Showing posts with label republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label republicans. Show all posts

Sunday, July 24, 2016

FLIGHT 11 DID NOT FLY ON 911

 by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy 

American Airlines itself is the source for information that AA Flights 11 (North Tower) and 77 (Pentagon) did not fly on 911. These flights are critical to the the government's crumbling cover up! Without those flights, Bush and his murderous co-conspirators will have to revise the big lie. They will have to concoct yet another cover story from the ground up! A cover up is on the brink of collapse when those guilty of capital crimes and high treason either turn on one another or are forced to revise the lie!

Already several demonstrable lies (many referenced in previous EC articles) are probable cause to begin a Federal Grand Jury investigation of George W. Bush's role in 911. Bush should be compelled by subpoena and Federal Marshals to testify under oath before an independent Federal Grand Jury. The AA revelations demand it!

WikiScanner discovered that American Airlines changed their Wikipedia entry to state that Flights 11 and 77 never flew on 9/11.

Original entry was:
2 American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 TerroristAttack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 
New entry is:
Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767). Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.
A Google search of the IP address that made the change - 144.9.8.21 - is located at American Airlines.

Why the change American airlines? Did the flights actually operate or did we just imagine all of that?
--LiveLeak
That AA claims that the two aircraft that are absolutely essential to the Bush administration's official theory were not, in fact, scheduled for flight and were, in fact, not in the air that day, is a big hole from which Bush may not escape.

According to Wikiscaner Americans Airliners changed their Wikipedia entry which now states that 'Flights 11 and 77 never flew on 9/11'.

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767). Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.

The entry had stated:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist  
  

Attack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 (a Boeing 767).

A Google search of the IP address - 144.9.8.21 - confirmed that the 'change' was made at American Airlines. User talk: 144.9.8.21 This IP address is registered to American Airlines From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search My WHOIS lookup of the above IP address returned the following: WHOIS - 144.9.8.21

Location: United States [City: Ft. Worth, Texas]
OrgName: American Airlines Incorporated OrgID: AMERIC-112 Address: P.O.Box 619616 Address: MD 5308 City: DFW Airport StateProv: TX PostalCode: 75261 Country: US
NetRange: 144.9.0.0 - 144.9.255.255 CIDR: 144.9.0.0/16 NetName: AANET NetHandle: NET-144-9-0-0-1 Parent: NET-144-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Assignment NameServer: DNS-P1.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P2.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P3.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P4.SABRE.COM Comment: RegDate: 1990-10-31 Updated: 2002-06-27
RTechHandle: OG60-ARIN RTechName: Gelbrich, Orf RTechPhone: +1-817-931-3145 RTechEmail: ************@aa.com
OrgTechHandle: ZW72-ARIN OrgTechName: WARIS, ZISHAN OrgTechPhone: +1-817-967-1242 OrgTechEmail: ************@aa.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-06-29 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database. 

If neither flight was in the air as American Airlines itself has so stated, then numerous 'official versions' of the 'official conspiracy theory' are all a pack of malicious lies. That includes almost every statement made by Bush. These lies are especially pernicious because they have the effect of covering up the truth, protecting the guilty and obstructing justice. These lies are an insult to the families of everyone who died as a result of the event and the subsequent cover up. These lies aggravate the crimes of mass murder, terrorism and high treason for which the penalty must surely be death.

The official story is familiar by now. At 8:20, Flight 11 stopped transmitting its transponder signal, and veered northward and departed dramatically from the westward heading of its planned route. The controllers concluded that the plane had probably been hijacked. 4 5 At 8:24, the following transmission was reportedly received from Flight 11: We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay .. we are returning to the airport. ..Nobody move. Everything will be okay.

If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet. Nobody move please we are going back to the airport .. don't try to make any stupid moves. 6 Neither of the pilots pressed the distress call button. At 8:28 controllers reportedly watched the plane make a 100-degree turn toward the south. 7 Presumably, Flight 11 continued south along the Hudson River until it reached the World Trade Center, though documentation of this is sparse given the lack of public information.

According to NORAD's September 18 timeline, the FAA did not notify NORAD of the signs that Flight 11 was hijacked until 8:40, 25 minutes after the first signs of trouble. 8 --Flight 11, The First Jet Commandeered on September 11th, 911 Research But --if Flight 11 did not fly that day, that's all a deliberate, criminal lie! If neither Flight 11 or 77 was in the air that day, then nothing in the 'official statements' with regard to the Twin Towers of the WTC can is true.

This information is not compatible with previous EC articles in which it was revealed that NTSB data placed Flight 77 at an altitude of 273, some 200 feet ABOVE the Pentagon at the time of impact, give or take a couple of seconds or less! Moreover, it's trajectory was such that those 'eyewitnesses' who claimed to have seen it could not possibly have done so. Neither scenario is good news for Bush. Both support the statement that absolutely no wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever found at the Pentagon. Moreover, photos of an engine rotor appear to depict a Rolls-Royce engine that is used in the Global Hawk, a payload carrying missile that was, in fact, flown from the US to Australia completely by remote control.

It is certainly a much better candidate for what Rumsfeld called '...the missile that struck this building' than a 757. Here's what you need to know about the Pentagon. No wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever recovered.

Only ONE engine rotor (seen in photos) was recovered! This rotor is about one third the diameter of a 757 rotor. A 757 has two rotors, each of which are nearly three times the size of the SINGLE rotor located at the Pentagon Engine rotors are made of a Steel/Titanium alloy to withstand high temps inside jet engines.

Flight 77 could not have crashed into the Pentagon

The time has come to consign Bush's official conspiracy theory to the dust bin of history. The theory is not even a good cover story, surviving for as long as it did because millions of good Americans wanted to believe it. Millions of otherwise good Americans did not wish to believe the very, very worst about an administration that had claimed to represent and defend our interests. Millions of Americans chose to believe that the government was still responsible to us, that the government was still the defender of Democracy as we are always taught in school.

Recognizing lies for what they are is a part of the process of growing up! America, it is time to grow up! It is time to confront this heinous pack of lies! It is time to insist that the Obama administration begin a REAL investigation.

Bush got away with mass murder and high treason! It probably too late  insist that a Federal Grand Jury investigate every count of high treason, mass murder and domestic terrorism that was perpetrated upon the people of the U.S. by the Bush administration, collaborators in the Pentagon, K-Street, the Congress and the leadership of the Republican party, Marvin Bush's 'Securacom', Larry Silverstein, General Myers, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and, of course, George W. Bush who was, at the time,m the 'Commander-in-Chief' and ultimately responsible for the orders given the US military to 'stand down'.

By Donald Rumsfeld's own admission, he was unaware of any threats to the Pentagon --the building where he was located during the September 11th attacks --until an aircraft crashed into the side of it, and he ran out "into the smoke" to see if it might be a "A bomb? I had no idea." (ABC News This Week, Interview 9/16/01).

Well, that's a pretty tall tale by any standard. The New York Times reported that by 8:13am, the FAA was aware of the first hijacking out of Boston. The Pentagon explosion, which Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "no idea," did not occur until approximately 9:37am, nearly an hour and a half later, this after two of the tallest buildings in the world were devastated. Note that a plane hijacked out of Boston can reach Washington D.C. as easily as it can reach New York City.

