Why Space Aliens Never Came Back to Earth

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

IF you think the politicians, the beauracrats, the asshole pundits in DC or NY et al, et al care about you --just REMEMBER VIET NAM!

Kent State, the Woodstock generation was a generation not afraid to take it to the streets, the campuses, the media! Alas --neither Democrat nor GOP administrations gave a shit! Viet Nam was in no way "improved" by U.S. presence; nor was it liberated by the sacrifice of thousands of young lives in a dank, fucking swamp.

I see little chance of improvement today, tomorrow nor several years down the road. The U.S. has squandered the seemingly endless resources for which they murdered entire Native American tribes. Even now --at this moment --the United States is on the very bottom of the list with the World's Largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance (formerly called the Balance of Trade Deficit). China Owns US!

Or --as Charles Fort put it: "We are property!" He was right but got the "owners" wrong. He thought our owners were space aliens. Reality was and remains much simpler. We may have been better off if "space aliens" had been benign, all powerful and landed! Hello Klaato! Loved your movie. You should have won the Oscar and --to wow the crowd on Oscar night --beamed up to the "big mother" ship.

Interestingly --UFO sightings seem to have diminished to near nothingness over the last 60 years or so. I have a "theory": Aliens came, they saw, they were disgusted! They returned to whence they came and vowed never, ever to come back!

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The Myth of Military Keynesianism

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Military Keynesianism is another myth of dubious origins. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes wrote an open letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging the new President to borrow money to be spent on public works programs:

“Thus as the prime mover in the first stage of the technique of recovery I lay overwhelming emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting from governmental expenditure which is financed by Loans and not by taxing present incomes. Nothing else counts in comparison with this.

In a boom inflation can be caused by allowing unlimited credit to support the excited enthusiasm of business speculators. But in a slump governmental Loan expenditure is the only sure means of securing quickly a rising output at rising prices. That is why a war has always caused intense industrial activity. In the past orthodox finance has regarded a war as the only legitimate excuse for creating employment by governmental expenditure. You, Mr President, having cast off such fetters, are free to engage in the interests of peace and prosperity the technique which hitherto has only been allowed to serve the purposes of war and destruction.

--Keynes, John (1933). "An Open Letter to President Roosevelt". Retrieved 2011-08-01.

Wars for 'Fortunate Sons'

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Said to have been written in about 20 minutes, John Fogerty 's 'Fortunate Son' is most often described as "anti-establishment". It was and remains a celebration of 'blue collar pride', a musical 'flip-off' of ruling elites, the sole beneficiaries of the Viet Nam war. These 'ruling elites' are correctly identified with the Washington 'establishment' --an entrenched axis of K-street and the 'Military-Industrial Complex'!

Recall a time when Richard Nixon was President! Essential CCR personnel --John Fogerty and Doug Clifford --were drafted in 1966 but discharged in 1967. Fogerty was no fan of Nixon; he believed that Nixon's cronies received preferential treatment. He was most surely correct!

As more recent events have proven, the song was prescient; the words 'fortunate son' seem now to describe a President who was, in fact, the son of a former President, a former President who had been head of the CIA --George H.W. Bush! His 'fortunate son' would himself become President as a result of a questionable, if not crooked, SCOTUS decision following what was most surely a stolen election in Florida. It is a 'fortunate son', indeed, who rises to the nation's top office at the end of a suspicious vote recount leading to an equally crooked decision of the Supreme Court, a decision that is remembered as much for the meaningless verbal circumlocutions of one A. Scalia as it is for some eight years each of which may be described as 'annus horribillis'!

The song by CCR was, in fact, supportive of soldiers in the field but forcibly makes the point that those serving in Viet Nam did so because they were the sons of working class people --not Senators. They were the sons of ordinary Americans --not well-connected right wing politicians or justices of a court that is now forever tainted!

