Steve Kangas: It was 'Liberals' and 'Communists' with Help from the Government who Really Won the West!

by Len Hart

The American right wing nurtures and promotes a 'mythology' of the 'Old West' just as Adolph Hitler and his Nazi minions nurtured and promoted a Nazi 'Weltanschauung' i.e, a sweeping Nazi interpretation of German folk lore and history. The version of American history that is given the 'right wing stamp of approval' is the political 'big lie' designed to support a contemporary right-wing extremist political agenda.

The strategy seeks to cloak extremism with 'folklore', to hide lies amid fables of pioneer struggles and exploits'. It is claimed, with a straight face or a smirk, that the pioneers were right wingers too!

That's not true!

At least as many were liberal, even communist! At least as many were what we might now call 'green'! At least as many were anarchists and opposed any government at all. At least as many believed in cooperation over competition and, in fact, found both cooperation and sharing to be absolutely essential to survival. At least as many were open to innovation. They were adventurous not conservative. It was a matter of survival --not politics or ideology.

The Nazis --specifically Hitler's propaganda guru Joseph Goebbels --did it first.

In Hitler's Nationalist Socialist Party, the indoctrination program incorporated the use of the German folktale and was employed "as an ideological weapon" meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus, Party official Alref Eyd announced in 1935, "The German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young" (1977:170). Unfortunately, as Kemenetsy perceptively points out, the German version of the folktalke used by the Third Reich "was no longer a true reflection of the common peasant folk, but only a medium for the Nazi ideology, and a mouthpiece of racial propaganda"(1977:178).

--Cathy Lynn Preston, Folklore, Literature, and Cultrual Theory

The following excerpt is one of many brilliant essays published by the late 'liberal' activist Steve Kangas.

Most Americans have accepted the myth that early Americans were rugged individualists, pioneers who blazed trails into the Western hills and overcame adversity on the strength of their own self-reliance.

'Tain't necessarily so.

Entire books could be written about how white Americans got rich off the labor of their slaves, all the while waxing rhapsodic over the virtues of self-reliance. Volumes could be written about the early American women who created extensive social networks and church groups to help each other's families, all the while their men were entertaining the conceit of rugged individualism. But this is an essay devoted to the government's contribution to early American survival, so it will address that topic only: (1)

From the start, the West was not conquered by rifle-toting pioneers, but by the U.S. Army. (Hardly a government "success," to be sure, but the point here is that the stereotype of the lone pioneer conquering the West is a myth.) The government made massive land purchases, without which the conquest of these territories would have been even bloodier. It spent $15 million on the Louisiana Purchase, $25 million on the Texas/California purchase, and $7 million for the Alaska Purchase.

The government then turned around and sold this land below cost, at considerable loss to itself. The Preemption Act of 1841, the Graduation Act of 1854 and the Homestead Act of 1862 all gave away land to pioneers for a song.

The government also played a crucial role in developing these lands. When it came to connecting the Great Lakes to the Eastern seaboard with canals, the government funded or financially guaranteed three fourths of the $200 million project. It also gave each state 30,000 acres of land to build agricultural colleges. It would be difficult to overstate how important these colleges were in advancing agricultural education and techniques among the farmers. With their help, American farmers were quickly able to create a working agricultural economy. Meanwhile, the government provided mail services like the Pony Express that interconnected this economy.

At the farthest edges of the frontier, the settlers were literally lawless; gun-fighting and dueling were rampant. It was only when the government moved in that law and order and a sense of community were established. Disease, attacks from Native Americans and economic chaos at the frontier often turned towns into ghost towns overnight. Not surprisingly, group survival proved more effective than true hermitism. Historian John Mack Farragher described life on the frontier as "a community experience… Sharing work with neighbors at cabin raisings, log rollings, hayings, husking, butchering, harvesting or threshing were all traditionally considered communal affairs… [A] 'borrowing system' allowed scarce tools, labor and products to circulate for the benefit of all." One pioneer told prospective settlers: "Your wheel-barrows, your shovels, your utensils of all sorts, belong not to yourself, but to the public who do not think it necessary even to ask a loan, but take it for granted."

The government continued to develop the West in the early 20th century. It constructed dams and subsidized huge irrigation projects. During the Great Depression, rural electrification programs brought electricity to farmers, which enabled them to use power tools, refrigeration and household appliances to make their work and personal lives easier. The government also built highways into the West, and wired the countryside for telephone service. The government saved countless small farmers by giving them loans to stall foreclosures and tide them over the rough times. And it began paying huge farming subsidies that continue to this day.

Even then, it was not the small pioneer, but the major corporation that settled the West, often with vast help from the government. By the turn of the century, the government had distributed a billion acres of land, but only 147 million became homesteads. Sociologists Scott and Sally McNall estimate that "probably only one acre in nine went to the small pioneers." Some 183 million acres were ultimately given to the railroad companies. (It was these federal giveaways that created the major logging companies, not family businesses.) Four out of five transcontinental railroads were built in this way, and Congress approved loans up to $48,000 per mile to build them.

The West has a rich tradition of dependency on government. As historian Stephanie Coontz says: "It would be hard to find a Western family today or at any time in the past whose land rights, transportation options, economic existence, and even access to water were not dependent on federal funds." Paradoxically, however, the West has also enjoyed a long tradition of anti-government sentiments. When John Wayne punched out "Mr. Government Bureaucrat" in a Hollywood Western, he was acting out the misplaced rage of many Western Americans.

In closing, the story of the Montana Freemen is especially revealing. This is the radical anti-government militia that kept the FBI at bay in an armed stand-off that lasted for months. It turns out that they had stalled foreclosure on their farms for ten years by accepting $676,082 in government farming subsidies and loans. [Pic: Robber Barons were in for the booty]

Apparently, government assistance makes one ungrateful.

--Steve Kangas, Myth: Early Americans built this land on rugged individualism.

Kangas [the quoted author] was found in the men's room of Richard Mellon Scaife's office building in Pittsburgh. According to reports, he died of shot[s] wounds to the head! It was ruled 'suicide'!

Why have the police not questioned Scaife, since his newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, depicted Kangas as an obsessed lunatic who had come to that city with the intent of assassinating Scaife, but allegedly turned the gun on himself instead? And if Kangas was of no concern to Scaife, why did the reclusive billionaire dispatch his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to dig into Kangas' past.

Moreover, isn't strange that those who still insist presidential adviser Vince Foster was murdered, a theory promoted by Scaife, have no interest in how or why Kangas died?

The major media may be afraid of Scaife, who is known for going after his critics, but veteran journalist Mike Snow is continuing his quest for the answers to all these questions.

--The Kangas Chronicles

Suicide, it was conveniently ruled! But in Scaife's bathroom? Now --Scaife is reported to have 'threatened' Kangas! Scaife, it must be recalled, is the 'vast right wing conspiracy' so famous referred to by Hilary Clinton.

He posted his last essay to his Web site on February 3, just five days before his untimely death. In my opinion, it is not the writings of a man in throes of alcoholism, though people like Richard Scaife have suggested as much and he may well view Steve's work as pornography. See: ~kangaroo/L-PowerDistribution.html

There are more questions than answers. Richard Scaife hiring a detective to try and dig up dirt on Steve Kangas raises a red flag. He used the same detective, Rex Armistead, that was used to try and dig up dirt on President Clinton for the Arkansas Project. The Pittsburgh police should have been so thorough. I doubt the police even questioned Richard Scaife, though one report did say they were thinking about it. The systematic attempted trashing of Steve Kangas' raises questions. Discrepancies between the coroner's report, in which Steve was injured when first found, and the police report, with no mention of injuries when he was first found raises questions. The quick cremation and the erasure of Steve Kangas' hard drive raises questions.

If magically I could have three questions about the circumstances around this case answered, I suppose they would be -- (1) Is the checking of the circuit breakers in One Oxford Centre rest rooms sop, and is there a log to prove this? (2) Was the gun that killed Steve empty when found? The news articles infer this, stating 47 rounds were found in his backpack and in one pocket. This is important because if Steve Kangas were in custody of Scaife security, they may have initially taken his gun away and emptied the clip. There may even be prints on the bullets or the clip, if the gun is still in evidence. (3) One intriguing puzzle piece that doesn't fit with the theory of suicide -- the bullet found around the time that Steve Kangas was found. There was a bullet hole found in the window of a street level clothing store. The slug was found inside the store. The bullet got there somehow. The location of One Oxford Centre doesn't appear to be a part of Pittsburgh where random bullet holes would be found. I suspect this may be the first time ever that a bullet hole was found in a window of one of the shops. Maybe some time after all the stores had closed, Steve Kangas had attempted to leave, was stopped by Scaife security, shots or a shot were fired, with Steve Kangas was forced to go back up to the 39th floor. If that bullet is connected, suicide becomes implausible.

I don't know what happened to Steve Kangas on the evening of February 8. I can write several scripts from the facts, as reported in the various newspaper articles. Many of the facts of the case seem suspicious and do not fit well with the theory of suicide. When I started digging on my own, that is what I expected to find. But from the burglar alarm system, to the $300 gun, to the intensive work he'd been doing on his political web site, that does not seem to be where Steve Kangas was at.

And then there is that bullet hole in the window of the Kountz and Rider clothing store.

For Steve's sake, this case deserves to be investigated further by someone with the means and abilities far greater than I. Hopefully someone, or some agency, will investigate the death of of Steve Kangas in the manner it deserves.

--Democratic Underground, Who Killed Steve Kangas?

Who had Method, Motive and Opportunity to Murder Kangas?

I simply do not believe that someone --contemplating suicide --would make a trip to another city, look up the address of an arch nemesis, go to the bathroom there and proceed to shoot himself in the head!

I say that there is sufficient and probable cause to indict Richard Mellon Scaife and take his deposition where lies become a matter of record and are prosecutable. I suggest the same thing be done with the hired gunsel --specifically Armistead!

