A New Fat Cat-Government Conspiracy to Loot Social Security

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Under the cover of 'Economic Crisis', the Axis of Wall Street, K-street, and the GOP schemes to loot the Social Security Trust fund. This axis of evil wants to use the Social Security trust fund to 'bailout' the crooked banks who created the financial crisis to begin with. When times were good under Clinton, we were told that Social Security had to be scrapped. The trust fund was running out of money, we were told. Now, when times are bad, they are telling us that Social Security needs to be scrapped because it is a success.

The 'trust fund' that we had been told was going broke is coveted because it was NOT going broke. It is now seen as a means by which greedy, incompetent and failing banks can be bailed out! Would the greedy bastards go after a bankrupt program? I don't think so! To the greedy, incompetent bankers who have already squirreled away billions of bailout bucks offshore, I say: you give me the money you secretly transferred out of the country and let me do something constructive with it!

If I were Barack Obama, I would investigate and charge thousands of Wall Street Insiders with insider trading, fraud, theft, and Enron-style accounting. It may be fitting to hold these trials in the Superdome. New Orleans could be rebuilt with admission prices, season tickets, and ancillary rights.

Proponents of this outright theft of YOUR money, argue that this is the way the government should 'recover' billions that have been wasted so far 'bailing out' the very banks who created the crisis to begin with. These venal fat cats have targeted your Social Security Trust fund, Medicare, and Medicaid. They have targeted it for theft! Those wanting to loot Social Security now had supported Bush's plans to 'save Social Security' by destroying it.

Bush had wanted to replace government-guaranteed retirement benefits with private accounts that would have been subject to the whims of Wall Street. What if Bush's attack on Social Security had succeeded? Social Security would most certainly have been kaput by now --a victim of Bush's incompetent handling of the American economy.

In the meantime, Bush's 'bailouts' have done no good whatsoever. Why? Like GOP taxation and fiscal policies, the Bush 'bailouts' were 'trickle down' bailouts that benefited all the wrong people. None of the 'Bush bailout' money found its way into the economy in ways that would stimulate growth, create jobs or encourage consumer spending. Rather, billions wound up in offshore in tax havens maintained by the increasingly tiny elite what has gotten exponentially richer --at your expense. This trend began with Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982. Now --the same crooks, liars and idiots who alone benefited from Ronald Reagan's incompetent economic policies have targeted your money for outright theft.

These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what's happening or figure out which politicians to blame. The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform." In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud.

Defending Social Security sounds like yesterday's issue--the fight people won when they defeated George W. Bush's attempt to privatize the system in 2005. But the financial establishment has pushed it back on the table, claiming that the current crisis requires "responsible" leaders to take action. Will Obama take the bait? Surely not. The new president has been clear and consistent about Social Security, as a candidate and since his election. The program's financing is basically sound, he has explained, and can be assured far into the future by making only modest adjustments.

But Obama is also playing footsie with the conservative advocates of "entitlement reform" (their euphemism for cutting benefits). The president wants the corporate establishment's support on many other important matters, and he recently promised to hold a "fiscal responsibility summit" to examine the long-term costs of entitlements. That forum could set the trap for a "bipartisan compromise" that may become difficult for Obama to resist, given the burgeoning deficit. If he resists, he will be denounced as an old-fashioned free-spending liberal. The advocates are urging both parties to hold hands and take the leap together, authorizing big benefits cuts in a circuitous way that allows them to dodge the public's blame. In my new book, Come Home, America, I make the point: "When official America talks of 'bipartisan compromise,' it usually means the people are about to get screwed."

--The Nation, Looting Social Security

Fat cats are exploiting this crisis in order to loot Social Security. They resent the fact that Social Security is the government's greatest success story. They covet $billions$ in the Social Security trust fund. They wish to steal your money and re-distribute it among nation's richest one percent who are sure to squirrel your money away offshore in a bank beyond the scrutiny of the government.This is fascism, socialism for the rich elites.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan and the father-son crime syndicate of Bush Sr and Jr, only a rich, evil elite of just one percent of the nation owns more than some 90 percent or more of the rest of us combined. Will the looting of your money for the purposes of welfare for the rich stimulate the economy? NO! As was the case with Bush's bailouts, it will find its way into tax havens offshore, in fact reducing the amount of money in the US. It will hasten the depression by further contracting the amount of money available for spending.