Credence performed 'Fortunate Son' on the Ed Sullivan Show. Back in the sixties, the producers of the Ed Sullivan show had not yet figured out that CCR's song was a pointed damnation of an unfair war in Viet Nam! Had they figured that out in advance, CCR might never have gotten the exposure.

Just as Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The U.S.A." is a pointed protest, so too is 'Fortunate Son' though many have thought both to be 'patriotic anthems! The opposite is true! Consider the lines: "And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief" Ooh, they're pointin' the cannon at you...!"

Fogerty is often asked what inspired him to write 'Fortunate Son'! His response:

"Julie Nixon was hanging around with David Eisenhower, and you just had the feeling that none of these people were going to be involved with the war. In 1969, the majority of the country thought morale was great among the troops, and like eighty percent of them were in favor of the war. But to some of us who were watching closely, we just knew we were headed for trouble.

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Viet Nam Redux

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It may be too late for America to avoid falling into a trap like the one that embroiled several U.S. administrations in Southeast Asia for decades. The parallels are frightening. Just as JFK/LBJ had inherited what had been given the Orwellian name 'presence' in S.E. Asia, President Barack Obama risks getting stuck in an Afghanistan quagmire.

President Obama has received a military report requesting as many as forty thousand additional troops in Afghanistan though the objectives are increasingly vague, perhaps because both the Pentagon and the 'hawks' wish to avoid calling it what it is: nation building!

Since 911, the U.S. has bogged down in this new 'Viet Nam', failing every stated objective because: 1) objectives may be framed for 'public consumption' for the P.R. value; 2) because the Pentagon prefers to hide the fact that it is almost always wrong about anything more complex than lobbing a big bomb on a little village! The Pentagon is filled with gung ho grunts!

Again, the U.S. fights the wrong war, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. Nothing was learned from Viet Nam, the war crime from which Viet Nam did not begin to rebuild until we were gone! Clearly --the Military-Industrial Complex is unconcerned. The M.I.C is simply doing what it seemed intended to do and that is enrich the defense contractors who make up the Military-Industrial complex.

It seems that every Democratic president gets stuck with the false paradigm: be tough or be wimp! I submit that it is a 'tough' President who repudiates the bullshit left him by predecessors. It is the 'tough' President who levels with the American people. It is the 'tough' President who exposes the heinous nature of the war left him by George W. Bush who lied about 911 in order to start it. It is a 'tough' President who just says 'no': we will no longer compound the many crimes of George W. Bush!

Vietnam became a war of attrition. Johnson would regularly characterize his decisions as taking the middle ground. He would not "pull out" as the "doves" and "nervous Nellies" suggested nor would he go "all out" as the "hawkish" military advisors recommended.

Fighting a war with limited and political objectives had an added liability. It was difficult to define and convey the idea of "progress" to the public. There were few set piece or conventional battles and American objectives were not defined in geographical terms (e.g., Berlin and Tokyo). Instead, the administration was forced to create and essentially sell indicators of progress to the public. Herein lies the origin of such commonly used terms as "pacification zones" and "kill ratios.

Questioners, critics, and opponents to Johnson quickly arose. Perhaps the most prominent establishment figure was J. William Fulbright, the Democrat from Arkansas, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright was a one-time friend and ally of Lyndon Johnson and had, ironically, served as floor manager of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. He broke with Lyndon Johnson over the war in Vietnam and, in February 1966, led the Foreign Relations Committee through six days of televised hearings on the conduct of the war. To divert public attention from the hearings, Lyndon Johnson traveled to Honolulu to meet with South Vietnamese President Thieu. The Senate Committee would again hold hearings in August 1966 and in October-November of 1967.

--Conventional 'Warfare' in the Nuclear Age

Rory Stewart is the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights. My first exposure to his thinking dates to his BBC interview of about two years ago. Stewart does not merely think outside the box, he denies its existence. The first conclusion is that the U.S. is in Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons; secondly, the recent military report given Obama has effectively changed the original U.S. objective. Instead of the eradication al Qaeda, the U.S. is now committed to defeating the Taliban and rebuilding a nation in 'our' image. Once again, the U.S. is suckered with stated 'goals' that are vague, imperial, grandiose, ill-framed and ill-considered.