Armistead among other things is the famous private investigator used by Scaife to dig up dirt on President Clinton and Steve Kangas. He was paid $250,000 for one job. Rex Armistead was aided by Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Richard Gazarik and Steve's grieving parents eager for any information to fill the terrible vacuum. His mother now seems to regret being used that way. The Tribune-Review published some of the sleaziest dirt jobs you will find in any tabloid -- against Kangas. Below, you will see how one witness (Steve's mom) was mysteriously manipulated into telling lies about her son. Propaganda and mind bending. It's what they do.

--Evidence of Kangas' murder, Who Killed Web Warrior Steve Kangas

Odds are this case is just another instance in which the right wing murders anyone who disagrees. We are reminded of Conan Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, who said: "When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains however improbable must be the truth!" If, by that standard, you rule out an unlikely suicide, that leaves only a murdered Kangas in Scaife's men's room. That is the probable cause to investigate Scaife and his hired gun thugs!

The Kangas case is one of hundreds, possibly thousands of suspicious deaths, enough to make a 'statistic'.

George W Bush also has intimate connections to the Saudi Royal family and actively trades weapons with Pakistani militant groups from the ISI. For more on this, watch Farenheit 911 from Michael Moore. The documentary has been smeared as a Republican bashing video, however, Michael does a very good job exposing Bush's connections to the Saudi's, his dodging of the draft for Vietnam, and his connections to the defense contractors who benefited from 9/11.

Laura Bush, George's wife and the first lady, was involved in a fatal car crash in November of 1963. She was speeding and disregarded a stop sign. The victim in the other car was Michael Dutton, a 17 year old boy. The investigation concluded that the crash had "bizarre" aspects, such as the cars didn't seem to show physical evidence of normal drive behavior. With that said, the other "bizarre" coincidence is that the victim, Michael Dutton, was Laura Bush's ex-boyfriend and classmate. Again, in a "bizarre" coincidence, Laura Bush didn't get a ticket.

Michael Dutton Douglas and Laura Welch (Laura Bush's name at the time) were students together at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas. Douglas was described as an active athlete, physically attractive, and intelligent. He was nominated as the school's most popular male student while a junior, an honor typically awarded only to graduating high school seniors.

In May 2000 , a two-page police report detailing the fatal crash was made public. The report revealed that on November 6, 1963, Welch was driving her Chevrolet Impala sedan with one passenger (Judy Dyke, also 17). It was a clear Wednesday night, shortly after 8 p.m., when Welch entered the intersection of State Highway 349 and Farm to Market Road 868 . Welch failed to observe the intersection's stop sign and collided into Douglas' Chevrolet Corvair sedan. Welch and Dyke sustained minor injuries; Douglas was pronounced dead on arrival at Midland Memorial Hospital. Welch was not charged with any offense.

The future First Lady made a brief remark in March 2000 about the crash, "I know this as an adult, and even more as a parent, it was crushing ... for the family involved and for me as well."

Most Americans are aware of the countless violations of checks and balances and constitutional amendments this administration has committed. It is clear that George W Bush is a shadow figure with power only a few have ever had in history.

Marvin Bush, George's older brother, was the principal shareholder of Securicom until 2000. Securicom held the security systems contract for the World Trade Center and also held the security contracts for United Airlines, where 2 of the planes hijacked on 9/11 were from. Securicom bought CTC International under Marvin Bush as well. CTC International held the contracts of security at Dulles International Airport where the other 2 planes came from on 9/11.

Bertha Champagne

Marvin Bush's house maid, Bertha Champagne, was killed September 29, 2003 on Marvin's property. Like the usual Bush bizarre stories, Bertha was run over in Marvin's driveway by her own vehicle and pinned against the side of the garage. The investigation concluded that it was an "accident." Those who knew her remember her with fondness. Richard Davis, general manager for Belle Haven Country Club, said, "She made people feel welcome. A florist once told me, 'I could never forget Bertha; she made me feel like a member here.' She was friendly and outgoing; she always had a big smile, and a hello and a good-bye." Redding said, "Belle Haven was her stage; the people there loved her and she loved them." "Everybody knew Bertha," said Davis.

John McWethy Feb 2008, Former ABC News national security correspondent John McWethy was killed in a skiing accident in Colorado. McWethy was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and covered the attack live. McWethy had a number of good sources within the intelligence community. In a June 2005 WMR report: "WHY NSA IS THE FORT KNOX OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT" that covered the effect of outsourcing on the diminishing security of sensitive U.S. communications intelligence sources and methods, a major story first reported by McWethy.

Sid Adger Mr. Adger, a Houston oil supply company executive and Bush family friend, died in 1996 of unknown causes. Adger was the mysterious businessman who approached General James Rose and asked him to help George W. Bush avoid Vietnam by recommending him for a pilot position with the National Guard.

General James Rose General Rose recommended George W. Bush for a pilot position with the Texas National Guard. He died of unknown causes in 1993. He was immediately buried and no autopsy was performed.

Lt. Colonel William Harris, Jr. Lt. Col. William Harris was one of two commanding officers who could not perform George W. Bush's annual evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. They stated in their filing that "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report." Fortunately for George W. Bush, Lt. Col. Harris is not here to verify his 1973 statement. He's dead.

Amiram Nir: He was a former Israeli agent who was in Jerusalem with George Bush during Iran Contra. He went under the assumed name of Pat Weber. Nir was scheduled to testify to the Senate subcommittee and it was feared he would reveal the truth. He perished, following the shooting-down of his aircraft with missiles from the helicopter of a man called Gene Tatum, 25-year CIA deep cover agent.

Lt. Colonel Jerry B. Killian Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, another George W. Bush's commanding officer. He cannot testify, he's dead.

James Downing Aalund Mr. Aalund's name is the first on a long list of young Texans who died in Vietnam. No Texas Air National Guard connections.

Lewis B. Miskell WMRMurdered Canadian diplomat another possible victim of Valerie Plame Wilson/Brewster Jennings disclosure. On May 26, Italian police discovered the badly decomposed body of Canadian diplomat Lewis B. Miskell in a Naples sewer. Miskell, 49, had been stabbed in the abdomen. Intelligence sources report that Miskell, who assigned to the Canadian embassy in Vienna, Austria, was the attached responsible for liaison to UN specialized agencies in Vienna

Mark Lombardi He was an accomplished conceptual artist who, while chatting on the phone with a banker friend about the Bush savings and loan scandal, started doodling a diagram and was inspired to create a complex series of drawings and sketches that charted the details of the scandal. According to the New York Times, "He was soon charting the complex matrices of personal and professional relationships, conflict of interest, malfeasance and fraud uncovered by investigations into the major financial and political scandals of the day; to keep facts and sources straight, he created a handwritten database that now includes around 12,000 3-by-5-inch cards." On the evening of March 22, 2000, Mark Lombardi was found hanging in his loft, an apparent suicide.

Peter Hartmann Central Figure in cemetery probe found dead ... Peter Hartmann FEMA, La. Outsource Katrina body count to firm implicated in body-dumping scandals. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired Kenyon International to set up a mobile morgue for handling bodies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina, RAW STORY has learned. Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses.

Steve Kangas His web site, Liberalism Resurgent, was meticulously researched and presented such a problem to the "real boss" of George Bush, Richard Scaife, that he hired a private detective to look into Kangas' past. Steve Kangas was found in a 39th-floor bathroom outside of Scaife's offices at One Oxford Centre, in Pittsburgh, an apparent suicide.

Maria DiBiase WMR has learned from UN sources that the 19th Floor from which UN employee Maria DiBiase plunged to her death in the early morning of February 17, houses the Department of Peace-keeping Operations/Field Administration and Logistics Division (DPKO/FALD). The offices also house the code machines used for the encrypted fax machines used for DPKO activities in addition to a spare set of code machines used for DPKO rapid response teams. New York Daily News more search terms: Austrian national, IAEA, Conference Services, UNSCOM, Saadam Hussein wmd database, Iraq invasion, black market nuclear suppliers, A Q Kahn, Libya , Turkey, Pakistan, Marc Rich, Sibel Edmunds, 'black bag' operation.

Governor Mel Carnahan Missouri's former Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft, despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush. Investigators determined that Carnahan's plane went down due to "poor visibility."

Gus W. Weiss, former White House policy adviser on technology, intelligence, and economic affairs, highly significant player in Reagan/Bush Sr. execution of Soviet downfall, "Weiss had declared himself to be against the war in Iraq a short while before his "suicide". It is interesting to note that 18 days before Weiss' death, another Bush government analyst also committed suicide -John J. Kokal (58 years old) on November 7, 2003. This man leapt to his death from an office in the State Department where he worked.

Other Bush Family:

Jeb Bush, another one of George's brothers, conveniently and quietly declared martial law in Florida 4 days before the 9/11 attacks. This resulted in the public failing to find out the many hidden truths about what happened in Florida in the lead up to 9/11, which the public has yet to learn. In the upcoming film from Truth Alliance, this information that Jeb Bush doesn't want you to hear will be available. The working title for the 9/11 project is, "Corruption at the Core." PNAC signatory and he signed Executive Order 01-261 September 7, 2001 which allowed martial law to be declared in Florida. His was the first state to declare a state of emergency on 9/11, however, this was 4 days before it had happened..

Of course it is Florida where Jeb Bush was Governor that the massive account of voter fraud occurred and George W Bush illegally stole the office of President of the United States to begin with. The film, Unprecedented: The 2000 Election, was one of the journalist stories that didn't make headlines in the U.S. Greg Palast from the BBC also had the film, Bush Family Fortunes, as well as a book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, all about Bush's history and voter fraud case in Florida. Hundreds of thousands of votes were literally not counted due to a "glitch" in the Florida system that was supposed to go through and eliminate felon votes. The majority, over 90% of names removed, turned up to be innocent of any crime. Some counties were reporting that the cards used to vote with were confusing and placed the names of candidates nest to boxes that didn't match that candidate, a slick and manipulative move by someone clearly attempting to steal votes. It worked, Bush won by a couple hundred votes in Florida. Had the votes been allowed to be recounted, he would have lost.

