that Blair and Bush had decided to invade Iraq as early, I believe, as 2002, and the idea that weapons of mass destruction would be more a rationale than an actual reason was clear as far back as 2002. But what do you make of the lack of American media coverage of the British inquiry?

ROBERTS: Well, what does the American media cover? If you're talking about the newspapers and the television, they don't cover anything. So we don't want the people to know that the war was contrived and that some other agenda was being served that we still have not been told. You know, we don't really know—the government's never told us why they invaded Iraq. They lied to us and said, oh, he has weapons of mass destruction, and yet the record is clear that the government [inaudible] did not have these weapons. This is a known fact now. We still don't know why they did it, and they're not going to tell us. And so probably if Obama was trying to gin up the war in Afghanistan, he doesn't want a lot of news coverage of the British inquiry into how Blair deceived his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide cover for Bush's illegal war in Iraq.

JAY: How did you respond to President Obama's speech the other night on Afghanistan?

ROBERTS: Well, I didn't bother to listen to it. I mean, I already knew what he was going to do. [inaudible] interesting thing, because here we have millions of Americans, on that very day, lost their health insurance subsidies from COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985]. So all of a sudden, millions of Americans, no health coverage that day. Or 24 hours before, The Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement to the newspaper, listing all of the metro area foreclosures. In Michigan, 48 percent of the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. And yet Obama thinks we have money to escalate an eight-year-old war that serves no American purpose. You know, it's like the British ambassador Craig Murray said: what the war is about is protecting the pipeline route that the Americans wanted through Afghanistan so they could get the Central Asian gas out without it passing through Iran and Russia. So is this why we should be in Afghanistan? And how do we pay for this? Well, just the other day, Obie, the Democrat chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obie, says, "Oh, we're going to put an additional progressive income tax on every American earning more than $30,000 a year." So I call this trickle-up economics, where you tax the little guy and give it to [inaudible] companies and to the oil companies or the energy companies who would benefit from the pipeline.

JAY: But what do you make of the administration's argument that, one, al-Qaeda's a threat, a vital national security threat, and more than that—?

ROBERTS: That's a total lie.

JAY: And the other piece of it is the issue of dissolution of Pakistan. So what do you make of all that?

ROBERTS: Pakistan is falling apart because we forced our puppet government to attack its own people. All this stuff about al-Qaeda is a lie. It's a hoax.

JAY: Why? Why do you say so?

ROBERTS: Because it doesn't exist in any way that it means anything to us.

JAY: But what's the evidence for that? Because—.

ROBERTS: But what's the evidence that it means anything?

JAY: Well, the evidence—they say the evidence is 9/11, the attacks on the US embassies, and so on. There's certainly been attacks in Europe.

ROBERTS: Oh, you mean they object to our aggressive policies and our hegemony in their own lands. And if this organization exists, it's nothing to do with a state. It's nothing to do with Taliban. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. Pakistan is not al-Qaeda. The whole thing is some kind of a hoax. It's an excuse.

JAY: So what's the—so the real objective is pipelines.

ROBERTS: [inaudible] the 9/11 Commission report. We've had the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission, who apparently drafted the thing, he's written a book and said, you know, the military lied to us. People lied to us who were supposed to be helping us. We've had both cochairmen of the commission say the same thing. The 9/11 truth movement is very large. There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people—architects, engineers, scientists—and they point out all kinds of problems with this report. There's [inaudible] never been an examination. There was a political commission that was denied most of the relevant testimony and information according to their own chairman and legal counsel, and they produced a political document. We don't know what happened. I mean, people can say, "Oh, we believe this because the government did it," but it's the same government that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda connections when we know for a fact he didn't.

TARIQ ALI: “Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome"

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/12/7/tariq_ali_obamas_afghan_pak_syndrome

US military has no business in Afghan civil war

"'Obama's War Choice' pure politics" - Lawrence Wilkerson

Lawrence Wilkerson,"Obama's campaign rhetoric and his generals put him in a corner on Afghanistan."
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security.