Many pundits and editorial boards still give Mr. Bush credit for trying to "reform" Social Security. In fact, Mr. Bush came to bury Social Security, not to save it. Over time, the Bush plan would have transformed Social Security from a social insurance program into a mutual fund, with nothing except a name in common with the system FDR created.

In addition to misrepresenting his goals, Mr. Bush repeatedly lied about the current system. Oh, I'm sorry - was that a rude thing to say? Still, the fact is that Mr. Bush repeatedly said things that were demonstrably false and that his staff must have known were false. The falsehoods ranged from his claim that Social Security is unfair to African-Americans to his claim that "waiting just one year adds $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security."

...

But the campaign for privatization provided an object lesson in how the administration sells its policies: by misrepresenting its goals, lying about the facts and abusing its control of government agencies. These were the same tactics used to sell both tax cuts and the Iraq war.

And there are two reasons to study that lesson. One is to be prepared for whatever comes next on Mr. Bush's agenda. Despite the tough talk about Iran, I don't think he can propose another war - there aren't enough troops to fight the wars we already have. But there's still room for another big domestic initiative, probably tax reform.

--Paul Krugman, Social Security Lessons

The best thing the government could do with the Social Security trust fund is to leave it the fuck alone. Social Security is probably the Federal Government's ONLY success story, hence the envy with which those monies are viewed by venal, greedy, lying fat cats, Republicans and their paid conspirators on K-street and the Heritage Foundation.

The first thing to know is that Social Security is a bad deal for workers today, offering a much lower return than other investments.

Social Security payments are, in theory, made out of that fund. A depression is often called a 'contraction' because the supply of money literally contracts. As a result sales plummet, jobs decline, industries and businesses go belly up. These venal fat cats are just trying to line their pockets before making their final getaway.

And looking to the future, things only get worse. Younger workers are right to question whether Social Security will be able to provide them with promised benefits when they retire. The huge tax hikes required would exact a great cost on our economy, on employment opportunities, and on future generations.

For over 70 years, Social Security has helped to keep millions of elderly Americans from poverty. But the program rests today on unsound footing.

--Heritage Foundation Lies About Social Security

Given the current economic collapse, aren't you glad the Heritage Foundation gang of fat cats failed to get their greedy mitts on your money?

What it really is a government program with a dedicated tax. We take the payroll tax and it’s used to pay benefits to retirees. And 20-plus years ago, the commission led by Alan Greenspan said, you know, we are going to have this problem as the baby boomers reach retirement age. We will have a higher ratio of retirees to workers, and we better get ready for it. Social Security, the payroll tax was increased. There were some other things, a small rise in the retirement age set in motion. So that Social Security would run a surplus, which would be used to accumulate a trust fund, and this would tithe us over, some ways into the aging of the population. And that on its own accounting is working just fine.

I mean, one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses. So, ten years ago, people said it was going to run out in 2029. Now the official estimate is 2042. Realistically, it’s probably going to go well into the second half of the century. Now how does this become a crisis? Well it becomes a crisis by changing the rules. By saying, oh, well, actually, that surplus that we’re running because of the tax increase that was designed to prolong the life of Social Security, that’s not real. Because it’s invested in government bonds which are a perfectly good asset, for anybody else, but not for the Social Security administration. And so, there was a real crisis that people saw in the 1980’s. They dealt with it. The solution worked very well, but because this administration, because the Republican party doesn’t want Social Security to remain, because they have always wanted to get rid of it since Franklin Roosevelt, they have decided to redefine the rules so as to call it a crisis when realistically, we have a huge budget problem, but that has nothing to do with Social Security.

--Paul Krugman on Social Security, the Decline of the Dollar and Healthcare

Why don't we loot the Heritage Foundation's bank account and distribute all that monies among working folk who lost their jobs and careers during the Reagan years?

Why don't we LOOT the billions that have been quickly squirreled away offshore and re-distribute that money among the millions whose lives have been ruined by the export of US industry that was begun under Ronald Reagan?

Why don't we TAKE BACK this government? Why don't we tell Obama to get on board or get the fuck out of the way? Why don't we seize the bank accounts of the GOP leadership that is conspiring to loot your monies even as we write and post?

We don't we wage a real revolution and take this nation back?