Neil Bush, the president's other brother, had intimate connections with John Hinckley, the man who shot and tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Neil Bush was scheduled to have dinner on March 31, 1981, with Scott Hinckley, brother of John Hinckley, the day after a bullet came within an inch of making Neil Bush's father the new president of the United States. Even though John Chancellor had let slip out this most remarkable assassination coincidence shortly after John Hinckley tried to kill President Reagan, it was censored by NBC News and the other organs of the national news media during the subsequent 10 years. And even in the several months of extensive coverage of Neil Bush's part in the massive savings and loan fraud, no mention was made of his role in the continuing cover-up of the most significant story in the 1980s. Scott Hinckley, John's brother, worked for Standard Oil under Neil Bush's management. Had Hinckley succeeded at killing Reagan, George HW Bush would have become President much faster.

What did Neil Bush do in 1985 after he became a director of the Silverado Banking, Savings & Loan Association that went bust three years later at a cost to taxpayers of at least $1.6 billion? Among other improprieties involving "some of the worst kinds of conflicts of interest" according to federal regulators, he admits that he failed to list his business relationship on a conflict-of-interest form when he got a $100,000 loan from a developer who was a partner in his oil company. That was after he helped approve more than $100 million worth of loans to that business partner. When he wrote "None" on that form, he actually was dependent on one of the thrift's biggest borrowers for the entire $75,000 annual salary that was his main source of income. "I know it sounds a littlefishy," he admitted when he testified that the loan was not to be repaid unless JNB Exploration was successful, which it wasn't. What it was, he said in one of the classic understatements of our time,"was an incredibly sweet deal." One bemused expert observed that it "may have been the first completed loan in financial history in which the creditor defaulted."

While five of Silverado's board members were banned for life from any federally insured institution, Neil Bush was ordered only to "desist from any acts,omissions or practices involving any conflicts of interest, unsafe or unsound practices or breaches of fiduciary duty." In other words, to do nothing more than obey the law. And no order to pay restitution.

Shortly before the 1988 election, when the regulators wanted to close Silverado, a call came from Washington to delay that action for 45 days—until after election day. After George Bush was elected, an order was issued to close the bank. A Treasury Department request to the FBI a year ago for an investigation of White House pressure on federal regulators to delay closing Silverado until after the election received no attention from the president's good friend, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh (whom the voters of Pennsylvania last month temporarily removed from public office once they could get their votes on him).

Neil's mother is praised in puff pieces from Parade to People to the New York Times as a devoted wife of 45 years and mother of "four happy children" who nonetheless seem to be endlessly enmeshed in unhappy and unethical scandals. She is repeatedly quoted as saying that Neil was being "persecuted" and "has done nothing wrong." Her third son is known to suffer from a reading disability believed to be dyslexia, but she let an unexpected cat out of the bag when she told a Parade interviewer: "You know, people who have reading disabilities learn to fake. And Neil really had learned to fake."

Finally, there is Neil's father. "We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison," President Bush said on June 22, 1990, in regard to the savings and loan fraud. Read his lips. Then stare at the fact that when FBI field offices requested 425 new agents to help investigate the 21,000 thrift fraud referrals sitting "unaddressed" in their files, the Bush administration approved only half those requests and reduced the funds Congress authorized to spend on prosecutions. You and I may not always agree with Bill Moyers, but he was on target when he said that "George Bush is the most deeply unprincipled man in American politics today. He strikes me as possessing no essential core. There is no fundamental line from which he will not retreat....I have watched him for almost 30 years and have never known him to take a stand except for political expediency."

Don't forget, of course, George W Bush had substantial prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks as proven by the enormous amount of whistle-blowers and memos the public has now seen exists. Aside from Bush's clear involvement from covering up the attacks being a potential complicit attack from the Intelligence community itself, he has been accused by many to have been possibly involved in its planning.

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Why the US 'Investor Class' are Blood Sucking Parasites!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The bailout of big banks and 'financial houses' is a deliberate fraud! So too, 'trickle down/supply side' economics. Even if 'tax windfalls', like those found in 'supply-side' economics, persuade manufacturers to produce more, where is the market for the overproduction? Lately, however, Fat Cats have figured out how to game the system: transfer the booty offshore! As a result, declines in GDP have become a defining characteristic of every GOP regime since those of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes.

The current economic crisis has much in common with the US economy in the 1920s. The economy had been booming but by 1927 the nation had overproduced goods for which there was no market. No one should have been surprised that the overproduction led to a slowdown in both manufacturing and agriculture.

Overproduction results when there is no market for increased production. Among several reasons for 'declining markets' the most obvious is this: more and more have less and less to spend on new products or increased production. Failed economic ideology inevitably favors what is called 'economic stimuli', a more 'intellectualized' version of 'voodoo economics', otherwise called 'supply side economics' or, just as precisely 'trickle down' theory! It's all more accurately called 'bunkum', 'claptrap' or 'bullshit'! GOP/right wing economics fails to recognize the basic fact: increased production means absolutely nothing to those who have grown poorer. The fancy car in the showroom means nothing if I don't have a job or if my dollar has declined vis a vis the 'yuan' or the 'yen'.

Some recent history may illustrate the point: the Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by a severe world wide depression acutely felt in the US, Germany, France, and to a lesser degree --Great Britain and Sweden. Nevertheless, unemployment was high in Sweden when that nation returned a Labor government committed to a program of public investment to address the high unemployment problem. It worked. By 1935 real output in Sweden was 7 percent above its 1929 level. Unemployment was reduced and the finance minister was said to have been happy to suffer another budget deficit to stimulate the economy.

Ronald Reagan's budget deficit did not have as happy a result. So --why did Keynesian economics work for Sweden in 1929-30 but not for Ronald Reagan more recently? The answer is simple: Sweden was then --as it is now --among the world's most egalitarian economies and because of that, a prosperous 'consumer' class proved to be the growing market that supports increased investment, increased production. By contrast, the US --among the very least egalitarian nations --inevitably slides into recession/depression whenever a GOP regime favors the increasingly few but richer elites!

Reagan's tax cut of 1982 benefited only the investor class! As a result markets and spending declined. It was a 'depression' of some two years. the worst since the 'Great Depression. It was characterized by decreases in consumer purchasing, declines in jobs, and the shrinking of the US GDP. Sound familiar?

The wrong people, an utterly worthless investor class, got the money!

While a true 'Keynesian' deficit might have stimulated growth, the GOP/Reagan deficit had the opposite effect.

The proof of my assertion is the public record. Reagan's tax cut of 1982 was quickly followed by the nation's worst recession since the Great Depression. The economy contracted, people had less money to spend, many lost their jobs and homes and slept under bridges. Where had all that money gone? It would eventually find its way to China! It was Bush Sr, in cahoots with Nixon who set it all up. It was Bush Sr who cut the deals while feasting on 'dog lip' in the Forbidden City. Since then, most (if not all) US wealth has found its way to China.

Reagan's best critics were found inside his regime, primarily, budget director David Stockman who blamed a "noisy faction of Republicans" for Reagan's infamous tax cut and the debacle that followed. Reagan might have achieved the prosperity that Keynes had predicted. That might have happened had his policies rewarded the working and middle classes instead of the rich and idle elites. Fact is --Ronnie was owned! The government is owned! The MIC is owned! We are owned! We are slaves to a system that may be beyond our ability to reform short of revolution.

The Reagan-heads forgot that the wealth of a nation is the result of the 'work' that is done by its people --not the 'offshore investments' of an utterly worthless, idle leisure class.

Trickle-down (supply-side) transfers of monies to manufacturers that are over-produced is economic disaster. Similarly, transferring wealth to elites for whom additional consumer purchases are characterized by decreasing utility is foolhardy! Put another way --of what use is more 'spending money' to one who has 'everything'? And for that reason, why should a capitalist get a tax cut for producing product that cannot and will never be sold? The US investor class has solved that much of the problem by exporting manufacturing --our jobs --to China. If you don't believe me, just check out the CIA's own "World Fact Book" which lists the US at the very bottom with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance still often called the 'balance of trade' deficit. China sits atop the list with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance.

Because the very, very wealthy i.e, those benefiting from GOP tax cuts, most certainly do not increase purchases with tax cut windfalls, wealth does not 'trickle down'! It does not support increased domestic sales nor does it stimulate increased production and, thus, GDP. In fact, the record shows that instead of stimulating the economy by stimulating production, growth and sales, the very opposite invariably occurs.

This consistently results in a reduction of the money supply, most prominently:

1. lower wages ala Wal-Mart et al for those still fortunate enough to be employed;
2. declining purchases followed by declining GDP.

Why the US 'investor class' is an economic blood-sucking parasite!

The so-called 'Great Depression' was, in fact, a great contraction in which those who would have spent monies were deprived of the money to spend. A 'depression' is a self-reinforcing race to the bottom, a black-hole which feeds on itself.

During the Great Depression and, later, Ronald Reagan's 1980s depression of about two years, millions lost their jobs. In 1929, bankers and financiers continued to speculate on stocks, borrowing the money and buying stocks 'on margin'. More recently, 'short sellers' made fortunes on 911! What guilty 'insider knowledge' had they possessed? You can rest assured billions have already been transferred into offshore tax havens --wealth that is perhaps forever lost to the US economy.

Transfers of wealth to everywhere but America not only fail to stimulate the domestic economy, they bleed it! The wealth of a nation is not the money it prints, borrows or coins. The wealth of a nation is the productivity of its people and their industries. Both declined under Reagan and declined again under Bush and declined yet again under the other Bush! When another GOP 'Prez' assumes or steals the office, there will be yet another decline. That assumes, of course, that we survive the current crisis.

One wonders why Reagan didn't just cut out the middle man. A more equitable tax cut or better a more progressive tax might have put more spendable income directly into the hands of consumers. Spent money circulates and drives an economy. That consumers spend money seems to be a fact lost on the likes of Reagan, Bush, and the nation's rich and callous elites.

Surely, there were knowledgeable advisers in Reagan's regime who knew better. The tax cut, therefore, was entirely political, a pay off to the rich for their support, or more precisely, their investment! Nothing has changed in the GOP. The Bush administration made several such "payoffs" during his catastrophic and criminal regime.

The current collapse of the US is the end result of a trend begun with the passage of Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut for his rich, elite base. The year was 1982. Historians will write of that date that it was the beginning of the end of the American empire.

