Shoveling Shit in Louisiana?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The mantra du jour is that Obama hasn't undone 'Bush'. Ergo --Obama is just as evil as is Bush, or Bush Sr, or Ronald Reagan. Not so and not possible! The false analogy misses the point, a strategy designed to deflect attention from the endemic corruption of the right wing party --the GOP; It is a false analogy that might have been tested in a focus group on K-Street. It has certainly caught on as have many another 'successful' mantra, slogan, or buzzword. And it's just as worthless!

One of my recent critics had clearly caught the 'but Obama is just as bad as Bush' virus and posted the following comment:

I used to really enjoy your blog when W was in the White house - most of your commentary was spot on (except for the part about Bush being an idiot - I don't give damn who his father is, the USAF does NOT let morons fly jet fighter planes)

Flying an airplane is not evidence of political genius. I have known lots of pilots and would not trust one of them to run the nation, supervise a federal budget or negotiate a peace with a nuclear power. The idea that Bush was smart enough to be prez because he could fly a plane is idiotic.

A 'Democrat' is in the White House! But WHAT has changed? Are we out of Iraq? Is the government no longer owned by the Axis of K-Street and the M.I.C.? Did anyone suspect that the mere election of someone whose campaign was financed by the ruling elite of just one percent of the nation would suddenly decide, upon his election, to release their choke hold?

Where can I can find that press release to that effect.

Yes, they're criminals, but O has continued virtually every criminal republican policy instituted by W. And anyone failing to hold the current president accountable, is no better than the GOP slime who enabled Bush to get away with murder.

At last, I am sick and tired of trying to explain to people that Democrats are just another wing of a single right wing party --the capitalist party aka the fat cat party! It's the only party in the U.S. that wins elections. The system is so skewed that their bets are covered whomever wins the election. Get a clue, folk!

Both parties are financed by the same capitalists, a ruling one percent of the total population, a group --in fact --created and enriched by right wing GOP policies --not Democratic policies. While both parties line up for monies from the same source, Democrats get less. It is but a sop!

Many whine about O. But where is the revolution? Who is going to do anything about it? Who is going to put up or shut up?

NO ONE!

Many have missed the REAMS of cold hard stats that prove that of the two, the GOP is endemically evil while the Dems reduced to sloppy seconds, merely tolerated for appearances. Who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

Wealth and power are concentrated in America, a trend begun, in earnest, with the end of the Civil War. Labor lost its most important battle in 1910 in Los Angeles. It lost a FINAL battle under Ronald Reagan --a Republican whose administration must bear the responsibility for the most recent trend of income and wealth disparities. That record is available to anyone willing to search the archives of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department-B.E.A. But --who is going to do anything about that?

NO ONE!

A 'progressive history' is obviously neglected in public school curricula. So-called modern 'progressives' in name only come up with a whiny: "...but Obama hasn't changed anything!" My response to them is: well, what the fuck have you done lately?

In the early days of the 20th Century, real progressives were willing to fight for what they believed in and many suffered head cracks and broken bodies because of it. Modern progressives will whine about Obama but none --I daresay --are wiling to pay the price required to effect a real change. And no one in the 'Obama is just as bad' camp has a plan, a strategy, a frickin' clue! No one wants to get his/her head cracked, or shot to death as was the case at Kent State in the 60s. I'm not happy with Obama but wasting time and energy blasting Obama while the 'real killers' maintain power over every aspect of our lives is just plain stupid. I have no respect for and would never go into battle with any S.O.B. who is not smart enough to know who the real enemy is!

Bloggers may be forgiven their impatience when no one seems to pay attention, when the MSM gets thousands of 'gross rating points' with a single airing of just 30 seconds on prime time and every blogger I know (myself included) gets but a fraction of that over a period of eight years or more. That's how long it took to be rid of Bush and --still --the message has not gotten through. Fact is, we failed! Bush served out his term and has not yet been tried for 911, Abu Ghraib, or war crimes and crimes against humanity throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan. I wonder, how much good has blogging done but for the 'feel good' factor among bloggers and those who read them.