It was widely reported that Pentagon personnel were indeed aware of the threats to their security, and they took security measures on that morning. But not the "Secretary of Defense." Why should the man charged with defending the United States of America concern himself with hijacked aircraft?
There is a set of procedures for responding to hijackings. In particular, these procedures were changed oJune 1, 2001 while Rumsfeld was in power as Secretary of Defense, in a document called: "CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF INSTRUCTION, J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A"

Additional resources:

American politics: the choice between 'most bad' and 'not really very good'The 'Conspiracy of Rich Men' Who Pulled Off 911 and Other GOP Atrocities 911 Commissioner Slips Up: Pentagon Struck by Missile

How 'Suspicious' Plane Crashes and Assassinations Benefit the Right Wing "Last Chance to Indict Bush and Cheney for the Mass Murders of 911?"

The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism. [ Do not re-post without permission from author: Len Hart ]
________________________________________________________________________________
FLIGHT 11 DID NOT FLY ON 911
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy 

American Airlines itself is the source for information that AA Flights 11 (North Tower) and 77 (Pentagon) did not fly on 911. These flights are critical to the the government's crumbling cover up! Without those flights, Bush and his murderous co-conspirators will have to revise the big lie. They will have to concoct yet another cover story from the ground up! A cover up is on the brink of collapse when those guilty of capital crimes and high treason either turn on one another or are forced to revise the lie!

Already several demonstrable lies (many referenced in previous EC articles) are probable cause to begin a Federal Grand Jury investigation of George W. Bush's role in 911. Bush should be compelled by subpoena and Federal Marshals to testify under oath before an independent Federal Grand Jury. The AA revelations demand it!

WikiScanner discovered that American Airlines changed their Wikipedia entry to state that Flights 11 and 77 never flew on 9/11.

Original entry was:
2 American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 TerroristAttack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 
New entry is:
Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767). Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.
A Google search of the IP address that made the change - 144.9.8.21 - is located at American Airlines.

Why the change American airlines? Did the flights actually operate or did we just imagine all of that?
--LiveLeak
That AA claims that the two aircraft that are absolutely essential to the Bush administration's official theory were not, in fact, scheduled for flight and were, in fact, not in the air that day, is a big hole from which Bush may not escape.

According to Wikiscaner Americans Airliners changed their Wikipedia entry which now states that 'Flights 11 and 77 never flew on 9/11'.

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and Flight 11 (a Boeing 767). Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.

The entry had stated:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist  
  

Attack: American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and American Airlines Flight 11 (a Boeing 767).

A Google search of the IP address - 144.9.8.21 - confirmed that the 'change' was made at American Airlines. User talk: 144.9.8.21 This IP address is registered to American Airlines From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search My WHOIS lookup of the above IP address returned the following: WHOIS - 144.9.8.21

Location: United States [City: Ft. Worth, Texas]
OrgName: American Airlines Incorporated OrgID: AMERIC-112 Address: P.O.Box 619616 Address: MD 5308 City: DFW Airport StateProv: TX PostalCode: 75261 Country: US
NetRange: 144.9.0.0 - 144.9.255.255 CIDR: 144.9.0.0/16 NetName: AANET NetHandle: NET-144-9-0-0-1 Parent: NET-144-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Assignment NameServer: DNS-P1.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P2.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P3.SABRE.COM NameServer: DNS-P4.SABRE.COM Comment: RegDate: 1990-10-31 Updated: 2002-06-27
RTechHandle: OG60-ARIN RTechName: Gelbrich, Orf RTechPhone: +1-817-931-3145 RTechEmail: ************@aa.com
OrgTechHandle: ZW72-ARIN OrgTechName: WARIS, ZISHAN OrgTechPhone: +1-817-967-1242 OrgTechEmail: ************@aa.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-06-29 19:10 # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database. 

If neither flight was in the air as American Airlines itself has so stated, then numerous 'official versions' of the 'official conspiracy theory' are all a pack of malicious lies. That includes almost every statement made by Bush. These lies are especially pernicious because they have the effect of covering up the truth, protecting the guilty and obstructing justice. These lies are an insult to the families of everyone who died as a result of the event and the subsequent cover up. These lies aggravate the crimes of mass murder, terrorism and high treason for which the penalty must surely be death.

The official story is familiar by now. At 8:20, Flight 11 stopped transmitting its transponder signal, and veered northward and departed dramatically from the westward heading of its planned route. The controllers concluded that the plane had probably been hijacked. 4 5 At 8:24, the following transmission was reportedly received from Flight 11: We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay .. we are returning to the airport. ..Nobody move. Everything will be okay.

If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet. Nobody move please we are going back to the airport .. don't try to make any stupid moves. 6 Neither of the pilots pressed the distress call button. At 8:28 controllers reportedly watched the plane make a 100-degree turn toward the south. 7 Presumably, Flight 11 continued south along the Hudson River until it reached the World Trade Center, though documentation of this is sparse given the lack of public information.

According to NORAD's September 18 timeline, the FAA did not notify NORAD of the signs that Flight 11 was hijacked until 8:40, 25 minutes after the first signs of trouble. 8 --Flight 11, The First Jet Commandeered on September 11th, 911 Research But --if Flight 11 did not fly that day, that's all a deliberate, criminal lie! If neither Flight 11 or 77 was in the air that day, then nothing in the 'official statements' with regard to the Twin Towers of the WTC can is true.

This information is not compatible with previous EC articles in which it was revealed that NTSB data placed Flight 77 at an altitude of 273, some 200 feet ABOVE the Pentagon at the time of impact, give or take a couple of seconds or less! Moreover, it's trajectory was such that those 'eyewitnesses' who claimed to have seen it could not possibly have done so. Neither scenario is good news for Bush. Both support the statement that absolutely no wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever found at the Pentagon. Moreover, photos of an engine rotor appear to depict a Rolls-Royce engine that is used in the Global Hawk, a payload carrying missile that was, in fact, flown from the US to Australia completely by remote control.

It is certainly a much better candidate for what Rumsfeld called '...the missile that struck this building' than a 757. Here's what you need to know about the Pentagon. No wreckage traceable to a 757 was ever recovered.

Only ONE engine rotor (seen in photos) was recovered! This rotor is about one third the diameter of a 757 rotor. A 757 has two rotors, each of which are nearly three times the size of the SINGLE rotor located at the Pentagon Engine rotors are made of a Steel/Titanium alloy to withstand high temps inside jet engines.

Flight 77 could not have crashed into the Pentagon

The time has come to consign Bush's official conspiracy theory to the dust bin of history. The theory is not even a good cover story, surviving for as long as it did because millions of good Americans wanted to believe it. Millions of otherwise good Americans did not wish to believe the very, very worst about an administration that had claimed to represent and defend our interests. Millions of Americans chose to believe that the government was still responsible to us, that the government was still the defender of Democracy as we are always taught in school.

Recognizing lies for what they are is a part of the process of growing up! America, it is time to grow up! It is time to confront this heinous pack of lies! It is time to insist that the Obama administration begin a REAL investigation.

Bush got away with mass murder and high treason! It probably too late  insist that a Federal Grand Jury investigate every count of high treason, mass murder and domestic terrorism that was perpetrated upon the people of the U.S. by the Bush administration, collaborators in the Pentagon, K-Street, the Congress and the leadership of the Republican party, Marvin Bush's 'Securacom', Larry Silverstein, General Myers, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and, of course, George W. Bush who was, at the time,m the 'Commander-in-Chief' and ultimately responsible for the orders given the US military to 'stand down'.