The Dangers of American Fascism

Following is a description of the American fascists who have looted the US and exploited the labors of those whose efforts alone create wealth.

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

...

--Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, The New York Times, From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

In this case, the "gods" of American fascism are greed and lies. While Democrats are flawed and often impotent, the GOP has ceased to be a political party! It is, rather, a crime syndicate, a dangerous, kooky cult of psychopaths and liars!

We're in the Money?

It was Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) who 'stole the show' when she sang "We're in the Money" in Gold Diggers of 1933. Goldiggers was a Warner Bros. musical choreographed by Busby Berkeley, starring Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell and, famously, Ginger Rogers.

An original stage production ran for 282 performances on Broadway in 1919 and 1920 featuring songs by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics). In 2003, Gold Diggers of 1933 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

"We're in the Money" is memorable not only for its energy but for a charming performance by Ginger Rogers, singing a verse in Pig Latin accompanied by scantily-clad showgirls dancing with giant coins.

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Lessons the GOP Learned from Adolph Hitler: the 'Big Lie' Called 911

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Those still believing Bush's big 911 lie are of three types plus combinations: crooks, idiots, and liars! There was no fuselage, there was no airliner wreckage, there were no large titanium/steel alloy rotors each some 10 feet in diameter to be found at the Pentagon on the morning of 911. Yet --we are expected to believe the most evil, the most harmful fraud since Hitler coined the phrase: 'Big Lie'!

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

--Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, MA, 1971, pgs. 231, 232

There was no airliner wreckage at the Pentagon --we are told --because a 757 airliner body 'vaporized' in the intense heat. Nevertheless, forensics experts claimed a 97 percent success rate identifying victims using DNA. Now --DNA is very fragile! The heat necessary to 'vaporize' an aluminum airliner body --some 11,000 degrees F --would have utterly destroyed testable DNA. The heat required to vaporize an aluminum airliner body is about 1000 degrees higher than the surface temperature of the sun itself! [See: NASA, Solar System Exploration]

The Bushco liars cannot have it both ways. If Bush were telling the truth about the airliner, then the casualty IDs are impossible. Bushco cannot claim to have ID'd victims and --at the same time --explain away the missing airliner wreckage by claiming it was victim to an extreme heat of mysterious, unknown origin.

Extreme Heat of Unknown Origins?

So effective are Hitler's 'Big Lie' techniques for Bush that millions swallowed the lie despite the fatal contradictions! Millions dared not conclude that a fire of 11,000 degrees F --sufficient to 'vaporize' aluminum --would likewise destroy the fragile DNA upon which the identification of victims was absolutely dependent! Either the airliner vaporized or the victims were identified --but not both!

We were expected to believe that heat sufficient to vaporize an airliner body left intact enough fragile DNA to make possible the identification of 97 percent of victims. If this were true, the age of miracles is not over. That this ludicrous lie --laughable were it not so tragic in its consequences --gained currency for even a second is proof that the American educational system is a colossal failure. Texas, which recently beat Mississippi in a race to dead last in the percentage graduating high school, is the specimen to be studied, the example to be avoided. Apparently, logic is no longer taught in Texas. Yee-haw!

Either the fire was not hot enough and the IDs are correct or Bushco is left to explain the presence of an almost unbelievable and mysterious source of heat. That Bush is still free, un-indicted for the capital crimes of mass murder and high treason, proves Hitler to have been correct. As Hitler himself made clear: the bigger the lie the less likely it is to be questioned, the more likely that the 'perp' will get away with cold-blooded murder for political reasons and the enrichment of a base of filthy rich, elite fat cats.

Bush Confirms Hitler with a Nazi Tactic

Nevertheless, the 'vaporization' theory creates yet another problem for devotees of the Bush official conspiracy theory: if the airline, indeed, vaporized then what is the source of this incredible heat without which the Bush theory falls apart?

Certainly --a mere kerosene fire could not have melted the steel at WTC, NY but 11,000 degrees F is required to vaporize aluminum. Certainly, the dinky, un-impressive Pentagon fires left open books in adjacent offices flapping in the breeze. The axis of GOP/Bush has a problem: how to explain the fatal contradiction, how to hide the truth, how to distract the idiot masses, the poor unwashed, every child that was, in fact, left behind but not before they were exploited for votes!

The Pentagon fires could not and did not -- in fact --vaporize anything on 911. If there had been such intense heat, it begs the question: what is the source of alleged temperatures in excess of 11,000 degrees F? A violation of Occam's Razor, it is a big problem for the crooks, liars and idiots in office.

911: A Day of GOP Miracles and Suspensions of the Laws of Physics

Mysteriously, the remains of alleged hijackers were separated from the remains of Pentagon employees! How was this miracle achieved? Indeed, none of them were ID'd and none of them appeared on the official autopsy list released to Dr. Olmsted in response to his FOIA request.

If Bushco's theory were true, there would have been no DNA to test because no DNA would have survived the 11,000 degree F temperatures required to 'vaporize' an aluminum 757 body. The best explanation --of course --is that there was no airliner and no airliner body. But the GOP cannot seize power with either science or logic. The question is not whether Bush lied! The question is, rather, which lie does he expect you to believe today, this week, this month?

DNA is often said to decompose when heated but, in fact, the effect may be even worse: it literally melts. As heat is applied, bonds that join the two nucleotide strands may break.

The two molecules [nucleotides] are stabilized in this structure due to noncovalent bonds, mostly hydrogen bonds and vanderWaals forces. These bonds are not strong; accordingly, when the temperature rises sufficiently, the double helix is said to "melt" into its two component molecules, and will reassociate upon slow cooling under appropriate salt conditions. So, the issue is not decomposition so much as disassociation upon exposure to too high a temperature; and the reason for the disassociation is that the energy input of the heat overcomes the ability of the noncovalent bonds to keep the molecules together. .

--US Energy Department, Molecular Biology Archive, DNA Decomposition

Take the case of Flight 93. Saeed Alghamdi has been protesting his innocence of 911 since the event. If Saeed were guilty, he would be dead! If Saeed were guilty he would have been blown to smithereens over PA. A dead Saeed might be evidence of Bush's theory. Alive, he is living proof that Bush's official conspiracy theory is a pack of black hearted lies that have harmed the American people, the world and, most certainly, the cause of peace.

FBI Director Robert Mueller had said that there was no evidence to connect the 'said' 19 'hijackers' with the events of 911. His statement alone should have been sufficient cause to re-open a case involving one of the most heinous, cruel atrocities in human history. And there is STILL no evidence to connect ANY 'Arab hijackers' with the crime of mass murder called '911'. As Dr. Olmsted pointed out: mere names on a list is not evidence, certainly not admissible evidence. Anyone can type up a list of anything. But an 'official' list of bodies autopsy is evidence and may be admissible in court upon the sworn statement of the coroner. In this case, such a document does not have on it any Arab names whatsoever. There is, then, absolutely no official or admissible evidence whatsoever that there were any terrorists on board Flt 77. There is no evidence that any 'alleged' hijacker was ever on board any aircraft that is alleged by Bushco to have been involved in the tragic events of 911.

To anyone subscribing to Bush's load of bullshit, I say: show me bodies or a bona fide autopsy report with the names of Arabs on it!

There is none because there were no hijackers on board Fl 77 and there is absolutely no evidence that Flt 77 crashed the Pentagon. If you think so, produce it! Or --as they say in Texas --put up or shut up!

It has been my experience that only those who are guilty of crimes bother to cover them up and lie about them. When Nixon tried to cover up Watergate, he infamously said: "I am not a crook!" But Nixon was a crook and we all knew it.

Reagan lied about Iran/Contra but the concluding statement of Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh left no doubt that Reagan, he believed, was complicit in an act of high treason --'directing' the arming of an avowed and declared enemy of the United States: Iran.

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

--Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

Demonized for years, had Iran suddenly become so cozy with Reagan-heads that it was now OK to arm them? It was a treasonous money-laundering scheme in which Reaganheads funneled the profits to an insurrection in South America --the Contras! Reagan was a crook too, possibly a traitor. But in the US bizarro-world, it's only treason if a Democrat does it!

Amid speculation that Vice-president George Bush and numerous other members of the Reagan cabal were involved, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigated the affair over a period of some eight years. Fourteen people were charged, some with 'operational involvement, other with participating in the "cover-up". Oliver North's conviction was overturned but only upon a 'technicality'. It was left to Bush Sr to let six 'suspects' off the hook with pardons. One of them was Robert McFarlane who had already been convicted. Thanks to a Bush, Caspar Weinberger beat the rap. He didn't even stand trial.

More recently, it is the administration of Bush Jr which actively suppressed evidence and quashed every investigation of 911. Bush and Condoleeza lied when they said that the crashing of airliners into buildings could not have been foreseen. In fact, it was precisely that 'scenario' that was the basis for security when Bush attended the G8 Summit in Italy, July 23, 2001 [See: "Italy: Bush Targeted at G8." New York Newsday 19 Sept 2001, unsigned; "Extremists 'Planned Genoa Attack on Bush'", BBC News, 27 Sept 2001]

Flight 77 Did Not Crash into the Pentagon!

Every Bush lie with regard to every facet of 911 can be exposed easily enough. But it is the Pentagon that is most obviously a bald faced lie. No airliner whatsoever crashed into the Pentagon. I defy Bush and Bush-head to prove it, and failing that, cite --at least --one scintilla of verifiable evidence in support of the idiotic idea that a 757 crashed into the Pentagon!

Bush's theory has been utterly disproven, utterly debunked. In the meantime, I submit to you a much better suspect: the US Global Hawk, a pay-load carrying missile. The Global Hawk was, in fact, flown --without a pilot --from California to Australia entirely by remote control. No box cutters, no Arab hijackers were required! It was all computerized from take off to landing. It is a weapon that traitors and 'inside-jobbers' might have only dreamed about. A Global Hawk gives these lying, murderous, treasonous bastards total control. They need only program the co-ordinates and leave the 'driving' to Global Hawk.