Who created this situation? Democrats??? No --the concentration of media in the hands of just four or five major corporations is the result of Ronald Reagan policies and I can prove it. And Ronald Reagan --last time I checked --was not a Democrat at the time he was Prez. Reagan was, in fact, a Democrat but only before his official corruption. The concentration of wealth among a ruling elite of just one percent began with Ronald Reagan and his policies. I have proven this with the government's own stats time and again over the last ten years or more. Yet another article may be read by a few, perhaps hundreds or even a thousand. Fox will reach that many in a less than a minute and that many again in another minute. In the course of one hour, the Fox audience of millions will have 'turned over' many times. Each turn-over is called a 'cume'; it's measurable.

Of my 'critic', I ask: what do you want to hear? What do you want me to write or say? What makes you feel better about yourself? What makes you feel better about living in the fall of empire --a fall that is directly the result of right wing policies! Not Democratic ones.

It is symptomatic that only two Democratic candidates espoused anything resembling a 'progressive' platform: Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. That's because Democrats must raise even more money than GOP incumbents if they wish to unseat them --monies that come from the same well-heeled sources. Such monies finding their way into a Democratic coffer are a hedged bet. It is not really intended to win him/her the seat! Think of it as insurance.

Neither Gravel or Kucinich had a chance of becoming President and I took heat --liberal (progressive) heat --because I dared say so. I was misunderstood. I was not criticizing either Gravel or Kucinich but the evil, corrupt system that kept either man out of the White House. I was, rather, pointing up the inequities, the built-in institutionalized unfairness. I was damning a skewed and phony hologram of right wing creation!

Raising the kind of money it takes to win the Presidency requires a sell-out, a Faustian bargain, the sale of souls to the Axis of K-street and the MIC, a sacrifice to Moloch. So --sure --Obama is compromised. It goes without saying! That he 'won' is evidence of it. That's what we've come to; that's what our nation has become: a periodic auction of the offices of government! But it is not Obama's fault. It is an endemic evil that must be addressed and changed and carping about Obama 'ain't' making it. Carping about Obama utterly misses the point! I suggest 'progressives' read Shakespeare and, by doing, prove to conservatives that a progressive education is money well spent:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Does anyone really think that these BIG BUCKS come from the grassroots? Haven't the American people figured out by now that the ruling elite of just one percent --created by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr primarily --is not going to fund a progressive like Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich --both smart, honest men? Personal attacks on Obama are, therefore, stupid and counter-productive and help ensure that the system that kept kept Kucinich and/or Gravel out of contention will maintain the crooked status quo. And if either Kucinich or Gravel had won, what would they have done, what could they have done that Obama has not? What miracles might have occurred that would have undone an accretion of bureaucratic infrastructure spanning some 50 years or more?

Of my critic, I asked: would it make you feel better if I said the Axis of K-Street/MIC no longer existed? Would it make you feel better about yourself if I scolded Obama for having been bought by the same cabal that bought Bush JR? Would it make you feel better if I raised some other strawman, some other distraction while the real crooks finish off the rape of Iraq, Afghanistan or --for that matter --the rape of the American people by robber barons and an elite of just 1 percent of the total population?

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and wrote --in the spirit of equal time --that the MIC was created by Obama? It was not!

Would it make you feel better if I lied and said that Obama was as stupid as Bush JR? He is not! And I won't say that he is!

Would it make you feel better about yourself if I lied and stated that it was really Democrats or Obama who plotted with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq?

Would you feel better about living in the last days of American empire if I wrote that Obama had sat in on GOP planning sessions in which he conspired with them to transfer wealth to just one percent of the U.S. population? Clue: he didn't! And I will not lie and say he did! So --just get off this 'Obama is just as bad' shit!

I don't buy it!