By Donald Rumsfeld's own admission, he was unaware of any threats to the Pentagon --the building where he was located during the September 11th attacks --until an aircraft crashed into the side of it, and he ran out "into the smoke" to see if it might be a "A bomb? I had no idea." (ABC News This Week, Interview 9/16/01).

Well, that's a pretty tall tale by any standard. The New York Times reported that by 8:13am, the FAA was aware of the first hijacking out of Boston. The Pentagon explosion, which Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "no idea," did not occur until approximately 9:37am, nearly an hour and a half later, this after two of the tallest buildings in the world were devastated. Note that a plane hijacked out of Boston can reach Washington D.C. as easily as it can reach New York City.

It was widely reported that Pentagon personnel were indeed aware of the threats to their security, and they took security measures on that morning. But not the "Secretary of Defense." Why should the man charged with defending the United States of America concern himself with hijacked aircraft?
There is a set of procedures for responding to hijackings. In particular, these procedures were changed oJune 1, 2001 while Rumsfeld was in power as Secretary of Defense, in a document called: "CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF INSTRUCTION, J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A"

Additional resources:

American politics: the choice between 'most bad' and 'not really very good'The 'Conspiracy of Rich Men' Who Pulled Off 911 and Other GOP Atrocities 911 Commissioner Slips Up: Pentagon Struck by Missile

How 'Suspicious' Plane Crashes and Assassinations Benefit the Right Wing "Last Chance to Indict Bush and Cheney for the Mass Murders of 911?"

The US Army Document That Proves the US is the World's Number One Sponsor of World Terrorism. [ Do not re-post without permission from author: Len Hart ]
________________________________________________________________________________

Sunday, March 09, 2014

Why GOP Administrations Do Not Create Jobs

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

What tycoons of old understood was that if wage earners earn more, they spend more. Jobs are created. Even more spending follows the additional jobs. That's the left/dem/progressive model. But the GOP method is just the opposite and so --too --the miserable results.

The effects of the GOP model are confirmed with official stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Commerce Dept and various other studies.

A GOP tax cut --from which only elites benefit --is invariably followed by a recession/depression, increased joblessness, higher prices and the export of jobs, most often, to China. [See: CIA'S World Fact Book, online] For example, Reagan's "infamous" tax cut was followed quickly by a depression of some two years (or longer). It was the LONGEST, DEEPEST depression since H. Hoover's GREAT DEPRESSION.

The Axis of Reagan/GOP are wrong. Wealth does not and has never trickled down. "Suppy Side Economics" was and remains a scam, a con job sketched out, it is said, on a napkin by Arthur Laffer. Laffer is remembered for his "Laffer curve" illustrating the theory that reducing taxes for the very wealthy would result in increased production. That has never happened. It's either a lie, a fraud, a fairy tale or all of the above. The Axis of Reagan/GOP are wrong. "Suppy Side Economics" was and remains a scam, a con job sketched out, it is said, on a napkin by Arthur Laffer. Laffer's curve, it was said, would result in increased production. That has never happened. It's either a lie, a fraud, a fairy tale or all of the above.

GOP tax cut for its elite base was quicklly followed by a recession of some two years. It was the deepest, longest depression since H. Hoover's big one! Not addressed with Laffers curve is the fact that elites have the purchasing power to bid prices UP! They also have offshore bank accounts. The results are not inflation! At least since Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, the GOP has tried to peddle tax cuts that have benefited only the elite classes with various forms of trickle down theory. No GOP plan has ever worked!



Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justices Should Stay If They're Able To Work

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Some liberals have recently called on Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire so that President Barack Obama can choose her replacement. At 80, she is the oldest justice on the court. Some fear that if she chooses to stay, a Republican succesor to Obama might nominate another A. Scalia. God help us! But Justice Ginsburg believes that Supreme Court justices should not be influenced by political assessments of a party's future prospects with respect to the court.

One of Ginsburg's shining moments came with the dubious ascension of one George W. BUsh to the White House. With respect to Bush v Gore, Ginsberg's decision was the best, better even than those who agreed with her. Scalia's decision was poorly written, his conclusions wrong and wrong-headed.
Not only that --Ginsberg was, I believe, outraged that the case had been "dumped" on SCOTUS. At the end of her decsion, she wrote simply: I DISSENT --not "I respectfully dissent" as is normally the practice.
Rarely has this Court rejected outright an interpretation of state law by a state high court. ...The extraordinary setting of this case has obscured the ordinary principle that dictates its proper resolution: Federal courts defer to state high courts' interpretations of their state's own law. This principle reflects the core of federalism, on which all agree. ...Notably, the Florida Supreme Court has produced two substantial opinions within 29 hours of oral argument. In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.I dissent.
--Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (Bush v Gore)

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

George H.W. Bush's "New World Order"

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Bush Sr is at his most sinister in a YouTube video in which he promises a "New World Order". It's creepy --the gleam in his eye, his evil grin, the quaver in his voice. Admittedly --Bush Sr is creepy. But this performance is off the boards.

NWO means different things to different people. As a result, very little written about it is meaningful or significant. Hitler had in mind a world dominated by the Third Reich. But recent use of the term does not necessarily mean Nazism. In some cases, it may be worse. Muddying the waters is the "Illuminati Conspiracy" which gets mixed up with with other theories about Jesuits, international bankers and an international conspiracy of Jews. Who can sort all this stuff out?

There was, in fact, an Illuminati in Europe at the time of the 'Enlightenment'. How the term came to be associated with an obvious and criminal conspiracy like the Skull and Bones, I will never know. I do know this: SCOTUS, Federal Law, numerous lesser courts, a saint (St. Thomas More) and numerous state laws, ordinances and regulations all recognize the fact that crimes not involving conspiracies tend to be petty --simple theft, robbery, mugging etc.
Real crimes --like those perped by Enron upon the state of California --are simply impossible for one person working alone. The sheer scale of such crimes requires conspiracy.

The genocide of Jews by Hitler's Third Reich 'required' the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. A lone maniac could not possibly have murdered the millions who perished during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. The minutes of Heydrich's meeting at Wannsee are a testament to the coordinated planning required to pull off the murder of millions of people. One person --a lone gunman in a depository window --cannot contemplate or 'pull off' such a crime.

Director Stanly Kubrick must surely have believed in the Illuminati. 'Eyes Wide Shut' with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman was Kubrick's take on the effect that an evil and kooky cult might have on individuals. Religious folk would say of 'members' that they had 'sold their souls'. Is that not what church people themselves have done? In psychological terms, they have surrendered to the church. The thing to be remembered is this: such groups have NO POWER but the power that is given them by their victims.

With regard to politics, the Skull and Bones is such a group! That they exist is a fact. They have no power but the monies that are bequeathed them by wealthy Yale alumni and the oaths required of their pledges. This combination is most powerful when the initiate is a believer.

I took an oath once! I pledged an honorary fraternity at University. But the oath I took was to "integrity", "scholarship" and the "pursuit of truth". I am very, very comfortable with that oath as I believe it to be the basis for a better and more egalitarian world in which individual rights are respected within the framework of a more egalitarian state which respects all peoples and all races. That oath is enough to make me an outlaw among the cultist GOP inclined.