The Global Hawk would have had no problems with maneuvers credited to Hanjour but which experienced pilots say is impossible in a 757. The ONLY engine rotor found at the Pentagon --about one third the size of the huge titanium/alloy rotors found in a 757 --certainly came from a GLOBAL HAWK.

Like its larger cousin inside a 757, the much smaller Global Hawk rotor (made by Rolls-Royce) is likewise made of a titanium/steel alloy to withstand high temperatures inside the engine. It would have survived the Pentagon fire and did! It was the only rotor of any sort to have been photographed on the Pentagon lawn following the crash. The murder weapon was found but ordered destroyed by Bush!

The cover-up of 911 consisted largely of the overt destruction of forensic evidence, the bulk of which is seen in the photo to the right. I am confident It followed an obvious pattern. Physical, forensic evidence was ordered removed and destroyed and was, in fact, never seen again. Other evidence, photographs, video footage, and various once-public documents presumably beyond the reach of complicit officials, was suppressed.

I consider the overt destruction of evidence to be 'evidence' of guilt. Certainly --innocent people have no interest in the suppression of evidence in any case whether it be petty theft or mass murder/high treason. Those guilty of crimes have a lot 'riding' on whether or not the evidence proving their guilt is found. Only the guilty are sufficiently motivated to willfully destroy evidence.

'Concerted programs' to remove evidence were largely successful at ground zero in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and the so-called debris fields of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Much evidence was removed from Ground Zero even before a massive "steel removal operation" was begun.

It is significant that these instances of obstruction of justice and the criminal destruction of evidence was done after the scenes in question had been sealed off and put under the control the Bush administration. Only the Bush administration had an 'interest' (legal sense of the term) in silencing the truth and obstructing the course of justice. Short of extraordinary extenuating circumstances that I am hard pressed to name, innocent people are simply not going to bother covering up a crime, certainly not crimes of this magnitude where the cover up itself has required a panoply of illegal actions, instances of obstruction of justice, and demonstrable overt lies. Are we expect to believe that innocent people will engage in this kind of felonious, treasonous activity willingly?

Only the guilty are motivated to expend this kind of effort and the resources of the entire nation in the cover up of obvious act of high treason and mass murder! This gang should be rounded up now and prosecuted even if should involve the arrest, incarceration and indictment of every member of the Bush administration, their co-conspirators in other branches of the government, the bureaucracy and the lobbyists who benefited from the defense contracts that result from war. The guilty include the complicit elite one percent who benefited from war the war booty, the deliberate transfer of wealth that occurs during every GOP administration.

Obstruction of justice is a serious crime, a felony. Because this cover up is ongoing, I post the following resource: The Citizen's Investigation Team. This 'team' advises that we 'take it to them'. We demand that our Senators, Reps and other officials

1. stop lying about 911; lies about crimes are crimes if they aid, abet and/or cover up
   
2. actively and substantively support active investigations of the crimes called 911
3. support the prosecution of those who not only conspired to plan and pull off 911 (Bush, Rummie, Cheney, Rice et al) but those who are complicit by their inaction, by their silence.

As St. Thomas More reminded Qui tacet consentire vidétur, silence gives consent. Those inside the the government who are knowledgeable about this crime must come forward. The failures of public officials to act upon verifiable evidence brought to them are, in fact, crimes of obstruction of justice, misprision of treason, and misprision of a felony. If they persist, if they continue to cover up this crime, they must be charged, tried and sentenced.

It's time to take off the gloves and fight or resign yourselves to perpetual slavery, subservience to big brother and the lying bastards who seized the US government and with it the world's largest nuclear arsenal.

Had a 757 crashed the Pentagon there would have been no need to order decontamination procedures that were, in fact, carried out. No such procedures were carried out in New York. Clearly, 'officials' knew at the time that a civilian airliner had not crashed the Pentagon. That decontamination procedures were ordered and, in fact, carried out is evidence that it was not an ordinary commercial airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. If airliners have begun emitting deadly radiation, I strongly suggest you stop flying.

AFTER 911, the BBC interviewed several of the alleged hijackers, 'dead men' according to Bushco. The Washington Post reported that Hanjour was not on Flt 77 because he did not have a ticket. It is hard to imagine short, skinny Hanjour forcing his way on board, overpowering the Captain and crew, and having done so, taking over the controls with force and a mere box cutter! It didn't happen.

As I recall, the BBC interviewed at least one of Hanjour's alleged Flight 77 partners --after 911! Dead men --we are expected to believe --give interviews. In fact, there is no verifiable evidence of any sort to support Bush's absurd lie. There are no Arab names whatsoever on the only official document of Flight 77 passengers: the autopsy report that was released to Dr. Olmsted in response to his FOIA request.

The official conspiracy theory of 911 is more full of holes than Swiss cheese. Among the biggest holes are these having to do with the Pentagon:

• NTSB data -Flight 77 never dropped below 273 feet [Source: Pilots for 911 Truth, FOIA request]
  
• NO WRECKAGE traceable to a 757 was EVER recovered.
• The ONLY engine rotors SURVIVING, 'officialists' say, WERE VAPORIZED. That's a lie! The rotors are made of titanium/steel alloy in order to survive the extreme interior heat of jet engines.
  
• Just one rotor was found; it was about ONE THIRD the size of a 757 rotor. I believe it was the Rolls rotor from the Rolls engine that is found inside the Global Hawk. A Rolls spokesman is on record as having said that the only rotor found at the Pentagon was not from a 757.
  

Only the guilty try to cover up their crimes'; only the guilty are motivated to cover up this murderous and treasonous act. As David Ray Griffin said, 'no expenditure of time and money would be considered too great.' Certainly, no lie was too great for Bush. In the end, it is the lies he told that convict him daily.

Someone did pull off 911. The best suspects are the usual suspects: Bush, his NEOCON co-conspirators, the leadership of the GOP, various Pentagon brass, and other complicit murderers inside the Axis of the Military/Industrial Complex and K-Street! This gang of crooks, this nest of human cockroaches, liars, and traitors are responsible for perpetrating the treasonous, murderous crime of 911. Bush is the primary suspect for several reasons:

• Those who lie about crimes do so to cover up guilt. Bush has never told the truth about 911.
• Bush has not merely lied; he has actively, consistently and deliberately tried to cover up the crime of 911 with overt and identifiable instances of obstruction of justice, lies, and overt intimidation. This --I believe --is persuasive evidence of his guilt and/or complicity.

Major fuck ups; A mass hanging!

Tim Roemer let the cat out of the bag when, like Donald Rumsfeld, he referred to a 'missile' that struck the Pentagon. In addition, there were the early news reports before 'officialdom' was able to insist that the media report ONLY the official conspiracy theory. Those early reports consisted of anchors like Dan Rather and Peter Jennings talking about 'controlled demolitions', field reporters declaring that no airliner had struck the Pentagon, and, of course, the famous BBC report that WTC7 had fallen even as it was seen still standing behind the reporter. Clearly --the press release had been sent to the media in advance of the event. BBC simply read the release even as the building was still standing behind her. It is a major fuck up among several major fuck ups!

The space shuttle broke apart in the stratosphere at six times the speed of sound yet left identifiable wreckage and identifiable body parts strewn over three states. Wreckage was gathered, investigated and a plausible cause for the disaster addressed. Why was not that professionalism seen with regard to 911? The Carvellian quick response: it is because NASA was not covering up the crimes of mass murder and high treason! The Bush administration was doing precisely that. Government insiders and an entrenched bureaucracy are still lying about and covering up the crimes of 911.

The answer to that question is this: the truth should have already indicted half or more of the Bush administration and the DC bureaucracy of the crimes of mass murder and high treason! The US would have witnessed a mass hanging not seen since the Civil War.

Would someone please indict these criminals before they kill again?

While there is absolutely no valid or convincing evidence to support Bush's conspiracy theory, there is some cause for optimism. A growing public awareness of this fraud may yet reach critical mass and may yet result in mass murder indictments against the Bush gang of murderous thugs.

67% (Zogby International) of Americans blame the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the Bush crimes called '911'. At the time of the poll, a large majority of Americans wanted a Congressional investigation of Bush and Cheney, specifically their actions during and after the attacks.

Zogby Poll: 51% of Americans Want Congress to Probe Bush/Cheney Regarding 9/11 Attacks; Over 30% Seek Immediate Impeachment

67% also fault 9/11 Commission for not investigating anomalous collapse of World Trade Center 7

Kansas City, MO (Zogby International) September 6, 2007 - As America nears the sixth anniversary of the world-churning events of September 11, 2001, a new Zogby International poll finds a majority of Americans still await a Congressional investigation of President Bush' and Vice President Cheney's actions before, during and after the 9/11 attacks. Over 30% also believe Bush and/or Cheney should be immediately impeached by the House of Representatives.

--911 Truth.org

For the following video, a hat tip to an assiduous, stalwart seeker of truth, Damien.

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Move to China; Cut Out the Middle Man

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

If because your job has been out-sourced to China and you are reduced to shopping at Wal-Mart, you should consider a move to China to cut out the middle man! China is going to get your all but worthless dollars anyway by way of US retail outlet: Wal-Mart! And when the dollar is completely worthless, it 'won't matter anyhow'. We will all be living in Chinese made tents.

If because of GOP transfers of unearned wealth to the increasingly tiny elite of about one percent of the population, labor is unproductive or impoverished the productivity of the nation will decline and ultimately collapse.

If the poor can no longer afford decent housing or food it is because elites have bid up prices on commodities. But because conservative robber barons and huge corporations have consolidated control of markets, your threats of boycott are laughed at. If you can no longer afford decent housing, health care or food, you have most certainly fallen off the bottom rung. It is clear that big business doesn't care about your fate and because the GOP is owned, the GOP doesn't care either.

A Give a Shit Attitude!

Just this kind of arrogance preceded the crash of '29 and the Great Depression which followed. This is not, therefore, the first time in American history that 'big business' flouted its 'give a shit' attitude. In his great 'A Rendezvous with Destiny' speech to the Democratic National Convention of 1936, FDR' made it very clear what is wrong with America today. His great speech is just as true now as then. FDR called it what it was and remains: economic tyranny!