But Ronald Reagan may have and if he didn't his evil minions did, the same evil minions who sold out to the Axis of K-street/MIC, the modern Moloch, the system! His tax cut of 1982 enriched only the upper quintile and everyone else lost ground. It was a payoff to Reagan's base, later Bush's base. The same guys. Am I supposed to lie about that in the interest of 'equal time'? Am I supposed to say that The Democrats were just as bad as Reagan in spite of the fact that the trend that was thus begun reversed in the Clinton administration and, clearly, as a result of Clinton's democratic policies?

Did it ever occur to Clinton's progressive critics, that it was the GOP who ramrodded his impeachment; it was the GOP who told every lie and pulled off every dirty trick to get him OUT of the White House? Would the GOP have bothered to do that had he failed? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton were really no different than the crooks of the GOP? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had really been doing their bidding? Would the GOP have bothered if Clinton had been a GOP plant as is often said of Obama because he's black? And why have so many said that Clinton was 'America's first black President?' I am convinced that it was floated up by a GOP consulting firm whose focus group results discovered that closet bigots thought it funny! I say that based upon my experiences 'inside' GOP consulting firms. I learned how the sonsobitches think!

I used to think goppers were stupid! Lately, whenever I heard the 'dems are just as bad' argument that I begin to understand how the GOP always manages to outsmart the progressives. Hence my advice to progressives: quit being stupid! Learn to identify catch phrases and slogans --memes --that most certainly originate in GOP right wing think tanks and focus groups! Unless you do, you will ensure the election of another GOP, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and you will regret it for the rest of your sorry fucking lives!

If I could reverse the GOP trend of wealth upward, I would happily procure blow jobs for Clinton! I frankly don't gave a damn and have no interest in what he does with his wang on his own time. It was another distraction that kept 'progressives' and 'Dems' occupied while GOP power brokers plotted to steal Iraqi oil as soon as they could get 'their man' in the White House. Now --I know a thing or two about the oil business. There is not a Democrat to be found in the executive offices of any of them. If you think you know one, please send me his email address or phone number. I would like to know why he has turned down all the offers he must have gotten for his very soul! Everyone else has sold out long ago!

There are no articles to be written about 'lessers' of two evils and I am not inspired to write one. Obama is neither the creator of the frickin' disaster he inherited nor --sadly, realistically --will he be the savior that undoes it all. That's just the way it is. So --I ask my critic --does it make you feel better about yourself and the Kafkaesque situation in which you have found yourself awakened as a cockroach to take it out on a blogger who has not made a goddamned dime on this blog nor taken a goddamned dime from the MIC/K-STREET axis? No one owns me! And if you had brain, you would focus your misplaced frustration on 1) someone who gives a shit what you think; and 2) some one who could do something about it from inside the DC bureaucracy. Clearly --if I were in a position to wave a wand, I would have done so years ago and spared myself the grief.

What makes you feel better about yourself?

Perhaps, I should write some crap about how Obama is just as stupid as Bush Jr! Forget it! If that's what makes you feel better, you're outta luck cause I will not sacrifice an ounce of intellectual integrity to assuage a fragile, progressive ego.

In the meantime, it would help if the American people would could break out of their matrix. Just turn off the stupid TV! READ! Throw a rock through Big Bro's telescreen! Just say NO! Turn off FOX! Turn off CNN! Stop repeating the stale, stock phrases that pass for analysis! Wake the fuck up! De-hynotize yourself! Get a brain!

And then --when the empire falls, you will have at least learned the source of your demise. Or --to paraphrase Gen Patton to his troops --when your grand children ask you what you did during the fall of the 'great' American Empire, you won't have to say 'Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana!"

Right about now --a lot of Obama detractors are just shoveling shit and totally missing the point!

See: For the GOP If You're Not in the Top One Percent You Can Drop Dead!

Saul Alinsky's Legacy

Bill 0'Reilly's 19th Nervous Break Down Rapped (What an Idiot!!)

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

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

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The Last Honest Republican?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Dwight David Eisenhower, familiarly called 'Ike', may very well have been the last honest Republican. As both General and President, Eisenhower held his positions in 'good faith'; he was not a 'crook'.

Bertolt Brecht had said: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook." By that standard, Nixon. the progenitor of the modern Republican who lies to conceal his/her true position, was a crook. When Nixon said 'I am not a crook', we knew he was one.