Monday, December 31, 2012

NRA Lies Exposed

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The NRA wants you to believe that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives them an unqualified, blank check right to 'keep and bear' arms as they choose. That's not so! The Second Amendment --from which the right to 'own and bear' arms is derived --is a single sentence':

 A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
U. S. v Miller is the only U.S. Supreme Court decision that directly "interprets" the Second Amendment. U.S. v Miller clearly states that the right to keep and bear arms occurs ONLY within the context of a "...well-regulated militia."
All other Federal decisions and state decisions having anything to do with the Second Amendment reference U.S. v Miller to the extent that they address that issue specifically. It is, at last, the only opinion regarding an interpretation of the Second Amendment that is, in fact, law.

The GPO report is an exhaustive source of original, official sources having to do with the Second Amendment. ONE of the original sources is U.S. v Miller (1939), the decision that is considered by scholars to be the most important. U. S. v Miller is the only U.S. Supreme Court decision that directly "interprets" the Second Amendment.

U.S. v Miller states clearly states that the right to keep and bear arms occurs only within the context of a "...well-regulated militia." All other Federal decisions and state decisions having anything to do with the Second Amendment reference U.S. v Miller to the extent that they address that issue specifically.

Before getting to the sources themselves, consider the following quote from R. William Ide III, former President of the American Bar Association, who stated bluntly in 1994:
"There is NO Second Amendment guarantee. There is NO confusion on this issue."

R. W. Ide [emphases mine, LH].
Further --the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association on firearms Violence stated that the Second Amendment "...relates to a well-regulated militia and that there are NO federal constitutional decisions which preclude the regulation of firearms in private hands." To sum it up, Erwin Griswold, the late Solicitor General put it this way:
Never in history has a federal court invalidated a law regulating the private ownership of firearms on Second Amendment grounds. That the Second Amendment poses no barrier to strong gun laws is perhaps the most well-settled proposition in American Constitutional law.

– Erwin Griswold, Solicitor General
In 1934, Congress reacted to gangster related violence by enacting the National Firearms Act which prohibited the interstate transportation of silencers, automatic weapons, and sawed-off shotguns. Jack Miller appealed his conviction under that law. He claimed that Congress had violated his Second Amendment rights. The court gave consideration to "...the dependent clause" of the Second Amendment --the first part which establishes the context of the Amendment as a whole: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state..." The following is an excerpt from the court's opinion:
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that the possession or use of a "shot gun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such instrument Certainly it is not within Judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.

–United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (USSC+)
The Supreme Court decisions continued, saying that the obvious purpose of the Second Amendment was "...to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of the state militia". The court concluded that the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with that end in view." The views are to be found in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) (USSC+)
Our most recent treatment of the Second Amendment occurred in United States v. Miller, in which we reversed the District Court's invalidation of the National Firearms Act, enacted in 1934. In Miller, we determined that the Second Amendment did not guarantee a citizen's right to possess a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had not been shown to be "ordinary military equipment" that could "contribute to the common defense."

--Printz v. United States, 117 S.Ct. 2365, 2385-86 (1997) (Thomas, J., concurring)
The conclusions drawn by the court address the possession and use of guns within the context of a "militia". By the definition given in any dictionary, the U.S. Army is a militia. However the courts define "militia", the Second Amendment clearly addresses "well-regulated militias". Common-sense, law, English common law, and tradition would dictate that only a sovereign government of duly elected and ordained elected representatives of the people may regulate militias. If not, then who? Unregulated bands operating outside the law is unacceptable in any civilized society. The self-appointed "militia" groups clearly do NOT meet the requirement established in the Second Amendment and in U.S. v Miller which recounts the legitimate purposes that a "well-regulated militia" may pursue under law.

To sum up: U. S. v Miller is the only U.S. Supreme Court decision that directly "interprets" the Second Amendment. U.S. v Miller clearly states that the right to keep and bear arms occurs only within the context of a "...well-regulated militia."

All other Federal decisions and state decisions having anything to do with the Second Amendment reference U.S. v Miller to the extent that they address that issue specifically. It is, at last, the only opinion regarding an interpretation of the Second Amendment that is in fact, law --your experts and mine notwithstanding.

A thousand experts are either right or wrong on merit; the number of experts on either side is irrelevant. There are such things as "honest" disagreements. However, the official positions of the NRA re: the Second Amendment are NOT of this class. They are, rather, a pack of malicious lies, propaganda, distortions, and half truths.

Almost ten years ago, my article with the same title was published on 'The Opinion', a pioneering 'opinion' site presaging the onset of 'blogs'. To be expected, I was attacked by a legion of brainwashed NRA ditto-heads who called me names, called me 'stupid', and presumed to 'instruct me' with respect to the opinions of the 'founders'. Naturally, I refuted every NRA attacker not with my own logic or perspectives but with the writings of the 'founders' themselves, U.S. v Miller and every other decision that SCOTUS and Federal courts have handed down, as well as the writings of founders that gun nuts had said would have opposed me. They didn't! In fact, my argument is that of the founders themselves.

As a result of that experience, I concluded that the NRA is an organization of liars, dumbshits, ignoramouses, intolerant ideologues, obnoxious would-be thugs and a legion of Wayne LaPierre wannabes. In other words: fucking liars! Their lies and propaganda are not welcome on this site. The NRA has enough money to buy time on the corporate media! The NRA can fuck off!

Monday, November 19, 2012

Why The GOP Occupied Texas

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It only takes one crook/moron to ruin the reputation of an entire state. Yes --I am referring to George W. Bush though he is but one crook among many GOP crooks who 'stole' Texas back in the early 80s. The GOP plans ahead.

I tire of the 'fashionable' but baseless attacks on an entire state when for some 100 years, Texas had been liberal, often progressive. Now --there are some 'conservatives' among Democrats even today. But Texas Democrats were often liberal, progressive, activist and out-spoken.  A Texas liberal/progressive --J. Frank Dobie --was invited to lecture at Cambridge where he was a big hit.

Some facts: Over a period of more than 100 years (1846 to 1979) EVERY Texas governor had been Democratic. Most were liberal and/or progressive. The term 'progressive' is especially applicable to the Furgusons --'Pa' Furguson and later 'Ma' (Miriam) Furguson who served two terms. 'Ma' Furguson was fondly recalled by the older persons I met and talked with while growing up. She was among the state's best governors.

It was not until January 16, 1979 that Bill Clements --a Republican --occupied the Governor's office. His tenure is recalled for a GOP revolution primarily TOM DELAY'S GERRYMANDER of the state. The GOP were motivated to gerrymander Texas. Its growing population had earned the state some 38 electoral votes (the map pre-dates that, showing only 34)

I won't write any more than this as this topic is worthy of a book advocating the abolition of the electoral college. Under the Constitution, the office of President represents all of the people! Then ---why is the President NOT elected by the people? Why are their votes watered-down? What right have the states to insert themselves in the election of the People's President (not the states' president)?

It is tragic that the GOP has succeeded in convincing the rest of the world that Texas is a conservative backwater. Great schools with great academic credentials (Rice Univ, U of T, Univ of Houston, et al, et al ) suffer when the state is unfairly maligned as a result of misdeeds by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Tom DeLay (who gerrymandered the state) Bill Clements and other right wing extremists whose ruthless ambition has victimized Texas in particular and the nation overall.