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor, other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

--A 'Rendezvous with Destiny, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

There are but two recent root 'aggravations' of this economic tyranny:

• The political ascendancy of the Bush family --Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush, and, more recently, George W. Bush.
• The rise of Ronald Reagan, his disastrous and inequitable tax cut of 1982, the two year long depression caused by 'Reaganomics', his legacy of increased terrorism against US interests, rising inequalities of wealth and income, the deterioration of educational standards seemingly everywhere in the US.

The origins of our dollar's collapse may be found in the Nixon and Bush trips to China as well as Reagan's 'give away' to his elite and greedy base. These extremist right wing policies have eaten away at our economic health like wood worms. The right wing/GOP subversion of our currency resulted in exceptions for the ruling elites while lower and working classes pay more than their fair share of taxes. It's why the real elites --just one percent of the total population--often pay no tax whatsoever!

Labor is taxed but capital gets a free ride --a recipe for an impending economic collapse, a collapse that appears to be well underway and beyond anyone's power or ability to stop. Nevertheless, the government will play it's well-rehearsed role, that of shakedown arm of the nation's tiny but increasingly wealthy elite.

Nixon deplaned in Beijing on February 21, his flair for both diplomacy and drama well in evidence. Notes Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose, "He knew that when his old friend John Foster Dulles had refused to shake the hand of Chou En-lai in Geneva in 1954, Chou had felt insulted. He knew too that American television cameras would be at the Peking airport to film his arrival. A dozen times on the way to Peking, Nixon told Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers that they were to stay on the plane until he had descended the gangway and shaken Chou En-lai’s hand. As added insurance, a Secret Service agent blocked the aisle of Air Force One to make sure the president emerged alone."

Soon after their arrival, Nixon and Kissinger were summoned to a previously unannounced meeting with Chairman Mao, which Kissinger later referred to as their "encounter with history." Next came a formal welcome banquet hosted by Chou En-lai, broadcast live on the American morning news thanks to the 13-hour time difference. In the Great Hall of the People, as the People’s Liberation Army band played such American favorites as "America the Beautiful" and "Home on the Range," course after course was followed by seemingly endless rounds of toasts. "‘Seize the hour! Seize the day!’" Nixon quoted from Mao, raising his glass to his Chinese hosts. But beyond the pomp and spectacle, the banquets sent a clear and dramatic message to everyone watching that a new relationship was being forged.

--Nixon's China Game, The American Experience

Nixon's trip was preceded by a long buildup that included 'ping pong diplomacy' and a little known or written about advance trip by George Bush Sr.

Premier Chou En-lai worked the public relations opportunity beautifully, receiving the Americans at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People on April 14. "You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people," he told the unlikely diplomats. "I am confident that this beginning again of our friendship will certainly meet with majority support of our two peoples." He also extended an invitation for more American journalists to visit China, provided they do not "all come at one time." That same day, the US announced plans to remove a 20-year embargo on trade with China. A Chinese table tennis team reciprocated by visiting the United States.

Ping-Pong was "an apt metaphor for the relations between Washington and Peking" noted a Time reporter, as each nation signaled, in turn, its openness to change. Despite the public warming trend, Nixon and Kissinger decided to keep their back-channel negotiations with China to themselves. It was not until July 15, after Kissinger's secret mission to Beijing, that Nixon announced that he, too, would make the journey the following year, as the first American president to visit China.

--Ping-Pong Diplomacy, The American Experience

Bush's bailouts proved Marx correct but, like everything else GOP, they' mucked it up. It's not even 'good' Marxism. The bailouts have benefited only the nation's elites, the same gang that had benefited most from Reagan's tax cut of 1982. Marx said that Capitalism would collapse of its own inconsistencies, 'internal tensions which will lead to its destruction.' The GOP, the greater of two major sellouts to the MIC and K-Street, merely hastened that result. The 'elites' who benefit do not merely maintain offices on K-Street, they OWN K-Street! The Military/Industrial complex serves at their pleasure. The MIC is expected to defend 'their' interests (not yours) abroad with the lives of YOUR sons and daughters.

Some recent history may illustrate the point: the Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by a severe world wide depression acutely felt in the US, Germany, France, and to a lesser degree --Great Britain and Sweden. Nevertheless, unemployment was high in Sweden when that nation returned a Labor government committed to a program of public investment to address the high unemployment problem. It worked. By 1935 real output in Sweden was 7 percent above its 1929 level. Unemployment was reduced and the finance minister was said to have been happy to suffer another budget deficit to stimulate the economy.

Ronald Reagan's budget deficit did not have as happy a result. So --why did Keynesian economics work for Sweden in 1929-30 but not for Ronald Reagan more recently? The answer is simple: Sweden was then --as it is now --among the world's most egalitarian economies. The US --among the very least egalitarian! Reagan's tax cut of 1982 benefited only the investor class at a time when increased consumer spending might have stimulated the economy. A 'Keynesian' deficit might have stimulated growth! The Reagan deficit had the opposite effect.

What's Wrong with the American Economy is Wealth and Income Inequities and the Dysfunctional Mentalities That Create Them

The proof of my assertion is the public record. Reagan's tax cut of 1982 was quickly followed by the nation's worst recession since the Great Depression, a recession of some 18 months characterized by record levels of unemployment and home losses. The economy contracted, people had less money to spend, many lost their homes and slept under bridges in 'boomtown' Houston. I know --I saw it. I was one of the lucky ones who somehow managed to keep a cozy home to sleep in. Luck! But for the grace of God go I! And no thanks to Unca Ronnie!

Reagan's best critics were found inside his regime, primarily, budget director David Stockman who blamed a "noisy faction of Republicans" for Reagan's infamous tax cut and the debacle that followed. Reagan might have achieved the prosperity that Keynes had predicted. That might have happened had his policies rewarded the working and middle classes instead of the rich and idle elites. Fact is --Ronnie was owned! The government is owned! The MIC is owned! We are owned! We are slaves to a system that may be beyond out ability to reform short of revolution.

The Reagan-heads forgot that the wealth of a nation is the result of the 'work' that is done by its people --not the 'offshore investments' of an utterly worthless, idle leisure class.

The US economy has entered into a contraction not seen since 1929. Private and public payrolls combined have shrunk for 14 straight months. Just recently, the US economy lost some 650,000 jobs over a period of four months. At the time, I asked: why had not GWB's bailouts worked? Obviously, as was the case with Reagan's 'voodoo economics', the wrong people got the money. Most certainly, the wrong people continue to get the money. The wrong 'people' were bailed out. The wrong people still get rich. You still get poorer whether you still have a job or not.

There was no Reagan recovery!

The record shows that the growth rate was 3% between 1979 and 1989 --the same as the growth rate between 1973 and 1979! There was, then, no improvement with "voodoo economics" than without it. Did Reagan's tax cuts bring about more growth than would have normally occurred? Of course not! The opposite occurred. The GOP/right wing is happy when you swallow whatever they puke up.

Worth repeating:

The opposite occurred. The record shows that the growth rate was 3% between 1979 and 1989 --the same as the growth rate between 1973 and 1979! There was, then, no improvement with "voodoo economics" than without it.

There was no Reagan recovery. Punch out the next gopper who tries to tell you that there was. Wealth did not trickle down! Rather, wealth has continued to be transferred upward to about one percent of the total population. Recently, the bailouts just wound up in the wrong hands and may have made matters worse! As Santayana said: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it!"

I am inclined to believe that this transfer was deliberate, planned and executed. It abated only briefly in Clinton's second term. That is but one reason Clinton is officially and systematically demonized and reviled. I have my own problems with Clinton, that is, he did not go far enough. But everything said about Clinton by Republicans are lies! Likewise, I have problems with Obama --but everything said about him by Republicans can be dismissed summarily.

The rise of Ronald Reagan brought with it a spreading of wealth upward to the upper classes and Wall Street insiders, in fact, an increasingly tiny elite of just one percent of the nation which owns more than 90 percent of the nation's total wealth. That fact is graphically illustrated above. The result is factually documented by the government's own agencies --Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Commerce-BEA, et al. Income inequality is measured by what economists call the GINI index. The higher the GINI, the greater the inequality. These numbers, recognized and cited by economists from Friedman to Krugman, from Keynes to Galbraith, invariably increase during GOP regimes.

Now --as the late Steve Kangas pointed out, 'conservatives' will claim that correlation is not 'causation'. I think conservatives are wrong on that point, but if, in fact, GINIS always go up under GOP regimes, what difference does it make? The pragmatic solution is simply this: fire the GOP! Permanently! We cannot afford to continue to support both the GOP and its elite, pampered, privileged sponsors in business, industry and government. See more about 'income inequalities' at: What do liberals believe about income inequality? Also: Myth: The rich get rich because of merit. The rich get rich because they are born rich and get obscene tax cuts for producing nothing.

There are many parallels with the American economy of the 1920s. The economy was booming but by 1927 the nation had overproduced goods for which there was no market. Overproduction led to a slowdown in both manufacturing and agriculture. This is evidence --if not proof --that 'trickle down/supply side' economics is a deliberate right wing fraud. Transferring monies to manufacturers that are over-produced is economic disaster. Why should a capitalist get a tax cut for producing product that cannot and will not be sold? Wealth does not 'trickle down', rather, it is transferred to tax heavens offshore. Clearly --a bailout for big banks is a mistake that will continue to have the effect of reducing the supply of money in circulation --a 'contraction'. The so-called 'Great Depression' was, in fact, a great contraction in which those who would have spent monies were deprived of it.

During the Great Depression and, later, Ronald Reagan's depression of about two years, millions lost their jobs. Earlier, in 1929, bankers and financiers continued to speculate on stocks, borrowing the money and buying stocks 'on margin'. More recently, 'short sellers' made fortunes that you can rest assured have already been transferred into offshore tax havens.

The wealth of a nation is not the money it prints, borrows or coins. The wealth of a nation is the productivity of its people and their industries. Both declined under Reagan and declined again under Bush and declined yet again under the other Bush!

One wonders why Reagan didn't just cut out the middle man. A more equitable tax cut or better a more progressive tax might have put more spendable income directly into the hands of consumers. Spent money circulates and drives an economy. That consumers spend money seems to be a fact lost on the likes of Reagan, Bush, and the nation's rich and callous elites.