British Iraq Inquiry Hears Regime Change Claim

Ralph Nader on Obama's Election - one year on

Monty Python, Colin Powell and the Terror Industrial Complex

Leave it to Monty Python's Terry Gilliam - Python's 'Yank-in-the-wood-pile', director of 'Brazil', 'Twelve Monkeys' and other cinematic adventures - to pitch a zinger to Keith Olbermann. To wit, "Why didn't Colin Powell's interview about the 'Terror Industrial Complex' become a bigger story?"

Indeed; Why? The answer, of course, is revealed by asking another question; why aren't US forces and contractors out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
(If the embedded video doesn't link to this story, use this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#33336509

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Financial Coup d'Etat by Wall Street?

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html

BILL MOYERS: What's your explanation as an economist. And a student of this financial system as to why the banks are taking so long to help the homeowners when Congress has allocated funds for that purpose?

SIMON JOHNSON: I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious and it's very tragic. That they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. Bill, they'll expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.

These are very smart, very profit-oriented people. I can assure you, if there was money in it for them. They would be negotiating you know, very various kinds of re-schedulings of these loans. They don't want to do it. They it's not in their interest. It's not where the money is.

This is capitalism, Bill. That's what they're supposed to do. They represent their shareholders, they're appointed by the board of directors to make money for their shareholders. And the way they think that they can best make money is to shape the regulatory rules around housing around derivatives, around all everything we used to have that kept the financial sector under control. Has all been, you know, washed away, one way or another, by their efforts, right? They make money in the boom, that way. And when and when bad things happen, they shove all the downside onto the taxpayer. That's what they're doing their job.

MARCY KAPTUR: It's socialism for the big banks. Because they've basically taken their mistakes and they've put it on the taxpayer. That's the government. That's socialism. That isn't capitalism.

SIMON JOHNSON: Well people some people call that lemon socialism. So, when it turns out to be a lemon, it's you it's yours, the taxpayer. When it turns out to be good, it's mine, I'm Wall Street.

Listening to Lara Logan

Listening to Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs and 60 Minutes Correspondent on the Colbert Report sell not only her 3-part Special Report on CBS but throwing an impassioned (and obviously well-rehearsed) pitch for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan to the US people.

I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.

Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.

This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.

In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.

Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.

Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.

http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=251054

http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-times-whines-that-rethink-afghanistan-film-is-not

Property over People

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Judge Goldstone Defends Gaza Inquiry Alleging Israeli War Crimes

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council held a one-day debate Tuesday on a recent inquiry finding Israel committed a number of war crimes in its assault on the Gaza Strip. The head of the inquiry, Judge Richard Goldstone, said all but one of the individual Israeli attacks examined by investigators had no military purpose.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”

Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.

Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”

Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/30/headlines

Obama Beats the Drum on Iran - Where's the change?

It's ironic and hypocritical that the USA fires off missiles as a regular part of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, killing hundreds and thousands of innocent women and children and then raises a political stink about Iran test firing unarmed missiles within their own territory. The irony and the hypocrisy hardly ends there. The USA must look to its own non-compliance as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Scott Ritter was one of the more out-spoken UN weapons inspectors in Iraq who campaigned to continue weapons inspections in order to end the murderous sanctions and avoid war. He was also very vocal about denying the Bush/Cheney claim of WMDs in Iraq.
Go to Mr Ritter's article in the Guardian entitled,
"Keeping Iran Honest; Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant-inspections

Then watch his interview on Democracy Now!
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Surprise! Welcome to the Third World, Des Moines!

I’ve been working on an essay for several months – ruminating mostly; rolling things round in my head looking for supporting or counter-arguments. The gist of the piece is that the United States is becoming or - more nefariously - is being turned into a Third World economy.

From personal observation, I’ve seen my friends and family, by necessity, change from manufacturing jobs or occupations as skilled workers to service jobs, losing pay, perks, union representation, and a sense that the situation will improve with time. Associating those numerous anecdotes, with the dismantling of social services and the disintegration of infrastructure, I wondered what other element would further the affect the USA’s slide from First World to Third World economy in this depressing scenario.