Friday, October 26, 2012

How the GOP Became Victims of the GOP!

by Jay Diamond, Guest Author

Whatever happens in this election, it is finally the end of the psychotic and vicious American rightist movement as a political force.

This is the real reason the sulfurous "movement conservatives" have been going nuts.

Think about it....they would easily have controlled the senate after 2010 if their criminally insane movement....The low-brow, brownshirt talk radio party....had not insisted on lunatics like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell as their senate candidates in lieu of a little less fanatically rightist snakes.

And they would have padded that senate majority much further this year had not once again low-brow, brownshirt talk radio insisted on displacing one of the most respected men in the senate, Richard Lugar, with an out and out psycho Christianist Kook like Richard Mourdock, and a similarly preserved in amber asshole such as Todd Akin!

There are 3 or 4 other Dominionist brownshirt psychotics also especially selected by the low brow, brownshirt talk radio rulers of the GOP, thereby insuring a robust democratic senate majority for years to come, as the total talk radio control of all GOP primaries will guarantee.

The also know that if Obama wins in a week or so, that Hilary is a lock on the presidency for 2016 AND 2020 which means the Democratic Party will control the Oval Office till at least 2024!

Believe me, our brownshirt enemies are well aware of the truth of what I have written above.

And EVEN if Obama is defeated and provided that Rmoney’s John Bolton and Dan Senor do not kill us all before 2016, they also know that should Rmoney cause a complete collapse of the USA, including 40% effective unemployment as he gleefully repeals even the anemic post financial collapse re-regulation of Wall Street, that the American right wing movement will be dead as nails for at least the next 60 years! Like the Great Depression of 1930’s, the memory of what the economic royalists will have wrought will last for 3 generations of Americans. As in 1990, the very last people alive in the 1990’s who were adults in 1929, will finally be gone, leaving the right-wing propaganda machine once again able to bulldoze American Morons into killing themselves yet again.

They know this!

But they dare not, and can not even fathom how they might remove low brow rightwing Dominionist brownshirt talk radio as the owner of all GOP primaries!

They are a terminally ill and wretchedly pathological movement on the edge of extinction, which will make them temporarily more dangerous than ever.

But they will all go away, unless they dread the prospect of their imminent political destruction so much that they would rather we all die in a nuclear armageddon than relinquish control for all time.

Monday, October 08, 2012

Political Decision Theory Made Easy

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I lost patience long ago with so-called 'progressives' because Democrats are 'imperfect'! Who is perfect? I've never seen such a person on any ballot! I prescribe an introductory course in 'decision making'! So what if the MESSIAH is not on the ballot!? You are stuck with two viable choices in any case. You don't like either though one is clearly superior to the other.

NOT voting is not an option; it puts a crooked moron in the Whie House! So --what do you do? You stay home, don't vote and piss and moan about it on FB while a criminal elitist takes over the White House.

I actually consulted a GOP campaign once. I wish I could say that it was an act of 'infiltration' to study GOP tactics and attitudes. Though it was not, I did learn --from the inside --how the GOP thinks. I was in the 'Belly of the Beast'. I even picked the 'brains' of one Tom DeLay --the evil genius who delivered Texas to the GOP on a platter.

Texas had been a Democratic state for some 100 years prior to Tom DeLay's GOP 'revolution'. The GOP campaign manuals actually cover the art of voter suppression. The GOP does not want you to vote. The GOP wants you to BELIEVE that Dems are not better. And --if you buy that crap --you lose!

Short of real revolution, we are stuck with a crappy and inaccurate system, a system that seems designed to keep the very best candidates OFF the ballot. It could not have worked out better for the GOP had they conspired to create it. Come to think of it --they did. That said, the GOP could NEVER, EVER have gone as far as they have of late if idealistic Democrats and Utopian progressives had not decided to boycott the election.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

'They Live' Directed by John Carpenter

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The release date of John Carpenter's film "They Live" is 1988 but seems more recent, more like a commentary on today's news than it is a commentary of 1980s paranoia. To be sure, there were many who warned of the dehumanizing effects of mass culture, political propaganda, political agendas --right or left!

The temptation to see allegory is not merely justified; it is, surely, the filmmakers intent. Like the much earlier "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" this message is political, a cautionary tale. While 'The Day the Earth Stood Still" deals with potential invasion, it is the alien's intent to warn us of ourselves. Klaato comes to earth with a warning, a warning about how we may destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. But, he might just as well have had in mind our enslavement from without and, most ominously, from within. It the latter case, 'we' would have no one but ourselves to blame. Or as Shakespeare put it in 'Julius Caesar':
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
--Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers' seems obvious in retrospect: the 'seed pods' were the American right wing, Republicans, narrow-minded bigots, authoritarians. They would enslave us from within. John Carpenter's 'They Live' is both allegory and warning. Carpenter has created 'aliens' who have disguised their origins and their 'evil' intentions. They cannot be detected without the use of special eye glasses. The viewer accepts this as a convenient plot device. Wisely, Carpenter does not slow down the action for lectures about how this kind of thing may be feasible. Nor does he reveal an agenda but through a well-crafted story --not lectures or soliloquies. It's a device which successfully moves both plot and action to a riveting and inevitable conclusion/climax.

'They Live' is not merely Sci-Fi. It's a horror film in which a dreadful future is the monster. And, like Frankenstein, the 'monster' is one of our own creation, in this case, the complicity of 'earthlings' with evil aliens. Unlike many Sci-Fi movies and literature, the aliens of 'They Live' do not appear to have anything profound or awe-inspiring in mind. Like many earthlings the ugly aliens, resembling death heads when seen with special shades, have, it seems, only the U.S. right/GOP agenda in mind, that is, rigging Wall Street, acquiring great wealth and power, usurping the media for purpose of mass mind control. So far --they differ little from the Republican party.
Here's another review which, likewise, spotted the political implications:
John Carpenter wrote and directed this science fiction thriller about a group of aliens who try to take over the world by disguising themselves as Young Republicans. Wrestler Roddy Piper stars as John Nada, a drifted who makes his way into an immense encampment for the homeless. There he stumbles upon a conspiracy concerning aliens who have hypnotized the populace through subliminal messages transmitted through television, magazines, posters, and movies. When Nada looks through special Ray-Bans developed by the resistance leaders, the aliens lose their clean-cut "Dan Quayle" looks and resemble crusty-looking reptiles. Nada joins the underground, teaming up with rebel-leader Frank (Keith David) to eradicate the lizard-like aliens from the body politic. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
--They Live, Rotten Tomatoes
John Carpenter directed but, interestingly, wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym: Frank Armitage, the name of one of the characters in the movie. I have no idea why Carpenter chose to do this. In any case, the film (full movie below) is scary, challenging, and, if action is your cuppa tea, there is a memorable fight scene to end all fight scenes. Having failed to kill one another, the two characters are destined to be friends but we don't know that at the time. There is the possibility that one will kill the other. The audience is sure to find in each character traits with which he or she can identify.

Called part sci-fi, part horror, part dark comedy, it is, in fact, a cautionary tale. That it works on every level accounts for its enduring popularity.


Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Why the U.S. is No Longer a Productive Nation

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The decline of the U.S. as a net exporting nation is the inevitable result of the growing, yawning gulf between rich and poor. A nation cannot be productive if it has failed to invest its wealth in the creation of jobs.