At last, any intelligent 'enemy' should be expected to resist a foreign power, a foreign enemy. An enemy in Afghanistan knows the 'lay of the land'. We are fighting on their turf. We are the newbies. For all our flashy, high-tech, game-boy tech, we are just city slickers in the back country. We will never know Afghanistan as it is known by the Afghans.

This crisis for Obama is literally a dangerous opportunity. He can be suckered down a long road for which he will be remembered as LBJ is most often remembered --NOT for his 'Great Society' but for the escalation of hostilities in Viet Nam; or Obama can be remembered for having refused to be suckered by the merchants of death--the Military-Industrial complex and the sycophantic blood suckers on K-Street! We can bog America down in a long and ruinous war or we can break out of the trap that the seems always laid for Democrats by wars already begun and screwed up but left to a Democrat to clean up, a Democrat whose name will inevitably be stuck on it as LBJ's name is forever stuck on Viet Nam!

Rory Stewart on Bill Moyers Journal

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
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Also see:

• A Spiritual Mind Movie
• How the US Became a Vassal State of China
  
• Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes
  
• The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism
• Dissecting the Scrambled Brains of the GOP
  
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization
  [w/LINKS]
• Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization [PDF]
• How the GOP Pays Off its 'Base' of Elites
  

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

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Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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LBJ White House Tapes Reveal Nixon 'Treason', Sabotage of Viet Nam Peace Talks

Richard Nixon, who resigned at the height of the Watergate Scandal, is now implicated with his Sec of State Henry Kissenger in an act of high treason. On the tapes, a furious LBJ told Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen that because Nixon had 'played politics' with Viet Nam 'tens of thousands' of US troops in Viet Nam lost their lives. Specifically, Johnson accused Nixon of sabotaging peace efforts by his administration. LBJ is heard yelling: "This is treason."

According to the Austin-American Statesmen, Nixon surrogates had asked South Vietnam to avoid peace talks with North Vietnam until after the elections even as Johnson tired to arrange 'peace talks between North and South Vietnam'. At the same time, Nixon campaigned for the White House with the slogan that he had a 'secret peace plan' to end the war in Viet Nam.

The tapes also show that Johnson and Hubert Humphrey kept quiet about the Nixon/GOP shenanigans at the time. History might have changed had Johnson gone public.

On November 3, 1968, just two days prior to the presidential election, Johnson confronted Nixon but Nixon lied when he said point-blank: "I'm not trying to interfere." His response has been called, 'a bald faced lie'. All the while, Nixon and/or GOP activists were working behind the scenes to convince Vietnamese diplomats that "Nixon will do better by you".

To test the good faith of the North Vietnamese, Johnson ordered that all bombing in the north cease on Oct. 31 , six days before voters were to go the polls. The cease-fire gave the Humphrey campaign an immediate jolt — polls showed Nixon's 8-percentage-point lead had shrunk to 2 points.

The precise nature of any communication between Nixon's allies and the South Vietnamese government isn't revealed in the tapes — nor is the way Johnson and his advisers learned of them.

In the tapes, Johnson tells Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "It's pretty obvious to me it's had its effect."

In a segment aired at the news conference, Johnson tells Sen. Everett Dirksen , the Republican minority leader, that it will be Nixon's responsibility if the South Vietnamese don't participate in the peace talks.

"This is treason," LBJ says to Dirksen.

"I know," Dirksen replies, very softly.

--Austin American Statesman

Certainly --Nixon's victory over Humphrey was a mere 500,000 out of 73 million total votes cast. By that time, the Viet Nam war was highly unpopular and not just among those of draft or college age. Public knowledge of Nixon's activities would most certainly have sunk his bid for the White House.