(n.b. Scenario construction like this is one, is a technique I employ to control my natural ebullience.)

Since the time last March when this dismal thought first occurred to me, the US economy has imploded; the huge no-strings-attached bail-out funds of TARP have mostly been distributed and dispersed to some of the largest corporations on the planet. Unemployment has risen unofficially to nearly 20% and officially in double digits. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are pandemic. The missing element that would precipitate the change in the US from a First to a Third World economy became evident; massive debt to foreign creditors. Being heavily indebted to foreign entities is an economic characteristic of all of the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World.

The unknown trillions of dollars borrowed from the Fed, the PRC, France (and who knows where else) hemorrhaging from the U.S. Treasury to pay war profiteers (e.g. Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.), Defense Contractors, corporate subsidies, and the out-and-out wholesale bail-out of the most morally destitute, most conniving, self-serving, rapaciously avaricious swindlers, scammers, hornswogglers, flim-flammers and thoroughly destructive bunch of crooks seen in nearly a century would, I judge, qualify as an over-bearing burden of debt. A perfect shit storm of financial hanky-panky, two never-ending wars and the continuing slavish dependence on petroleum just might be the fulcrum by which the middle class of the USA begin to empathize with the citizens of Nicaragua and Colombia.

This postulation was an apparent orphan, though, as far as I could tell – a depressing day-dream but nothing more. I found little real evidence supporting the idea and that offered some relief.

Until I saw a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" from Friday, September 25th, that is. In that segment, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics said, “On bad mornings I wake up and think that we are turning into a Latin American country," Krugman said.

“If America was officially a Third World country, the international monetary fund would come in and say, “You’ve got to break the power of your oligarchs. Those banking interests; they have too much power. You’ve got to end all of this crony capitalism… We’re not in good shape.”

He went on the say that while the American dream is not totally dead, it is "dying pretty fast," particularly when it comes to social mobility.

Sometimes, I surprise myself. I only wish that the surprise was a more pleasant one.

Right this way, Mr and Mrs America. Your hovel is waiting.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/26/krugman-the-american-drea_n_300702.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman

First, Torture; Now, Disappearances?

Two of the thugs in cammies are apparently wearing a black arm band similar to those worn by military police. I could see no other designation of unit or rank. None wore head-cover.

After the civilian is manhandled into the unmarked sedan, riot troops move in warning off the concerned witnesses.
I hope somebody thought to get the license number.

Are we starting to disappear our own people in broad daylight from the streets of a major city with the eyes of the world turned the G20?

Disappearances; another of the counter-insurgency 'skills' along with torture and assassination taught to fascists the world over at the School of the Americas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/g20-protest-photos-vote-o_n_298692.html

Condi Rice continues her neo-Con-Job

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Condi Rice Talks More Shite

In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted with fear-mongering.

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!

What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.

This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.

Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.

If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209

How do you spell 'Quagmire', again?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes, “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term…risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

Does this sound like circular logic to anyone else?

The 'initiative' - meaning the ability to control the battle theater - is an illusion in guerrilla warfare and 'momentum' can only mean sustained and relentless, perpetual military action against the citizenry of the country.

The fact of the matter is that 'insurgency' is a code word for 'citizens of the country that resent the US military for killing their friends and family and have taken up arms to fight hostile occupation'.

Support the troops!
Bring them home to lead productive - not destructive - lives.

Breaking the Silence - John Pilger

As we near the start of the 9th year of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan, take time to listen to the reasons voiced by George W, Tony B, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century that were meant to justify the illegal invasion and armed aggression against a sovereign people. John Pilger's documentary of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. What is the point? What is the justification 8 years on for the death and destruction?


Watch John Pilger - Breaking the Silence in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The Real Death Panels

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Torture Investigation Gets Gonzo's Okay

It would seem that former Attorney General Gonzalez finally remembered something. He remembered the law and what a prosecutor is suppose to do when someone is suspected and accused of breaking it.