It is, at last, 'labor' which creates wealth to begin with. Since Adam Smith wrote 'The Wealth of Nations', every major economist --right or left --has espoused a 'labor theory of value', i.e, 'value' (wealth) is created by labor and is the result of labor. A nation in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite of just 1 percent cannot be productive or efficient. Today --the U.S. is literally owned by China which occupies the No 1 position on the CIA's World Fact Book with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Acct Balance. The U.S. is on the very bottom of that list with the World's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance, formerly called the Balance of Trade Deficit.

To make this clear --China makes its living by manufacturing and selling that product to the United States. The U.S., by contrast, is on bottom because U.S. manufacturing of cars, appliances, electronics et al no longer competes. Entire industries have ceased to exist in America. Detroit is a specimen to be studied.

An aside: the right wing recently tried to blame 'Muslims' for the fall of Detroit. Total BS! Muslims had no more to do with the fall of Detroit than did Christians the fall of Rome. The fall of Detroit is the result of stupid/incompetent policies put into effect by Ronald Reagan and his idiot disciple ---George H.W. Bush. It was under Reagan, that the long and depressing decline of America began.

The vast gulf between rich and poor in America is a fairly recent development, a product of the 'robber baron' era. Even so --FDR reversed those trends and the official stats prove it. The Great Depression had been both the result and the symptom of absurd inequities associated with and caused by the era of Robber Barons. It was preceded by three very conservative, very Republican administrations --Coolidge, Harding and Hoover.

An expanding economy, that is, an economy that creates wealth and jobs requires a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Otherwise --to whom will manufacturers sell? A prosperous middle class is absolutely essential to 1) GDP growth 2) retail sales. An impoverished population will buy increasingly fewer luxury items; an impoverished population will struggle to maintain the very basics --food and shelter.

A nation in which just 1 percent owns more than the remaining 99 percent is an economy on the very brink of collapse. It has happened many times in the past. The best example is Rome. Like the U.S. today, Rome was a teeming city of the very, very poor. Many were refugees from nations that had been conquered by Rome. Like the U.S. today, the currency of Rome --the sesterces --was essentially worthless, a mere 'token' that would admit you to the Gladiator 'games' in the Coliseum.

By impoverishing the U.S. middle class, the GOP capitulated to China which found --in GOP America --a market for its cheap crap. The PRICE of that 'crap' is not found on the label or the check out counter. It is found in the GOP destruction of the American labor movement, American productivity, the American 'standard of living', and, of course, our very futures.

The GOP is NOT a political party. It is a coven of kooky cultists who sold us ALL out to China and the Military-Industrial Complex which orchestrates our LAST REMAINING EXPORTS ---death and destruction.

Sunday, May 08, 2011

How Progressives Can Take Back America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Many 'progressives' who voted for Obama expected a 'savior'. There are none! The best strategy left to disappointed progressives is to take back the party many believe abandoned them. I was among those who believed Clinton should have taken a stronger stand in defense of liberal and/or progressive values. I despised 'triangulation'.

My biggest disappointment was Janet Reno's attack on the Branch-Davidians in Waco, an unlawful attack violating federal and state laws --most egregiously --the presumption of innocence and every due process clause known to exist anywhere at any time to include the 14th Amendment
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.
--U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights.
The best strategy available to progressives now is not to create another party but to take back an existing party apparatus --the Democratic party. It will take years to mount an effective third party whose best hope would consist of 'brokering' a deal with more conservative wings of the only organized opposition to the GOP i.e. the Democratic party.

Progressives' best chance for changing the fascist direction taken by American politics may be found in a book that was, in fact, appropriated if not usurped by the GOP. I have in mind one Saul Alinsky whose 'Rules for Radical', written for a liberal, left leaning movement owing much to FDR and war opponents like Eugene Debs.

Interestingly, it is the GOP which has made more effective use of the strategies and tactics than have liberals or Democrats for whom 'Rules for Radicals' was written. It is cited in GOP campaign manuals, practiced in almost every campaign. I have personal knowledge of that, having acquired a few GOP 'campaign manuals' at a time when Tom DeLay was building a conservative machine while gerrymandering the state of Texas.

Alinsky advises 'activists' to work inside the existing system, to utilize the existing networks and/or infrastructure. Starting from scratch is inefficient, time consuming, wasteful of time and resources. Democrats have an infrastructure in place already. Use it! As ALINSKY himself said:
"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future."

--Saul Alinsky

If 'liberals/progressives will not heed and benefit from a 'legendary' liberal organizer/activist like Alinsky, I have a slim chance of waking them up! If the 'left' insists upon walking off a cliff there is little anyone can do for them.

There is now, however, an opportunity to be seized. Whatever your feelings about the Bush occupation of Iraq, the political fact of the matter is that millions of Americans seemed to have bought into the many lies that the right wing told in order to justify the massive theft of oil resources in the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq, we were told, was part of the bigger 'war on terror' (more properly, 'terrorism'). Bin Laden was the boogeyman upon which were directed the fears and prejudices of much of the population and especially the right wing which wanted to believe. For Bushco, they were an easy sale!

Recent events have turned the Bush strategy on its head! This is a paradigm shift rarely seen in American politics in which a right wing and a left wing had dug their trenches and had begun a long seige. In just a few short days, the news that Bin Laden had been killed --NOT on Bush's watch but by a Democratic U.S. regime --has shaken the GOP to its rotting foundations. There is really very little the GOP can do but praise the efforts of a Democratic President. It must hurt! My heart bleeds!

There are, therefore, opportunities to change the very complexion of U.S. politics but only if progressives work with the existing Democratic infrastructure.
Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a “mass army” that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals. Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

--Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
The GOP is now robbed of its cause celebre --the capture and/or death of Osama Bin Laden and, at the same time, robbed of its erstwhile raison d'etre --the war on terrorism!


Sunday, December 19, 2010

Bush's Tragic Legacy at Home and Around the World

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

One hopes that thinking about Iraq has gotten clearer since Bush violated U.S. laws and international commitments in order to: 1) seize the oil fields of Iraq; 2) exploit the 'threat of terror' to consolidate his 'base' at home, 3) subvert Constitutional guarantees that give Americans the right to denounce incompetent and/or traitorous 'leaders'.

An evil legacy of this idiocy is the recent decree that would allow the government to 'sanction' i.e, kill its vocal opposition.
Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back Friday at what they describe as the “deliberate targeted killing of U.S. citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is.”

In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing ... that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.

--William Fisher, Legal Experts Slam Assassinations of US Citizens, February 06, 2010
This reminds one of the infamous assertion by the newly appointed Gen. Michael Hayden that the legal standard to begin an investigation or, possibly more Draconian measures, was 'reasonable suspicion' --not 'probable cause' as it is, in fact! The General was wrong! He betrayed the fact that he had never bothered to read the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That the possible murder of U.S. citizens by our own government even saw the light of day is not just worrisome, it is cause for alarm! We should be yelling --crowded theater or no! The very concept is repugnant and those politicians entertaining it should be fired, impeached, removed, tried upon the probable cause they have violated U. S. laws against sedition.