As millions of ordinary working people are anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years, an impressive armada is lined up to push the idea--Washington's leading think tanks, the prestige media, tax-exempt foundations, skillful propagandists posing as economic experts and a self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly.

"We have magneto trouble," said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn't working. He also said this: "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Both statements are as true now as they were then.

How did this second great colossal muddle arise? In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we redesigned the machine so that we did understand it, well enough at any rate to avoid big disasters. Banks, the piece of the system that malfunctioned so badly in the 1930s, were placed under tight regulation and supported by a strong safety net. Meanwhile, international movements of capital, which played a disruptive role in the 1930s, were also limited. The financial system became a little boring but much safer.

Then things got interesting and dangerous again. Growing international capital flows set the stage for devastating currency crises in the 1990s and for a globalized financial crisis in 2008. The growth of the shadow banking system, without any corresponding extension of regulation, set the stage for latter-day bank runs on a massive scale. These runs involved frantic mouse clicks rather than frantic mobs outside locked bank doors, but they were no less devastating.

What we're going to have to do, clearly, is relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression. I won't try to lay out the details of a new regulatory regime, but the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn't a crisis so that it doesn't take excessive risks. Since the 1930s commercial banks have been required to have adequate capital, hold reserves of liquid assets that can be quickly converted into cash, and limit the types of investments they make, all in return for federal guarantees when things go wrong. Now that we've seen a wide range of non-bank institutions create what amounts to a banking crisis, comparable regulation has to be extended to a much larger part of the system.

--Paul Krugman, What to Do

Staring into an abyss, we stand on the brink of a new 'Great Depression'. Those who must bear with greed and incompetence, responsibility brining us to this point, now scheme to subvert our only economic success story. As the late Steve Kangas reminded us, retirement before 1935 condemned huge numbers of seniors to starvation in the streets. It was Social security alone that addressed this problem and eliminated it.

Social Security not only provided the American elderly with a pension, some of that spendable income found its way back into the economy and created jobs. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson expanded Social Security and, by doing so, reduced senior poverty from 30 percent to 12 percent. Now --for all the wrong and wrong-headed reasons, an increasingly uninformed and unintelligent right wing covets the monies that have a proven record of success in difficult times. There are two words for these people: crooks and fools!

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An Epidemic of Police Thuggery First Seen in US Occupied New Orleans

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The Bush administration did not rebuild New Orleans. It occupied it. When normal folk looked at New Orleans they saw a picturesque, beautiful, culturally unique city. When the GOP looked at New Orleans, it saw Disneyland and Las Vegas! Certainly, the brutal Blackwater occupation of New Orleans was but a foretaste of an epidemic of police thuggery and brutality that now sweeps the US.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown --better known as 'Brownie'--did a 'helluva job' for George W. Bush and the party/syndicate bosses. Just one year after the Gulf Coast region, New Orleans most dramatically, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina it was clear that nothing had been done to rebuild the city. 'Brownie' wasn't fired, just 'removed from his job', hid from public scrutiny.
It is hard not to believe that this corrupt GOP administration deliberately punished New Orleans for its liberal, free-thinking, free-wheeling, Democratic history. The Bush administration did not rebuild New Orleans. It occupied it.

"It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast roped-off regions here.

If we did not have the services of an off-duty law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on the air." Brian Williams, for MSNBC, 18 Sept. 2005 "This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. [1]

The occupation was cruel and unnecessary. People were forced to leave pets and property. Charities were deliberately turned away by the Bush occupation forces. Some who were merely trying to scavenge something to eat were treated like dangerous criminals.
The forces of US occupation in New Orleans disrupted private transportation; flights in and out of New Orleans were burdened with absurd police state measures put into effect after 9/11. Private property was confiscated. Families were broken up. Citizens were simply rounded up like cattle, herded into buses and buildings, deprived of adequate ventilation, water or plumbing.

“Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. ‘This is a desperate SOS,’ the mayor said.”
[AP]

Meanwhile, back at GOP Occupied America Headquarters:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE GOES SHOE SHOPPING: “Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’”
[Gawker]

The imposition of martial law in New Orleans was deliberate. The hired killers of Blackwater were dispatched to the city of Louis Armstrong, Pete Fountain and the Marsalis family.
The Bush government did every thing it could to prevent Katrina survivors from surviving the US military occupation of New Orleans. Governor Kathleen Blanco described National Guard troops sent to New Orleans to impose order. She said that they were "fresh back from Iraq ...locked and loaded ...ready to "shoot to kill." And they did!