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Richard B Cheney: please, go back to your safe-room and await the US Marshalls

Cheney's claim that his policies saved lives and foiled terrorist plots reminds me of that joke about the person shredding newspaper in NYC to keep away the tigers. When told that there are no tigers in NYC, the person rejoins,'See how well it works?'

Although correlation is not proof (as this joke illustrates), the number of plots foiled by Cheney's administration by torture and rendition are few and laughable. The heinous acts that they committed are numerous and vile.

Cheney (and Addington, Rice, Tennant, et al) were caught so flat-footed by 9-11 that they went off the moral and legalistic deep end in a frantic attempt to 1) avoid culpability and 2) make political hay.

In Cheney's own words, they went to the 'dark side' which to me indicates that he was already quite familiar with the territory having been there many times before.

Pilger: Obama a Product of Corporate Marketing

Many will be abhorred by what award-winning investigative journalist, John Pilger, has to say about President Obama. Many will ignore Pilger's thesis altogether but will pounce on his cited examples as proof positive that Dubya was right all along but that Obama is still a socialist. Or a fascist. Or Kenyan. Or not really the president cuz it say so in the Bible.



Now that you've heard Mr Pilger's comments about Barak Obama, consider this: why should the idea that the US president is a product of marketing strategies, public relations tactics, and corporate planning be a surprise? The role of PR firms in US elections goes back at the very least to the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns. Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Selling of the President’ recounts Nixon’s successful re-packaging and his triumph in the 1968 presidential race following his loss to Kennedy in the nail-biter of 1960.

Winning the contest for the highest elected government office in the land (if not the world) is most assuredly a prize that corporate America and those in its thrall would do nearly anything to accomplish. This is the self-evident fact of the matter and incontestable. Putting the concepts Bernays and Lippman proposed in the early 1900’s for manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion and thereby controlling the ignorant herd is standard operating procedure. SOP. So last millennium it’s hardly worth mentioning. Nothing new here. Move along.

How many movies have come out of Hollywood –itself a creature of marketing and PR alchemy – that have told the lurid tales of backroom deals, media handlers, corporate shills, wardrobe consultants, press agents and PR strategists? How many summer-reading novels?

The notion that the US president is a corporate marketing creation should not come as a revelation. (A dispassionate observer might need look no further than the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan to confirm the proposition that the quality of packaging and promotion out-weigh the quality of the candidate in a run for the White House.) Nevertheless, the truth of it is disturbing. Mr. Pilger is doing us all a favor by pointing this issue out to us and rubbing our noses in it.

The chief executive of our government – you know, the one that is of the people, by the people, for the people-is a product. A product that is shaped by focus groups and groomed by market research and then sold to the electorate by callously well-crafted media ads in combination with attractive product placement and the scripted pronouncements of pundits in the pay of corporations.

(I’m not really an expert, but I play one on TV.)

Understanding that Americans insist on feeling they are independent in their actions - exercising their freedom, in the parlance of patriotism- the marketing mavens offer a choice of products. Sales departments also know that making a choice can be daunting. Especially when there’s a lot at stake and the choice is to be made in near total ignorance; some of it willful, some by design.

In the US the electorate’s choice has been limited to two so as not to confound the troublesome herd; crispy or extra-crispy? Paper or plastic? Democrat or Republican? For here or to go?

Third-party candidates become the target of PR attack dogs and relegated to obscurity by corporate programmers and editors and made to appear an irrelevancy to the presidential contest.

And may the one with the bigger war-chest and the better sales campaign win!