Next time --unless these ideas are exposed, eviscerated and laid bare --a future would-be tyrant may find it easy to carry out a program of rampant murder upon a mere 'suspicion' about which he might even be inclined to lie. Such a tyrant might order the round-up and incarceration of anyone daring to express a disagreement! There is precedent! In the Germany of Adolph Hitler one need not 'do' anything to be arrested, detained, imprisoned and, eventually, murdered. One had only 'be'! A Jew ! A Gypsy! A non-Aryan! Thus not even the pure Aryan was free to act! He could only 'be' but not as a free individual but as a cog in the enslaved collective! This is what happens when the rule of law is flouted and or ridiculed as it was during Bush's eight years each of which were Annus horribilis!
The President revealed this ... as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics.

The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

This President's response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

"Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," he was asked by a reporter. "If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?"

“If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic,” Bush said. “It's just -- I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

Of course it's acceptable to think that there's "any kind of comparison."

And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary, even if Mr. Powell never made the comparison in his letter.

Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists.

--Keith Olberman, Bush owes us an apology
While he occupied the White House, his opposition was often called traitorous by that term and others as well. That this chill upon 'free speech' could happen in America where it was often said It Can't Happen Here begs an explanation! The question is not whether it might happen but why it happened in the first place and when it will happen again!
A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived.

--Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
Thus, it was in 1795 that Kant made quick work of the very concept of aggressive war. I find it ironic that as soon as this nation under incompetent and criminal leadership abandons those principles we find ourselves in a state of Perpetual War from which only an increasingly tiny ruling elite will benefit! This elite is Moloch by any definition!

Totalitarian regimes and other "fear based" societies are considered by Natan Sharansky to be "tyrannies". Though an apologist for Bush, Natan Sharansky is at least correct about that much! However, the "basis" for the specific principles of International Law to which the U.S. is "obliged", indeed, even insisted upon are as follows:

An excerpt:

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
I also recommend ‘Preventive War’ and International Law After Iraq. An excerpt from the introduction and executive summary:
However if change is to be effected, it must be carried out in way(s) that promotes international peace and security through multilateral action and the rule of law. This may be time consuming and frustrating, but the alternative danger is a weakening or even abandonment of the rule of law and undermining the prohibition on the use of force which has been the product of not only the international consensus to avoid war following two world wars but decades of consensus.

--‘Preventive War’ and International Law After Iraq, Duncan E. J. Currie LL.B. (Hons.) LL.M., 22 May, 2003
To conclude that because one has power its exercise is always right is, simply, wrong! It's a non sequitur! On trial for his Nazi crimes at Nuremberg, Goering called it "victor's justice"!
The victor declares what is right and moral and through some charade transforms these propositions into "legal" form and engaging in some meaningless ritual, punishes the losers.

--Hermann Goering
Goering's position is the Nazi position and that of anyone else, most recently, Republicans who subscribe to it! The law of the jungle, it will describe the ultimate descent of civilization unless it is eschewed. It must be pointed out that even Goering --a Nazi --did not consider for a moment that it was 'right'. It was and remains, as he said, the exercise of power by those who have it against those who don't! There is nothing 'right' about it and no victory can make it so.

Eventually Iraq will form an Islamic socialist/theocracy and --if it wishes to survive --an alliance with Iran. American soldiers will have been sacrificed for nothing! Is this how conservatives and/or GOPPERS define 'victory'?

Iraqis opposing a U.S. war of aggression are hardly "subversive"; many Iraqis will call those who oppose the U.S. by the word: "patriots". I refer you to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham who admonished the British parliament with what was very nearly his dying breath:
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms,—never! never! never!

--William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708–1778)
And what term is used to describe the Americans who fought with the Lincoln Bridge and others against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Are they terrorists?

Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes

It used to be that one need not be "left" to denounce wars of naked aggression! I denounce the idea of "pre-emptive" strike; it is a return to the law of the jungle in which "...life is nasty, brutish, and short"! Every tin horn dictator from N.K. to Iran need only cite the Bush doctrine to justify their armaments.It's hard to imagine how one can win a moral argument by so willingly, so eagerly giving up the moral high ground --as Bush has clearly done!

My remarks are not merely theoretical. Just as FBI statistics prove conclusively that terrorism against the United States was worse as Ronald Reagan waged his similarly failed "war" against 'terrorism', so, too, Bush has failed! In fact 'terrorism' against U.S. 'interests' is always worse under GOP regimes. Coincidence? No! It is the understandable reaction of people to U.S. imperialism as it was the reaction of Zulus and eventually the people of India against the British!

Terrorism under Bush increased with his declaration of no quarter for those nations harboring or nurturing terrorists! Though he would not admit it, Bush had in mind administering his new acquisition--Iraq --by way of puppet governments. The ex post facto rationalization --bringing Democracy to Iraq --was not conceived until it was clear that no WMD would be found and, secondly, that the mis-named insurgency would not go away! At various stages, Bush and Bushy thought things would get better.

They never did!

But we are expected --I suppose --to surrender our freedoms willingly because a moron fucked up! I don't think so!

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Party of Panic and Depression

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The administration of Ronald Reagan ushered in a depression of some two years, the longest and deepest since Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s. Millions were put out of work. Many businesses, entire industries never recovered. The Reagan depression followed a GOP tax cut benefiting only the upper quintile. As a stimulus, it was an obvious failure, yet that's how it had been sold. It's how they are always sold.

The real world results: a depression of some two years, a contraction of the economy, a transfer of wealth upward to the upper quintile, the nation's richest 20 percent. A windfall of this nature is not stimulus to invest but, rather, to transfer the gains offshore. There were no net gains in jobs. There was no Reagan-recovery. There were, rather, net losses, declines in employment. The government's own stats prove it. They are available the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Commerce Department --B.E.A.

Our Major Exports: Death and Destruction

Check the CIA's 'World Fact Book' where you will find listed on the very bottom the United States with the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance. China is on top with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance. The downside for China is this: it must prop up the worthless U.S. dollar if it wishes to survive by dumping its product on our shores. The downside for us is this: we are now a vassal state of China. Anyone reduced to shopping at Wal-Mart should know this. If not, I suggest you search the shelves and aisles for goods manufactured in the United States and exported abroad. I doubt you will find any.

If the U.S. citizenry believed that there was booty to be gained with oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was fooled again! Clearly, then, the war racket has done absolutely nothing for the US bottom line and less for the working people who are always faced with the prospect of living in a tent city during a downturn. The US, the right wing in particular, for all its bullshit and bluster has less than nothing to show for the many lives sacrificed at the alter of greed and capitalist/imperialistic ambition.

The US follows the Roman model of empire though it is difficult to say which comes first --the collapse of the real economy or the commencement of empire? In the case of Rome, it is clear that the local economy was already in trouble when Rome began its conquest of Dacia for its gold! Had Rome been producing more than it had been consuming it might have survived and prospered. As the dollar is all but worthless today, the currency of Rome --sesterces --was worthless except as a means by which a head count could be made of those attending the gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum. Something needed to be done and quickly. The Praetorian Guard saw an opportunity in Rome's increasingly difficult problems. The Guard took action, selling, at auction, the Roman empire. The highest bidder  was Didius Julianus who purchased the empire with Greek Drachmas, not worthless sesterces.

The U.S. dollar is similarly debauched but conveniently propped up by China. That is not the case because China wants to help us out. Rather, China must support the dollar if it wishes to continue selling to U.S. consumers. Some have said that China "dumped its crap" on the U.S. consumer via Wal-Mart. If it did not, it was said, its own burgeoning population would face utter poverty, millions might starve. Chinese poohbahs will, of course, blame the U.S. Facing starvation, China it was feared would threaten the world, if it had not already.