The GOP never does anything unless there is something in it for the party. The party bosses were most certainly prepared to sacrifice New Orleans for the ambitions of filthy rich white guys and various land re-development schemes. Katrina, after all, had done the dirty work of displacing most of the city's 'poor' population. The GOP '...don't like po folk' or as Kanye West told his audience: “George Bush doesn't care about black people.” [BBC, 9/3/05]. Bush and his crooked party would have preferred not to get its hands dirty. How propitious Katrina! The GOP didn't even have to come up with an absurd cover story --incompetent Arab pilots, impossibly hot fires, or parallel dimensions capable of swallowing up airliners. The Bush administration was, perhaps, inspired by 'progress' that was already evident.

The land has always been a part of the folklore. For years the leaders of New Orleans have been approving plans to tear down the city's housing projects, which are mostly occupied by black people, and replace them with expensive condominiums. Uptown, the St. Thomas was the first to go. The Desire, in the Ninth Ward, soon followed. Now, on the Westbank, most of the Fisher has been demolished. And the other four seemed on their way out before Katrina even came. The result of all this is that a large part of the black community is being split up and shipped off to other areas. And as with the cases of the St. Thomas and Desire, when black people see white people moving in and taking over their part of town, conspiracy theories inevitably arise.
--Kenneth Cooper, 'They' Destroyed New Orleans

What was mistakenly called 'incompetence' was really just GOP strategy.

• Demoralize the Democratic base with phony press releases and whisper campaigns.
• Attack opponents' strength with character assassination.
• Suppress the vote in every possible way.
• Buy some people off with tax cuts.
• Scare the rest into voting against their own interests.
--Republican Dirty Tricks

Even now, the city is little changed but for the symbolic photo ops and other staged media events. New Orleans is not rebuilt and when it is, Bush will have had nothing to do with it. If New Orleans is lucky, it will escape the evil schemes that the right wing has in store for a city utterly beyond its comprehension.

Various schemes to rebuild New Orleans range from nothing at all to GOP visions of golf courses, Potemkin villages, and glitzy casinos owned by crooks and other heavy contributors to the GOP crime syndicate. Much of those proceeds, you can be sure, will wind up in party coffers. Most unsettling is the reasonable suspicion that in New Orleans, we glimpsed the horrible future that awaits us all, a future in which a fascist central government patrols our streets and dominates our lives with corporate armies like Blackwater, killer vigilantes, armored, blacksuited thugs, Nazis cum Robocop!

In the duplicitous “War on Terror,” mercenary armies like DynCorp, Blackwater USA, KBR, Custer Battles, and Aegis plunder Iraq and other victims of Pax Americana, operating with no rules of engagement and near-total legal immunity, usually earning at least four times the salaries of enlisted U.S. soldiers.

A Sept. 21 London Independent investigation labeled the $120 billion sector “arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy,” with operations in 50 countries, adding, “None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq have been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the U.S. does not keep records.”
--Private contractors threaten U.S. democracy, Rice Thresher

More than 1,800 people died in the Katrina disaster --less than died on 911. The GOP got off cheap. 911 cost the government some hardware. It is only the people who lose their lives whenever the GOP dreams of a 'permanent GOP majority'. Dictatorship!

For news straight from the Crescent city, check out the New Orleans News Ladder
for essential resources.
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It's the Government's Job to Shake You Down

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The "mob" --often called "the Mafia" --achieved mythic status in America thanks to movies, books, and the FBI. No expert on the mafia, I have in mind a rather simplistic Mafia business model --how it came about, how it grew, how it exploited "niche marketing". It's origins are usually traced to mid-nineteenth Century Sicily.

The Statue of Liberty greeted new arrivals with a promise of liberty. Many new immigrants, frankly, needed help. Many spoke little or no English and had equally limited job prospects. Many had families to feed. The character, Tateh, in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime typifies a million stories. Ragtime paints the tragic picture of a promise broken. One of the film's most memorable scenes involved J. P. Morgan pontificating from a catwalk. Like today's GOP politicians he was holding forth about the American Dream. As a sea of immigrants reached out to him, the catwalk creaked and then collapsed. A desperate throng was crushed as they sought their dreams.