What Hollywood movies do not typically deal with is nevertheless very closely scrutinized: the source of the funds in a presidential candidate’s war-chest. Although there are laws regulating campaign financing, there are many ways around those regulations. Laws, lawyers and loopholes; this is not a revelation, either. It’s axiomatic. Little could be more obvious than the fact that legal services cost money in the USA; as do the services of public relations firms, marketing consultants, ad agencies, media advisers, speech writers, press secretaries, wardrobe and make-up specialists, to name but a few that are essential to the selling of the president.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics , a research group which has tracked the money in U.S. politics for a quarter of a century and which does not accept contributions from corporations, trade associations or labor unions, Obama’s presidential war-chest was an unprecedented $745, 000,000. That astounding sum is based on the Federal Election Commission data for the 2008 election cycle. John McCain, the Republican runner-up, raised a paltry $368,000,000 according to the same sources. Third party candidates’ campaign funds were beggarly in comparison; raising a measly $5,457,000 to finance four separate campaigns. The lion’s share of which, $4,000,000 – little more than one half of one percent of Obama’s record-setting total - was raised by seasoned campaigner, Ralph Nader.

The source of campaign funds should raise no eye-brows. The money comes from the political action committees (PAC) of major corporations and institutions.
• Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama’s presidential bid.
• The PACs of media conglomerates National Amusements Inc (which owns media giants Viacom and CBS Corporation) and Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate contributed more than a cool million.
• International business law firms, Sidley, Austin LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Skadden, Arps, and Wilmerhale, kicked in an even cooler $1.6 million.
• Hi-tech powerhouses, IBM, Microsoft and Google nearly doubled the lawyers’ contributions.
• Although it may prompt a warm and fuzzy feeling that Obama’s alma maters, Harvard and Columbia were major contributors along with Standford and the University of California each of these renowned educational institutions is also funded by government research contracts and should be considered part of the military-industrial complex.
• Rounding out the list is General Electric, which benefits directly from the research done by the aforementioned institutes of higher learning as one of the largest recipients of military contracts.

A pattern emerges; international law firms, mammoth media groups, financial sector behemoths, hi-tech giants and colossal military contractors were primary supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. To risk stating the obvious once more, highly successful corporations and institutions do not go around tossing millions of dollars into wishing wells. They make well-considered and sober decisions, choosing, investments that offer low risk and high probability of profitable returns. An Obama presidency, while seen as ‘dark horse’ by the general public (if you’ll pardon the pun), was assessed as a sound political and financial investment. That these corporate and institutional entities hedged their bets by investing in Obama’s competitors is part of what is known as a balanced investment portfolio and should further negate any lingering illusions that they were foursquare supporters of his message of Hope and change.

This is not news. That this sorry reality is not news exposes the fraud of what passes as democratic process in the United States. The 2008 election campaign of the Chief Executive, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States was paid for by major corporations. That this is merely the most recent one in a long uninterrupted series of corporate-sponsored political contests leads to one incontrovertible conclusion: the US is a Corporatocracy, plain and simple. There should be no one of voting age so naïve as to cling to the fantasy, the irrational will-o’-the-wisp that Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, IBM, GE and Microsoft et al. will not claim ownership of what they have paid millions to acquire.

Should this depress Obama supporters? Only if they actually believed the PR hype. One more instance of belief as an obstacle to reason.

We should all be abhorred and politically radicalized by this truth.

To view Mr Pilger's speech 'Obama and Empire' in its entirety go to the Real News.

For more about John Pilger and his work; http://pilger.carlton.com/
To view Mr Pilger's speech

Richard Dawkins on Atheism (part 2)

Richard Dawkins on Atheism (part 1)

United Health Group - A story of corporate sociopathology

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Cheney's Self-serving Disinformation

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Prosecuting Torturers

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Former Labour MP and Cabinet Minister Tony Benn on Health Care and Afghanistan

On Health Care:
"And, you see, I suppose it’s really basically a question of, do you regard the health of the nation as a national interest? Now, in the United States, taxpayers pay for the education of children. Does that make it socialized education? The police are paid for by the taxpayers. Does that make it a socialized police force? The fire services are public services. Does that mean they are socialized fire services? You see, this is just the language of very, very rich people who don’t want to make a contribution for the healthcare of others."