The LBJ Library has made public some 42 hours of recordings that were made from May 1968 through January 1969 when the Johnson family left the White House. Historians, investigative journalists and government prosecutors are urged to access the documents here and here .

LBJ Accused Nixon of Treason!

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GOP, Bush, Evil, Tyranny

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How to avoid wasting your vote in a Bush dictatorship

I recently blamed "pundtry" for much of what is wong with this country. Everyone's a frickin' pundit and no one, it seems, is prepared to take a stand unless they've checked a poll first. Not wealth, but "punditry" and modern sophistry has trickled down. Instead of weighing the merits of various candidates, voters read the polls and columns and make calculations. Would John Edwards beat Guiliani? Can Hillary Clinton win the center? Can Obama keep the black vote while courting a "white" center?

When was the last time a "major" candidate said anything that had not first been vetted or parsed by a focus group, a consultant, or an entire PR firm? No one, its seems, does what's right because it's right! Mr. Smith never got to Washington. Except perhaps once in the person of Mike Gravel, remembered for his efforts to end the Viet Nam war, to end the draft, and for having put the Pentagon Papers into the public record in 1971.

For twenty years this nation has been at war in Indochina. Tens of thousands of Americans have been killed, half a million have been wounded, a million Asians have died, and millions more have been maimed or have become refugees in their own land. Meanwhile, the greatest representative democracy the world has even seen, the nation of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, has had its nose rubbed in the swamp by petty war lords, jealous generals, black marketeers, and grand-scale dope pushers.

And the war still goes on. People are still dying, arms and legs are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies, as a direct result of policy deecisions conceived in secret and still kept from the American people.

H. G. Wells, the English novelist and historian, once wrote:

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.

This is nowhere more true than in the conduct of a representative democracy. Free and informed public debate is the source of our strength. Remove it and our democratic institutions become a sham. Perceiving this, our forefathers included with our Constitution a Bill of Rights guaranteeing the maximum competition in the marketplace of ideas, and insuring the widest opportunity for the active and full participation of an enlightened electorate.

--Sen Mike Gravel, History of US Decision Making on Viet Nam

Mike Gravel was absolutely correct about Viet Nam and he is just as correct now about Iraq. Every war fought by the US since WWII has been ruinous and immoral, wars fought --not for defense --but in order to enrich the Military/Industrial complex.

I have no illusions. Even before the GOP figured out how to use computers to steal elections, elections had become mere window dressing. The fix was in because the Military/Inustrial complex hedges its bets. As the GOP was fond of pointing out in numerous campaign manuals, the candidate spending the most money usually won the race. An "Axis of Evil" --the MIC, the GOP and the CIA --has manipulated every election outcome in recent memory.

The time has come to draw a line in the sand. Just as I never play carny games, I refuse to play the election game as its been designed by the major parties and the GOP in particular. I am not going to compromise my conscience voting for someone based upon a pundit's view of his chances in a general election.

I will support Gravel's candidacy because Gravel is right, one of only two candidates who still has integrity, who has a complete program based upon what is right for this country. I would support a Gravel/Kucinich ticket or even the other way 'round.

Many will object that I will have wasted my vote. When Diebold can change the outcome of an election with a few lines of code, my vote is wasted already. When the US Supreme Court can set aside an election by passing off transparent bullshit as "law", my vote is wasted. When Tom DeLay's gerrymadered districts are still "stealing" votes in Texas, my vote is wasted. As long as candidates are bought and paid for by corporations, my vote is wasted. If I try to game an evil system, my vote is wasted. But --not this time! Gravel for President.

Additional resouces

• How the Pentagon Papers Came to be Published by the Beacon Press: A Remarkable Story Told by Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Dem Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel and Unitarian Leader Robert West
• The Huffington Post: Sen. Mike Gravel's Blog
• Official Channel of Mike Gravel
• Gravel: History of US Decision Making on Viet Nam

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