In some communities, in Sicily and in America, a godfather helped a new immigrant find a job or set up a business with small loans. He was often an advocate for the newly arrived. He offered them protection. At first, few regarded these men as criminals. They became, rather, role models and protectors. He filled the vaccum, offering protection when the "state" would not. Historian Paolo Pezzino wrote: "The Mafia is a kind of organized crime being active not only in several illegal fields, but also tending to exercise sovereignty functions – normally belonging to public authorities – over a specific territory..."

It was only the more odious practices that attracted the attention of government and prosecutors. Godfathers were shaking down small businesses, extorting money, collecting regular payments. No fair! Shaking down folk is the government's job!

Nation columnist Naomi Klein explores a key argument from her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: After 9/11 the Bush Administration launched a new economy, driven by the notion of an endless war against an undefined notion of evil. Read more in her 2005 Nation column "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

Global ShakeDowns-R-Us: James Baker-Carlyle Group Government-guaranteed Global Corporate Fraud doesn't get any better than this. Acting as a special "debt" envoy to Iraq as well as a senior "advisor" to the Carlyle Group, James Baker, the Bush Family bagman, has been enlisted to strong-arm nations into forgiving Iraq's debt.

"Sir" James Baker, partner of Baker Botts, is also an equity partner in the notorious Carlyle Group, which is part of a consortium trying to collect $27 billion on behalf of Kuwait, one of Iraq's biggest creditors. How? By twisting the arms of Iraqi debt holders.

Countries like the U.K., which is owed $1 billion by Iraq, is being urged by Baker into "forgiving" this debt.

George Bush Jr. appointed Baker, the US Secretary of State under Bush Sr., as an "unpaid envoy" (read bagman-fixer) on Dec. 5, 2003. However since Baker is also an equity partner with a reported $180 million stake in the Carlyle Group, the conflict of interest is at once stark and undeniable.

Published in the Nation Magazine, Naomi Klein's article (thenation.)--Global ShakeDowns-R-Us: James Baker-Carlyle Group

URI DOWBENKO

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.

- Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.

-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.

And footage from yesterday's police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans

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Bumps Along the Road to Freedom

We may escape a close encounter with tyranny. As the GOP self-destructs, The Nation declares that Democrats are poised to roll back the excesses of George W. Bush. The battle is won when Democrats retake the government; the war is lost if Democrats fail to restore the republic and the Constitution. We have stared into Nietzche's abyss and saw ourselves! We remain our greatest threat since the 1930s.

Every heroic struggle deserves an equally heroic soundtrack. In 1830, Hector Berlioz orchestrated not a film score --but a life score: La Marseillaise.

Casablanca - Rick´s Bar

The year 1830 was recalled by Hector Berlioz in his memoirs. While he had been two weeks shut up in the Paris Conservatoire writing a cantata, a revolution had broken out.

I was finishing my cantata when the Revolution broke out," "I dashed off the final pages of my orchestral score to the sound of stray bullets coming over the roofs and pattering on the wall outside my window. On the 29th I had finished, and was free to go out and roam about Paris till morning, pistol in hand. A day or two later I was crossing the courtyard of the Palais Royal when I heard a tune I knew well - a dozen or so young men singing a battle hymn of my composition [one of the Neuf Mélodies on texts of Thomas Moore]. Unused as I was to this kind of popularity, the discovery delighted me and I pushed my way through to the circle of singers and requested permission to join them. The audience grew steadily and the space round the little patriotic band got smaller and smaller. We barely escaped, and fled with the crowd streaming behind us till we reached the Galérie Colbert. There a haberdasher asked us up to a second-floor balcony, where we could 'rain down our music on our admirers' without the risk of being suffocated.

We struck up the Marseillaise. Almost at once a holy stillness fell upon the seething mass at our feet. After each refrain there was a profound silence. This is not at all what I had expected. On beholding that vast concourse of people I recalled that I had just arranged Rouget de Lisle's song for double chorus and full orchestra, and that where one normally writes 'tenors and basses' I had written instead 'everyone with a voice, a soul and blood in his veins.' After the fourth verse I could contain myself no longer, and I yelled, 'Confound it all - sing!' The great crowd roared out its Aux armes citoyens! with the power and precision of a trained choir.