Surely, there were knowledgeable advisers in Reagan's regime who knew better. The tax cut, therefore, was entirely political, a pay off to the rich for their support, or more precisely, their investment! Nothing has changed in the GOP. The Bush administration has made several such "payoffs" during his catastrophic and criminal regime.

The 'contraction' of an economy is typically called a 'depression'. The US economy is contracting due to

• the transfer of wealth to but about one percent of the population;
• this 'elite' has transferred most of its wealth offshore where it has absolutely no good effect on the domestic US economy.

The current collapse of the US is the end result of a trend that was begun with the passage of Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut for his rich, elite base. The year was 1982. Historians willl write of that date that it was the beginning of the end of the American empire.

---

Texas is 'number one' in executions, murders, children in poverty, industrial pollution

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Texas recently beat Mississippi in a race to dead last in high school graduations. At the same time, Texas may 'boast' that it is 'number one' in executions, number 'one' in the number of children living in poverty, number one the number of murders per one thousand persons, number one in various forms of industrial pollution! Number one in the race to bottom.

I had toyed with headlining this piece: 'Why Capitalism Must be Eliminated and Replaced'. But the answer was too obvious: Texas! Texas will have proven Marx correct about almost everything! Marx was certainly correct about the source of 'value' in any economic system. He was most certainly correct about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy. Texas is the best evidence Marx didn't live long enough to cite.

Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and Hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system. Texas is about 50 years behind the times in this regard.

Texas is a state in which so-called 'free enterprise' has robbed millions of children of a decent education and as many poor of justice in a state ruled by elites. As a result of so-called 'free enterprise':

• Texas/Bush syle provides the residents of Texas with some of the nation's very worst crime and incarceration rates;
• Texas subjects the residents of Texas to deteriorating air quality and wanton ecosystem destruction;
• Texas can boast of the the nation's very worst murder, crime and incarceration rates!
• Texas --a state that now leads the nation in pollution, crime, and illiteracy --should be studied by any other state wishing to avoid a similar distastrous fate.

Surreal Scenes from a State in Terminal Denial

Recently --Texas Gov Rick Perry's boisterous audience of schizoid idiots were caught waving US flags even as they shouted: SECEDE! Clearly, a result of the monumental failure of Texas to educate its young. It is a lapse of values! It is as well an utter failure of policy and budget priorities resulting in Texas' utter and humiliating failure to educate its younger generations. Nevertheless, Perry is said to have 'fired up an anti-tax tea party with an old Southern mantra: 'states' rights'. I say 'state's right' is old-time, old South bigotry. 'State's rights' is a wake up call to a black community that was denied in Texas the promise of Dr. Martin Luther King's struggles.

I doubt that this so-called 'tea party' was exceptionally stupid! It was, rather, typically stupid, based on a profound and growing ignorance of economics, history, and recent headlines. The 'tea-parties' are an obvious result of Texas' proven inability to educate its young! Perry was whistling past the graveyard with a tired old tune: "...the Texas' economy is in good shape compared with other states" and "...the federal budget mess"

Is it?

No!

Texas is, rather, out of oil and out of time. Like the US, as a whole, one is hard pressed to name a single viable industry since the East Texas and, later, the West Texas oil fields failed to compete with Middle Eastern oil. Before the oil boom, Texas was a farm and ranch economy. Without oil or its equal, Texas will be fortunate if it makes a peaceful transition to a farm and ranch economy. Indeed, the nation --having exported its auto, steel and electronic industries during the Reagan years --will be fortunate to survive as a farm and ranch economy. It will be fortunate because the conduct of farming and ranching has been taken over by the huge monopolies. In simpler times, a family might survive a downturn or even a financial collapse by living off the land. Today --there is, perhaps, no land left that might be homesteaded and everywhere poor people are deprived of the means by which they may survive or make an honest living.

Gore Vidal, meanwhile, foresees a US bankruptcy putting an end to what he called 'insane wars'. He is correct about the insanity of US wars in particular. In the end, however, bankruptcy will be even costlier as a direct result of 'reagonomics'. That is, only one percent of the nation owns more than about 90 percent of the rest of us combined. Only these elites benefit from wars of aggression and oil theft.

Any person not a 'member' of this tiny one percent pays for US wars with his/her life or with higher taxes as a percentage of his/her income. The elites pay absolutely nothing!War is, in fact, the elites' bread and butter. There is a good living to be made with war, a killing, in fact! The elites are the sole beneificiaries of US wars, adventures and land grabs. These elites --for whom war is most often fought --will eagerly sacrifice the lives of every young man or woman not carrying their seed; they will, likewise, finance upon the backs and futures of the unborn poor numerous wars of aggression from which only they benefit. It is a form of eugenics that numerous famous Americans notoriously supported.

A bankruptcy for America will be a very, very hard crash from which there may be no bounce as there had been during the FDR administration. Later, a GOP President, Ronald Reagan, would preside over what had been at that time, the biggest, longest, deepest depression since the crash of '29. Yet --the nation recovered under a Democrat, Bill Clinton, demonized and hated for having dared undo the harm that had been done by Ronald Reagan.

Texas is the Number Backwater in Education: Another Idiotic Idea

The school board in this impoverished rural hamlet in North Texas has drawn national attention with its decision to let some teachers carry concealed weapons, a track no other school in the country has followed. The idea is to ward off a massacre along the lines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.

“Our people just don’t want their children to be fish in a bowl,” said David Thweatt, the schools superintendent and driving force behind the policy. “Country people are take-care-of-yourself people. They are not under the illusion that the police are there to protect them.”

Even in Texas, with its tradition of lenient gun laws and frontier justice, the idea of teachers’ taking guns to class has rattled some people and sparked a fiery debate.

Gun-control advocates are wringing their hands, while pro-gun groups are gleeful. Leaders of the state’s major teachers unions have expressed stunned outrage, while the conservative Republican governor, Rick Perry, has endorsed the idea.

--In Texas School, Teachers Carry Books and Guns, New York Times

Texas Is No. One; Leads the Nation in Executions

When Justice Byron White wrote the Enmund decision in 1982, he observed that the Court was not aware of a single execution of someone who did not kill or intend to kill. What a difference another quarter-century makes. Months after Enmund was decided, Texas executed its first prisoner since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In the tidal wave of capital cases that followed, numerous defendants would be sentenced to die under the law of parties.

One was Norman Green. Green was charged for a murder during a botched robbery in an electronics store in 1985. He got death. His accomplice, the man who actually pulled the trigger, got life. The arbitrary result exemplifies what Green's appellate lawyer, Verna Langham -- who also handled Kenneth Foster's first appeal -- sees as the danger of the law of parties. "[It] is subject to such loose interpretation," she told the Austin Chronicle in 2005. "A kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people can end up being sentenced to death." Green was executed in 1999.

--Alternet, Innocent Man Sentenced to Death Under Cruel Texas Law

Everything's big in Texas — big pickup trucks, big SUVs and the state's big carbon footprint, too.

Texans' fondness for large, manly vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation.

The headquarters state of America's oil industry spewed 670 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2003, enough that Texas would rank seventh in the world if it were its own country, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The amount is more than that of California and Pennsylvania — the second- and third-ranking states — combined.

A multitude of factors contribute to the carbon output, among them: Texas' 19 coal-burning power plants; a heavy concentration of refineries and chemical plants; a lack of mass transit; and a penchant among ranchers and urban cowboys alike for brawny, gas-guzzling trucks — sometimes to haul things, but often just to look Texas tough.

Debbie Howden, an Austin real estate agent, said her family of six has two pickup trucks, three SUVs, and no apologies. "I would definitely put size and safety over the emissions thing," said Howden, 55. She calls their high fuel bills a "necessary evil."

--Texas Is Biggest Carbon Polluter

Ten large companies generate more than one third of the 2.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted each year by U.S. electric power generators, according to figures in a first-of-its-kind database unveiled Wednesday.

American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, and Southern Co. of Atlanta, which run the largest coal power plants in the country, top the list of U.S. companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, according to data compiled by the Center for Global Development, a global economic development think tank in Washington, D.C.

The database, called CARMA or Carbon Monitoring for Action, culls for the first time data both from government regulators around the world and commercial databases to provide an up-to-date look at the state of CO2 from power production—which accounts for one quarter of all carbon emissions. (The database doesn't look at other large sources, like transportation and manufacturing.) Here are the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in the United

--The 10 Biggest Carbon Dioxide Polluters

The fascist corporatization of state prisons makes a slick end run, perhaps a 'triple option', around the Bill of Rights, sets up crony corporations with a guaranteed gravy train at tax payer expense, and --to sweeten the deal --it provides them with slave labor. Bill Yeoman nor Darrel Royal could have done better on the gridiron.

It is no accident that under Gov George W. Bush, Texas beat out Mississippi for 'dead last' in education. As education declines, crime increases. Increasing crime fuels the corporate prison gravy train. Justice has nothing to do with it.

It's about warehousing and enslaving people for profit

There is nothing in the middle ages half so slick, so cunning, so evil! Unless the nation wakes up to what happened in Texas, the nation will enter not just an economic depression but a new dark age, perhaps an end to civilization as we know it. We already share with the middle ages, a careless disregard for life. In Texas, the crime rate has increased as the prison systems --under Bush Jr --went corporate! As a result, one in 100 Texas residents are in prison, many of them 'corporate' lock ups in which prisoners have no rights. As Texas took the GOP/fascist prison route, education tanked --a recipe for future unemployment, poverty and increased crime.

I see a pattern

Declining education guarantees that unemployment, poverty, and crime will rise. Declining education likewise guarantees a risk free income for the evil corporations who run the state's corporate gulag with no-bid contracts! As long as the quality of public education declines, two groups will benefit: the corporate owned prisons and expensive private schools affordable only to the very, very rich and/or privileged. I was naive to believe that everyone was entitled to an education. I was naive to believe that education was not just another status symbol as was Yale to Bush.