Arguably a great general, it was  Ike who supervised the allied forces landing in Normandy in preparation for the final assault on Hitler's Third Reich, Eisenhower made the best case for world peace, putting forward five 'precepts' in what is often called the 'Cross of Iron Speech'. Tragically, Eisenhower's five principles have been hypocritically eschewed. It is symptomatic that the GOP leadership fell to the likes of Nixon, Reagan. Bush Sr and the Shrub --all of whom failed the economy, failed the people, failed the Constitution. All were crooks who whored themselves to the Military-Industrial Complex that Ike had warned about. The GOP has been crooked ever since.

In that spring of victory the soldiers of the Western Allies met the soldiers of Russia in the center of Europe. They were triumphant comrades in arms. Their peoples shared the joyous prospect of building, in honor of their dead, the only fitting monument-an age of just peace. All these war-weary peoples shared too this concrete, decent purpose: to guard vigilantly against the domination ever again of any part of the world by a single, unbridled aggressive power.

This common purpose lasted an instant and perished. The nations of the world divided to follow two distinct roads. The United States and our valued friends, the other free nations, chose one road. The leaders of the Soviet Union chose another. The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

• First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
• Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only ineffective cooperation with fellow-nations.
• Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
• Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
• And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

In the light of these principles the citizens of the United States defined the way they proposed to follow, through the aftermath of war, toward true peace.

--Cross of Iron Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.

It is not my position that I agree with every thing Ike did or said nor is it my purpose in this short article to analyze his every position with respect to a world view or my values in particular. It is, rather, important to point out that people of 'good faith' may disagree honorably. That Nixon failed the standards Ike lived up to defined the course of U.S. history and showed us a glimpse of a demise that we may very well be experiencing now.

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Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Ronald Reagan was already a 'grandfather' figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: 'Well....there ya' go again!' In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan's empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember --not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long 'depression' which left millions homeless, not the act of 'high treason' called Iran/Contra.

Reagan was no friend of the poor, the working class, the cities. On numerous occassions, Reagan would offer up his own version of 'let them eat cake'. Reagan implied that the poor were lazy and welfare recipients 'crazy'. He invented --full cloth --a 'welfare Grandma' who drove a cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Many reputable journalists tried to find this 'welfare cheat'! None succeeded! At last, they were forced to admit that this infamous 'welfare cheat' did not exist. She was either one Reagan's bald-faced lies or one of his many psychotic delusions. I will be charitable to Reagan's memory. She did not exist! Reagan was not nuts, he was just a common, goddamned liar! Tragically, the image stuck. Reagan might have known it would. The lasting image of the 'Cadillac driving' cheat was behind the 1996 'welfare reform law' which the GOP stuck on Clinton who, to his shame, signed. It demonstrates the power of the 'big lie' technique which the GOP clearly learned from Hitler.

Of aids victims, he might as well have said what he really believed: 'let them die and decrease the surplus population!'. Reagan is evidence if not proof that evil is what Nuremberg psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert said it was: 'the utter lack of empathy!'.

Recessions, like the one following Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut of 1982, harm workers. American recessions, like periods of prosperity, are inequitable in their effects, harming wage earners at the outset and paying off a tiny elite on tax day. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter confirmed as much when he compared recessions to a "cleansing douche", a characterization that lifelong goppers must surely apply to everyone but themselves and their country club cronies.

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," former Sen. John Edwards shot back at an event in Henderson, Nevada.

"He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country...He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."Edwards added, "I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

Washington Post, Obama's Reagan Comparison Sparks Debate

When I think about what Ronald Reagan did to this nation, I think of how he struck at and perhaps killed-off a viable labor movement. I think about how middle class families made homeless lived under bridges and overpasses in boomtown Houston. I think about how Reagan, like Bush, waged a phony war on terrorism during which terrorist attacks increased some three fold. I think about how Ed Meese waged a war on porn even as a gay prostitution ring operated right out of the White House. I think about how Ronald Reagan neutered affirmative action, the fairness doctrine, and the industries that had kept the middle class in the middle class. I remember how Ronald Reagan was worshipped by the gullible who remembered Reagan's reign at the Republican National convention of 1992: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves", they swooned.