--Memoirs of Hector Berlioz on La Marseillaise

Berlioz dedicated his setting of the Marseillaise to the anthem's author, Rouget de Lisle, who, by 1830, was living in indigent retirement in Choisy, on the southern fringes of Paris. The rise in popular democratic zeal surrounding the 1830 Revolt caused a renewed interest in his patriotic hymn, and King Louis-Philippe granted the poet an annual pension of 1500 francs. De Lisle wrote Berlioz a letter of appreciation on December 30, 1830, inviting Berlioz to visit him in Choisy to discuss an unnamed proposal. "I heard later," Berlioz continued in his Memoirs, "that de Lisle - who incidentally wrote many fine songs besides the Marseillaise - had an unpublished libretto on Othello that he wished to offer me. Being obliged to leave Paris on the day after I received this letter [for Rome as prize winner], I sent my apologies and explained that my visit would have to wait until after my return from Italy. The poor man died in the interval. I never met him."

--La Marseillaise - Berlioz

And in historical New Orleans, a reminder that the city's current problems with the Federal Government in Washington are not new.

New Orleans, LA (AHN) - The City Council of New Orleans unanimously voted to demolish 4,500 government-subsidized homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, despite overwhelming criticism and riotous protests that included a brawl in the council chamber before the vote.

The 7-member council supported a redevelopment plan of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to replace the C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, Lafitte and St. Bernard public housing projects with a mixed-use development that has 744 public housing units. ...

--Update 2: New Orleans City Council Unanimously Votes To Demolish Public Housing, December 20, 2007 7:01 p.m. EST

History, it seems, does repeat itself. Certainly, the battle for "liberte" is not won. In 1917, the government of the United States --the War Department, I believe --imperiously decided that certain parts of New Orleans had no right to exist. Those areas were "shut down", residents forced to relocate. The War Department presided over the destruction of property. I call that tyranny!

Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong - Farewell to Storyville

The area is known to us as "Storyville" for Alderman Sidney Story, who decreed in 1898 that prostitution should be legal in the area called by locals --"the District". The photographic images of photographer E J Bellocq, circa 1912, are among the few visual records of Storyville that survive. Bellocq, a commercial photographer for shipping companies, is remembered for the "studies" he made of working women in Storyville. His images, at once prurient and artistic, capture perfectly the ambiguity with which the rest of the US regarded New Orleans --a "French city" in America, a city in which the famous French Impressionist Edgar Degas lived for a while and produced important work. He found himself in the middle of post-Civil War politics. New Orleans itself was comfortable "in its own skin" if puritans elsewhere in the South were not.

I have yet to find the legal authority for the Federal Government's closure of Storyville during World War I. The New Orleans City Government protested vigorously to no avail. Nevertheless, with the Storyville's loss segregated "dens of prostitution" emerged around the city. By the 1930s very little remained of famous old mansions along Basin Street, some of the finest structures in the city. It seemed a deliberate effort to erase the very memory of Storyville. Efforts to rename Basin Street "North Saratoga" failed. Today, Basin Street is Basin Street and a classic blues tune bears its name. The video above is from a 1947 film featuring Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong.

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Hezbollah will rebuild Southern Lebanon faster than Bushco will rebuild New Orleans

In another year, New Orleans will still be a shadow of its former self —if it survives at all. More effort has been spent making excuses than restoring one of America's great cities. There will be more empty words and over the course of another year nothing will have changed. In the meantime, there is Southern Lebanon —already rebounding with help from an organization that Bush deems "terrorist".

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the force fighting and defending the villages, at the same time started helping the population as soon as the Israeli bombing began. The Lebanese resistance provided the ambulances and scores of searchers who pulled people from the rubble. They helped organize getting tens of thousands of refugees to schools, public parks and private homes. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 16)

In Beirut alone, Hezbollah organized 10 mobile medical teams that cared for 14 schools each, in two-day rotations, helping 48,000 people. Another 70,000 were treated in houses by other professionals.

In a Hezbollah kitchen near downtown Beirut, volunteers prepared 8,000 hot meals a day—part of a daily total of 50,000 they distributed across Beirut, reported the Monitor.