The New National Capital/Capitol: K-street

K-street is the best little whorehouse in Washington; it's the nation's 'read light district' in which the apparatus of government is pimped! K-street --not Congress --is where the bills, the laws, the policies are written, decided upon for a price! K-street is where the 'Johns' buy the bureaucracy and decide foreign and domestic policies. K-street is where money talks, souls are sold, bullshit peddled.

K-street is where the so-called 'Jewish Lobby' (read: Israeli Lobby) dictates American foreign policy. Some have called it a marriage made in hell, in fact, a Faustian bargain, in which the soul of America is bartered or whored-out outright! What's in it for the U.S. to continue to support the increasingly fanatic, aggressive and extremist governments in Israel? The most obvious answer is this: Israel provides the convincing 'pre-text' for US oil wars in the Middle East. Big oil has said to Israel or perhaps Israel to big oil: 'you scratch my back and I will scratch yours!'.
The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was hijacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status - through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status - was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.
In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn't it?

If you're willing to savage military icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections - and especially after you get away with it every time - you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming opportunists, you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as you're telling the American military's adversaries in Iraq to "bring it on", you're willing to do anything; Our Long National Neight Isn't Over; It's Just Beginning, --David Michael Green
War is a Racket
It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
--War Is a Racket, General Smedly Butler, Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
Conspiracies are how things get done. Some are legal; some are not. A 'corporation', for example, is a conspiracy made legal by 'charter'. Corporations were described by St. Thomas More in his 'Utopia':
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia
If you are still drinking the Kool-aid, go to Findlaw, where the search term 'conspiracy' of itself will get you 690 cases. Go to the Cornell University Law Library. Type in the single search term 'conspiracy'! Among the hundreds (possibly thousands of cases) you will find No. 03-3156,UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,APPELLEE v.ANTONIO N. TABRON, A/K/A FAT CAT,APPELLANT.

The transfer of wealth upward is deliberate. It's how the 'pay-offs' are laundered. Initially, it was only the top 20 percent who benefited as charts dating to the beginning of the Clinton administration indicate and prove. Clinton briefly reversed the trend. It might have been Clinton's lasting legacy, his finest hour, had not the regime of George W. Bush resumed the payoff as evinced in the resumption of the inexorable flow of U.S wealth upward and outward.

I don't know who it was who said that Satan's biggest 'trick' was convincing the world that he did not exist. The traitors of the 'American' right wing have, in fact, sold out America while wrapping themselves in the flag, convincing you that 'conspiracies' do not exist. But, in fact, St. Thomas More's description of the 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth' was never more accurate or more precisely descriptive than it is today. It is this 'conspiracy of rich men;', this ruling one percent who alone have benefited from GOP 'tax cuts', tax cuts which are inexorably followed by job losses if not recessions/depressions. And it is only the GOP which has benefited from them as working people are denied not only jobs but careers.

This is how the right wing thinks. While sane and/or scientifically inclined people will observe first and conclude later, the right wing acts upon prejudices and/or whatever rationalization makes them feel good about themselves. Supply-side economics is most certainly a rationalization whose origins lay in the troubled and often psychopathic minds of tortured Republicans. Thus 'trickle down' theory helps them feel better about themselves, relieves them of guilt, helps them sleep at night.

The GOP needs to believe. Studies by Stanford University prove that Republicans have more nightmares and night terrors than do normal people. To this end, they shoe-horn reality into a GOP mold; they work backward from foregone conclusions. They cannot suspend a prejudice long enough to reach a conclusion based upon evidence or verifiable fact. They reverse 'cause and effect' and often mistake one for the other. They will shoot first and ask questions later! They will not tolerate facts that proves them wrong.
Here are the basic facts on the major financial panics of the 19th century.

Panic of 1819

The first major American depression, the Panic of 1819 was rooted to some extent in economic problems reaching back to the war of 1812.
  • It was triggered by a collapse in cotton prices. A contraction in credit coincided with the problems in the cotton market, and the young American economy was severely affected.
  • Banks were forced to call in loans, and foreclosures of farms and bank failures resulted.
  • The Panic of 1819 lasted until 1821.
  • The effects were felt most in the west and south. Bitterness about the economic hardships resonated for years and led to the resentment that helped Andrew Jackson solidify his political base throughout the 1820s.
  • Besides exacerbating sectional animosity, the Panic of 1819 also made many Americans realize the importance of politics and government policy in their lives.
Panic of 1837
  • The Panic of 1837 was triggered by a combination of factors including the failure of a wheat crop, a collapse in cotton prices, economic problems in Britain, rapid speculation in land, and problems resulting from the variety of currency in circulation.
  • It was the second-longest American depression, with effects lasting roughly six years, until 1843.
  • The panic had a devastating impact. A number of brokerage firms in New York failed, and at least one New York City bank president committed suicide. As the effect rippled across the nation, a number of state-chartered banks also failed. The nascent labor union movement was effectively stopped, as the price of labor plummeted.
  • The depression caused the collapse of real estate prices. The price of food also collapsed, which was ruinous to farmers and planters who couldn’t get a decent price for their crops. People who lived through the depression following 1837 told stories that would be echoed a century later during The Great Depression.
  • The aftermath of the panic of 1837 led to Martin Van Buren’s failure to secure a second term in the election of 1840. Many blamed the economic hardships on the policies of Andrew Jackson, and Van Buren, who had been Jackson’s vice president, paid the political price.
Panic of 1857
  • The Panic of 1857 was triggered by the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which actually did much of its business as a bank headquartered in New York City. Reckless speculation in railroads led the company into trouble, and the company’s collapse led to a literal panic in the financial district, as crowds of frantic investors clogged the streets around Wall Street.
  • Stock prices plummeted, and more than 900 mercantile firms in New York had to cease operation. By the end of the year the American economy was a shambles.
  • One victim of the Panic of 1857 was a future Civil War hero and US president, Ulysses S. Grant, who was bankrupted and had to pawn his gold watch to buy Christmas presents.
  • Recovery from the depression began in early 1859.
Panic of 1873
  • The investment firm of Jay Cooke and Company went bankrupt in September 1873 as a result of rampant speculation in railroads. The stock market dropped sharply and caused numerous businesses to fail.
  • The depression caused approximately three million Americans to lose their jobs.
  • The collapse in food prices impacted America's farm economy, causing great poverty in rural America.
  • The depression lasted for five years, until 1878.
  • The Panic of 1873 led to a populist movement that saw the creation of the Greenback Party.
Panic of 1893
  • The depression set off by the Panic of 1893 was the greatest depression America had known, and was only surpassed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  • In early May 1893 the New York stock market dropped sharply, and in late June panic selling caused the stock market to crash.
  • A severe credit crisis resulted, and more than 16,000 businesses had failed by the end of 1893. Included in the failed businesses were 156 railroads and nearly 500 banks.
  • Unemployment spread until one in six American men lost their jobs.
  • The depression inspired "Coxey's Army," a march on Washington of unemployed men. The protesters demanded that the government provide public works jobs. Their leader, Jacob Coxey, was imprisoned for 20 days.
  • The depression caused by the Panic of 1893 lasted for about four years, ending in 1897.