Reagan was both a liar and hypocrite. He occupied the White House with a mandate to cut federal spending. It was his raison d'etre. Conservatives bought it. Reagan became the biggest spending 'President' in U.S. history, doubling the size of the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the deficit! He would escalate the military budget, enriching his crones on K-street and the Military/Industrial Complex.

Reagan can be given no credit for restoring the nation's prosperity. It was not enough that he destroyed the labor movement, he would cut off its raison d'etre by exporting jobs and industries abroad. Whatever economic growth occurred benefited only the upper quintile, a fact easily proven by cold, hard stats available to the public at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His tax cut of 1982 benefited only the upper quintile and, inevitably, the chasm between the rich and everyone else widened. To be expected, wages declined; home ownership declined; infrastructure declined.

The rich remember Reagan fondly. They alone prospered. Everyone else lost ground. In fairness, that trend was reversed briefly in Clinton's second term but --to be expected --resumed with Bush Jr. Today --just one percent of the U.S. population owns more thant 95 percent of the remaining population combined. The Reagan years were heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, only poverty and crime increased.

Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies? Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit and the budget would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush the lesser compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totalling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the US Census Bureau make stark reading:

Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

• Twenty percent of the population own 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
• In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
• Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
• And more unequal than any other developed nation today.

The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of declining in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseum utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work? The answer is simple: the GOP sales pitch is what Reagan Budget Director David Stockman called a 'Trojan Horse'. The purpose of the tax cut is not to trickle down. The tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them.

It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief - restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists - thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things - local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama's remarks have done) or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left - and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering.

It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission. It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era.

It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

--Found on the Democratic Underground

Paul Krugman can always be depended upon to put this kind of thing in perspective.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

--Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

Reagan/Bush tax cuts are payoffs to the very rich for their support. For everyone else, the GOP prescription is simple: just take another dose of what's making you sick.

Reagan was clearly aloof, indifferent to anyone's plight but his base of ultra rich robber barons, idle rich boys and the war mongers of the Military/Industrial complex. Reagan cared nothing for 'urban voters' which for him meant: 'black people' or 'brown folk'. There was only one black face in his cabinet, that of (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce. At a reception, Reagan asked him: "How are things in your city?" Unfortunately, I don't have the reply. I hope it was: "Fuck you, Mr. President!" Reagan got away with a housing scandal because no one knew anything about it until Reagan had left office. How convenient!

It was during the Savings and Loan Scandal, often described as an 'orgy of commercial real estate speculation', that Reagan managed to rise above it all by closing his eyes to 'widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions' across the nation. As we have seen recently, the Savings and Loan scandal preceded a huge bailout which stuck the tax payer for $billions$!

Widespread, endemic, institutionalized racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, went unrestrained and un-monitored. Big banks exploited what was called 'red lining', openly violating the Community Re-investment Act, to deprive minority and poor neighborhoods of capital. Only eight of some 40,000 applications from banks seeking to expand their operations were denied by the Reagan administration because they had violated CRA regulations.

Reagan cut federal assistance to local governments by some 60 percent. His administration eliminated general revenue sharing, slashed public service jobs and job training, and all but dismantled federally funded legal services for poor people. Other targets: the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and any program having to do with public transit. It was primarily the 'inner cities', which Reaganites considered to be 'black', which suffered. Reagan's favorite 'urban' program' provided aid to highways and that was favored only because it benefited 'white suburbs' not 'black' inner cities.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

--Barack Obama, Washington Post

Following is a very brief checklist of a variety of Reagan abuses that defy easy categorization.