In New Orleans, families evacuated from the Superdome and the Convention Center were scattered all over the country. Parents were sometimes separated from children. Some didn’t know if loved ones lived or died. Three months after Katrina hit, 6,500 people were still unaccounted for, and more than 400 bodies still unidentified, according to the National Center for Missing Adults.

—Joyce Chediac, Lebanon rebuilds, New Orleans waits

So —who are the terrorists? Bushco or Hezbollah?

If I had been a New Orleans resident victimized by the shoddy job done by the US Army Corps of Engineers and, later, by the Bush gang of crooks and incompetents, I might be inclined to call the US government a terrorist organization.

If I were an Iraqi citizen with family members among some 140,000 civilians murdered in Bush's initial wave of bombings —Shock and Awe —I might be inclined to call Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld terrorists.

If I had family members murdered in cold blood by US troops at Haditha, I might be inclined to label the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld a terrorist organization.

If I should find myself thrown into Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or an Eastern European gulag where I am tortured, sodomized, electrocuted, humiliated or, possibly, murdered, I might be inclined to use the term "terrorists" to describe and denote Bush, the Pentagon, the Military/Industrial Complex, a private army of un-accountable private contractors, and the enablers of the GOP!

Significant progress by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon will finish Bush politically at a time when the US has no leverage anywhere in the world. Surely, no one believed Bush when he declared Hezbollah defeated; by contrast, probably everyone believed Hezbollah when it declared "victory". Bush is testy and anxious and it shows. Billions of people know him to be a liar, a fraud, a war criminal, and an incompetent!

How did Hezbollah —called "terrorist" by Bush —win? For one thing, Hezbollah was in much better touch with its "base" than Bush with anyone but a tiny, wealthy elite. Hezbollah began a defense of villages as soon as Israel began a widespread bombing campaign. When Bush is forced by reality and an increasingly livid American populace to pull out of Iraq, who will undo the harm done there by Bush and his criminal gang?

Who will rebuild Baghdad?

Will we withdraw the troops and send in FEMA?

Can Brownie do a heckuva job in Baghdad where everyone else has failed?

Will anyone go to Baghdad in order to take the fall for Bush?

I suppose Bush hasn't thought that far down the road. It might have been David Hume who said that there is a moral imperative to be intelligent. Iraq was a "war of choice". Likewise, Bush's stupidity is the result of a deliberate choice. No one but Bush is to blame for Bush's stupidity. Less privileged people must learn quickly and choose wisely in order to survive. Bush did neither and winds up ruling the world. What's up with that?

As to be expected, Howard Zinn, gets right to the heart of the matter: Bush's war machine is impotent:

I remember John Hersey's novel, ``The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

...

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a ``war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

—Howard Zinn, War is not a solution for terrorism

The following story is hardly an update. It was published immediately after the dedication of the Clinton library. It is especially unsettling in retrospect. Since Bush mused about a single submarine "taking out" the Clinton library, Forbes reported that the said "Israeli soldiers" were captured inside Lebanon —not kidnapped inside Israel; the Jerusalem Post reported that Bush had urged Olmert to attack Syria, presumably to draw Iran into the fray. The Israeli source bluntly called Bush nuts for "egging" Olmert on! In short, there is abundant evidence to support the conclusion that George W. Bush is a violently inclined psychopath. Here he is fantasizing about an attack on the Clinton library:

At Bill library, Bush sounds sub-versive

President Bush and top strategist Karl Rove (l.) took a trip to the Clinton Library to seek inspiration for W's own legacy-building. President Bush once daydreamed about blasting Bill Clinton's presidential library to smithereens, according to a new book.

In "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime," former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal recounts a November 2004 visit by Bush and his political guru Karl Rove to the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., on the banks of the Arkansas River.

"Bush appeared distracted and glanced repeatedly at his watch," Blumenthal writes about a presidential tour during the library's dedication. "When he stopped to gaze at the river, where Secret Service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: 'Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there.' Bush replied: 'A submarine could take this place out.'"

The author muses: "Was the President warning of an Al Qaeda submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton Library? Is that where Osama Bin Laden is hiding? Or was this a wishful paranoid fantasy of ubiquitous terrorism destroying Clinton's legacy with one blow?"

Blumenthal, who attributes his account to two anonymous eyewitnesses, adds that "Rove showed keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy.

"'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools.'"

Amen to that.

Did Bush and his gang fantasize, at one point, about airliners attacking the WTC?

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