The GOP runs states like Bush ran the war of aggression against Iraq. State prisons are just another money making opportunity, as was Iraq for the likes of Dick Cheney's Halliburton and professional thugs like Blackwater. And 'education' is just another area in which everyone but about one percent of the population is priced out.

My assertions are backed up by a recent Pew study of trends that had been embraced by Bush's Texas, primarily the rapid outsourcing of prison construction and management throughout the US. As in Texas, crime rates over the period under study increased. Guilt or innocence is of no concern to corporate robber barons.

For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study. During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.

As prison populations expand, costs to states are on the rise. Last year alone, states spent more than $49 billion on corrections, up from $11 billion 20 years before. However, the national recidivism rate remains virtually unchanged, with about half of released inmates returning to jail or prison within three years. And while violent criminals and other serious offenders account for some of the growth, many inmates are low-level offenders or people who have violated the terms of their probation or parole.

--More than One in 100 Adults Are Behind Bars, Pew Study Finds

It is an Orwellian nightmare of waste, graft, and fascism in which no one is held to account. It is a corporate 'gravy train', reliving elected officials of almost every responsibility that government is traditionally and rightfully accorded. It's a scheme, a legalized payoff, a 'good living' for those profiting from incompetent and irresponsible government.

As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even the industrialized application of the death penalty cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may one day cite this fact in support of a "final solution".

...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:

• There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
• According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.
• The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
• Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
• If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
• The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
• The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.

  --An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

The lessons of the recent 'downturn' are lost on the 'mainstream media'! Owned by some some five or six like thinking conglomerates, the MSM is the last place one should expect to find the truth. For example, the MSM will never tell you that Karl Marx was absolutely correct! Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

If we divided the income of the US into thirds, we find that the top ten percent of the population gets a third, the next thirty percent gets another third, and the bottom sixty percent get the last third. If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest. (Actually, these percentages, true a decade ago, are now out of date. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.

--David Schwikerd, After Capitalism

Schwikerd suggests that 'economic freedom' and 'capitalism' are just as incompatible as Karl Marx has already stated. Schwikerd proposes, therefore, that we eliminate capitalism because capitalists, he says, are consistently bad for democracy. Contrary to what you may hear on FOX news and other symptoms of this failed system, Schwikerd holds that the US can, in fact, must eliminate the class of 'capitalists' who have transfered the product of US labor i.e, the very wealth of this nation upward to but about one percent of the entire population.

Diehards will object that despite the growing divide between obscene wealth on the one hand and abysmal poverty on the other, the US is still a 'land of opportunity'. That is just not true, and perhaps never was.

If the data were to show, for example, that many families were likely to move from the bottom fifth of the income distribution to the top over time, or that children of wealthy families might switch places with middle-class kids when they became adults, then one could conclude that the benefits of growth were more broadly shared than suggested by the profound inequality displayed in the snapshots of Chapter 1.

The evidence, however, does not find this degree of mobility. Of course, some families do move up and down the income scales, but most maintain their relative positions, meaning that relative to other families in their cohort, they remain at or near the income or wealth position in which they started out. For example, one recent study finds that about 60% of families that start in the bottom fifth are still there a decade later. At the other end of the income scale, 52% of families that start in the top fifth finish there at the end of the decade.

--The State of Working America [ PDF ]

Why Karl Marx was Right and Republicans are Just Plain Stupid

How is wealth re-distributed?

• The rich elites pay less as a percentage of their income because they have write-offs and dodges that you do not;
• The rich pay much, much less as a percentage of their total income just staying alive;

As the L-curve demonstrates, most of you reading this article may never find yourself occupying a house costing some one or two million dollars or more. Those in the elite one percent, however, may have several much more expensive houses the total value of which is but a small percentage of total income, an even smaller percentage of total wealth. Should you secure a mortgage for a five hundred thousand dollar house, you should ask yourself what is the value of that house as a percentage of your total income, total net worth? What is the value of that house as a percentage of Bill Gate' total income? Minuscule! Life on a curve is skewed!

Marx adopted Hegel's 'dialectic' substituting 'realism' for 'idealism'. Marx's use of the 'dialectic' was not to explain the world in metaphysical terms but, rather, to makes sense of history. The result is an economic assessment in which Marx interprets history in terms that make sense to biologists: a struggle for survival. Like Darwinists, Marx believes that it is this 'struggle for survival' that determines the nature of societal evolution. The history of humankind is reduced to a class struggle, how one class' exploits another, how 'capital' exploits 'labor', how 'elites' enrich themselves upon the 'value' that is created by acts of labor and labor alone.

Marx saw no other solution but a workers revolution to overthrow the ruling capitalists, to establish a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Marx foresaw and described a return to a 'classless' society at the end of an economic cataclysm that would lead inexorably to the communal ownership of the means of production.

So --it is no wonder, then, that the likes of George W. Bush, the leadership of the GOP, the elite robber barons of big business have 'labored' mightily to demonize and discredit the words and concept: 'class warfare'. They are frightened little wimps! I say: "bring it on"

If the ruling elites are incorrect about everything, they must surely be terrified of a world wide revolution that will inexorably and inevitably sweep aside their house o'cards at the end of an economic tsunami.

The GOP has supported and effected outright transfers of wealth from all Americans to an increasingly tiny percentage of the US population. There is but one word for this: THEFT! [See: 'Greed is Good': The Death of an Economic Religion]

Although the US economy produces tremendous wealth, it is always accompanied in GOP regimes by tremendous poverty. The US, for example, was most egalitarian in the years immediately following WWII. During GOP regimes, income inequality increased as measured with the GINI index. Higher Ginis indicate greater levels of income inequality. These indices have been significantly greater in every GOP regime since World War II.

Certainly --there is enough wealth to go around. Instead, wealth flows upward ---not down, as the propagandists of 'supply side' i.e. 'trickle down theory' would have you believe. The problem is systemic --the result of identifiable, right wing policies.

The primary culprits are GOP tax cuts by Mssrs Ronald Reagan and Bush; the effect of those cuts have been the deliberate transfer of wealth first to the upper quintile and, most recently, to an increasingly tiny elite of about one percent of the total population [See: Dr. Daniel Weinberger, US Census Bureau Briefings; Also see: The Quarterly Journal of Economics: Income Inequality in the United States at the following. It's a PDF and cites academic and official, original sources of data.]

The financial collapse of the US is tragic enough but complicated by the fact that Bush stole your money in order to commit capital crimes --crimes for which he could be executed when found guilty as charged. There is a place in the dock for Bush. [See: US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441]

The GOP hopes to deflect attention from its traditional marching orders. The GOP raison d'etre is simply this: pass tax cuts and other measures that enrich only the ruling elites far beyond what they might have achieved solely on merit. IF you are NOT among the top one percent of the nation, the GOP has ROBBED you under the rubric of "cutting taxes".

Wealth does not originate with rich people.

Thanks to GOP policies which, in fact, concentrate wealth at the top, there are increasingly FEWER 'small business' people because small business can no longer compete with HUGE corporations favored by the GOP. There are no more Bedford Falls. The GOP has a vested interest in keeping the truth from the American people. The truth is: wealth does not originate with rich people. Every economist --even right wing economists like Milton Friedman --subscribe to an established principle --the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value has been the basis for almost every major economic theory since Aristotle.

The GOP believes the opposite. The GOP would have you believe that capital creates wealth. Think about it --if wealth had been created by the rich and, indeed, trickled down, the GOP would never feel 'compelled' to pursue its unfair tax policies which are, in fact, the source of their wealth. If what the GOP tells you is true, the wealthy would have already been wealthy. The term 'nouveau riche' would be an oxymoron. The official statistics prove beyond any reasonable doubt that GOP tax policies have enriched an increasingly small percentage of the total US population. It only makes sense to support 'trickle down' economics if, in fact, wealth does not trickle down. The GOP pursues unfair tax policies because wealth does not and has never 'trickled down'. Wealth trickles up and the government always taxes it at its source, its creation! Its 'creation' is the act of labor itself. Government, therefore, puts an unfair 'tax' upon this 'labor' and transfers the proceeds to an elite that has done nothing to create it and, in fact, does nothing to deserve it.

Lower and working classes, therefore, pay more than their fair share of taxes. The government taxes labor and gives capital a free ride, a recipe for an impending economic collapse, a collapse that appears to be well underway and quite beyond anyone's power or ability to stop. But that has not stopped the government from playing it's well-rehearsed role as the shakedown arm of the nation's tiny and shrinking elite.

If because of GOP transfers of unearned wealth to the increasingly tiny elite of about one percent of the population, labor is unproductive or impoverished the productivity of the nation will decline and ultimately collapse. That is what we see happening as I write this. The poor are increasingly denied decent housing or food because elites have bid up prices on commodities. If you can no longer afford decent housing, health care or food, you have then, perhaps recently under Bush, fallen off the ladder. It's the GOP way.

During the booming, Democratic sixties, a distinguished economist had written that there were increasingly fewer 'status symbols' available to millionaires that were not also available to anyone earning 20 thousand dollars per year. In those days, a 30 thousand dollar home was a two-story, four bedroom, two car garage affair, perhaps on a cul-de-sac, and it may or may not have come with a pool. Have you shopped for a similar home lately?

Social Darwinism is one of many ideas that have harmed mankind. Social Darwinism is an idea that has harmed mankind by providing a rationalization for the perpetual and deliberate impoverishment of large segments of our society. It does so insidiously with a baseless theory that is not only fallaciously associated with Darwin, it is a 'theory' for which there is no evidence.

In simpler terms, the philosophical basis for the American right wing is this:

"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? Then let them die and decrease the surplus population."

—Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

In those categories and thanks to the GOP, Texas is NUMBER ONE!

Addendum

"It's Like A Whole Other Country"

--EyeSpy

Welcome to the third world. Texas has nothing over the rest of the nation. We will soon be living under a freeway overpass eating cat food while our volunteer military gets its ass kicked to protect our right to eat cat food.

--blufin

Isn't democracy great?

--Nighthawk

Found quoted on the Barefoot Bum:

Folly, thou conquest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

— Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans (translated by Anna Swanwick)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ6mje5etlc
The Texas Criminal INJUSTICE System!

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