"I’m afraid it’s getting an end of it, the whole argument. And the member of Parliament you quoted is being denounced by his own leader. And Mrs. Thatcher said the “Health Service is safe in our hands. And when she said that—and she was the most right-wing leader we’ve had in Britain for many years—when she said that about the Health Service, that gives you the clearest recommendation I can think of for a right-wing American audience."

"We took the view that a government had a responsibility to focus on the needs of a nation in peacetime in the way in which it does in wartime. And if that principle is followed, then all the ideological language can be set aside. You’ve got to judge a country by whether its needs are met and not just by whether some people make a profit. I’ve never met Mr. Dow Jones, and I’m sure he works very, very hard with his averages. We get them every hour. But I don’t think the happiness of a nation is decided by the share values in Wall Street."

On Afghanistan:
"But, you see, I think you have to understand the history of this. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, captured Kabul, and was defeated the following year, and 15,000 British troops were killed in the retreat. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1879. Britain was in Afghanistan in 1919. The Russians were in Afghanistan."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/18/british_politician_tony_benn_condemns_escalation

http://www.tonybenn.com/

Armey's Incestuous Lobby Firms

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Cheney's Memoirs - a pop-up book for neo-cons

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I particularly love the statement made by John Dean at 3:12 "He (Cheney) is all but a self-confessed war criminal."

The Family - Totalitarianism for Christ

“Christianity has gotten it wrong for 2,000 years—all this talk about the poor, the suffering, the down and out. I want you to focus on the up and out. I want you to be a missionary to and for the powerful." Doug Coe

'The Family, at other times, has called it “the totalitarianism for Christ.” What they mean is that they believe that the New Testament is primarily about power, and he (Doug Coe) illustrates this by giving Congressman Tiahrt a list of historical figures he can look to for modeling power—this is a direct quote—“Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.”

Jeff Sharlet on "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"

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Blackwater's Alleged Criminal Activity (cont'd)

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More on Allegations of Criminal Activity by Blackwater/Xe Systems' Erik Prince

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One has to wonder where this particular rabbit hole will lead since Prince was a darling of the evangelic Bush 43 Administration.
Death Squads for Jesus; do none of these autocrats recognize the oxymoron thusly stated? Murder and torture in the name of Christ for big, big bucks.

Ex-Employees Link Blackwater Founder to Murder, Threats, Weapons Smuggling

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For more...
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/5/in_explosive_allegations_ex_employees_link

Read the sworn statements here:
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/83/283/john-doe-declaration-1.pdf
http://www.democracynow.org/resources/84/284/john-doe-declaration-2.pdf

Killing the Messenger: Sibel Edmonds Documentary

This may be old news to many but as with so much that transpires in the New World Order, the story of FBI 'whistle-blower' Sibel Edmonds, needs to be kept in the public spotlight if we, as concerned citizens, hope to preserve, protect and expand our civic and social freedoms. The alternative is succumbing to the control of the globalized network of trans-national corporate fascism.



Here are some informative sites:

http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2009/07/sibel-edmonds-on-mike-malloy.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/31/63124/3823
http://lukery.blogspot.com/2008/07/court-documents-shed-light-on-cia.html
http://nswbc.org/Op%20Ed/Op-ed-Part1-Nov15-06.htm

Full Spectrum Dominance Pt.1

William Engdahl on his book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

The Economic Crisis - Charlie Rose and guests

Justice 'Thumb-on-the-Scales' Scalia

First, Scalia, from the bench, declared the United States a theocracy with all power coming from '

Torturing Democracy

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL presents TORTURING DEMOCRACY, a film from award-winning producer Sherry Jones which examines America's detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terror."
For more of Bill Moyer's coverage of torture go to:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05292009/profile3.html

Torturing Democracy

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The Question of Torture

Rice, Ashcroft Approved Torture in July 2002

More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.

Torture Memos Released

Rethinking Afghanistan - part one

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/troop_trailer.php

This is the first of three installments of a very good film by Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation. This documentary focuses on the financial burden of the undeclared and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rampant criminal war profiteering.I It side-steps the cost in civilian lives, the destruction of societies and immorality and wickedness of these barbarous conflicts.

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!