• During the Reagan years, federal aid to cities dropped from 22 percent to six. Causalities included urban clinics, hospitals, and police.
• In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice." And to that, I say: bullshit! Prove it!
• Various groups, community organizations et al, fought to limit the damage. Some victories were won including, during the Clinton years, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA. But funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs are still lost and may never be restored short of a revolution that will undo Reagan's very worst legacy: the fact that the rich have gotten exponentially richer as everyone else, including the middle class, have lost gains. I will repeat this until someone gets it: today, just one percent owns more than some 95 percent combine. That is Reagan's most horrible legacy and the one from which almost every other evil springs.
  
• Reagan was called the 'great communicator' but used his talent to divide the nation, perhaps, irreparably! Obama inherited a nation in which there is extreme wealth among the very, very, very few but obscene poverty and deteriorating conditions among the many. The middle class is no longer smug but threatened as the increase in foreclosures throughout suburbia will attest.

Iran-Contra: A Case of Treason!

In 1986, the Reagan administration was implicated in two illegal and secret U.S. Government operations stemming from the Reagan's support for Nicaraguan 'contra' rebels. At the time, U.S. law prohibited aid and/or the sale of arms as, in fact, transpired in Iran/Contra. The scandal called 'Iran/Contra' came to light and Reagan administration officials announced that government had sold arms to Iran. Iran was, at the time, an avowed enemy of the United States. It was not so long prior that the U.S. embassy personnel, held hostage, had been released by the 'revolutionary' government in Iran. Proceeds from arms sales to Iran were diverted --off the books --to the 'contra' rebels in Nicaragua.

As the 'scandal' came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese sought the appointment of a 'special prosecutor', a position in which Lawrence E. Walsh would assume the role of 'independent counsel' to investigate and prosecute possible crimes arising from what was already called 'Iran/Contra'.

It was alleged that Director Casey's 'unswerving support of President Reagan's contra policies' encouraged CIA officials to exceed legal restrictions in both operations, though it cannot be said that Iran/Contra was the only origin of CIA 'off the book' operations. The Boland Amendment of October 1984 had sought to prohibit and prevent the CIA from aiding the 'contras' either directly or indirectly. As the 'scandal' came to light, it became increasingly clear that Casey had made an end run around Boland and was, in fact, the architect of North's role in a so-called 'contra-support team'.

North's role --described as 'dove-tailing' CIA activities --violated the Boland restrictions even as Casey ordered and/or supported arms sales to Iran. 'Operatives' Alan Fier and Claire E. George lied to Congress to 'keep the spotlight off the White House'. When the arms ales were made public in November, 1986, it was clear that Congress had been lied to; the people, the nation had been misled.

Four CIA officials were charged with crimes. George, the third highest-ranking CIA official, was convicted of two felony counts of false statements and perjury, i.e, 'lying' to Congress. Two CIA 'operatives' were awaiting trial when they were pardoned by Reagan whom Special Prosecutor Walsh clearly implicated in his 'Final Report' on Iran/Contra matters.

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.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.

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

The Reagan era was the beginning of the end. If Reagan was the American 'Augustus', Bush Jr is Caligula. Those writing of the Fall of the American Empire often write as if this outcome is Obama's fault. That's just plain stupid! If Obama were an utter incompetent, he could not possibly have duplicated the thousand cuts inflicted by Herrs Reagan, Bush and Bush the Lesser. Likewise, Clinton. No 'miracle worker', Clinton --in fact --reversed several pernicious, ruinous trends that had begun with Reagan. Given another term, the end of America would have occurred on Bush Sr's watch. Reagan's sorry legacy benefits from the fact that Presidents --competent and incompetent alike --are limited to eight years in which to fuck things up!

The fatal trends, however, were all in place and working overtime when Reagan exited the White House. Therefore, it is not Reagan's fault that the evil empire he helped create did not fall immediately! He tried his best!

To be fair, U.S. Presidents are as incompetent if not as impotent as were the Emperors in Augustus' wake. During the Cold War, the MIC, a latter-day Praetorian Guard, became accustomed to getting all the appropriations it wanted. The power accrued to the MIC during the cold war years meant that 'they' would not simply go quietly into that good night with the fall of the Soviet Union. A new enemy would simply have to be found. The MIC is still around and bigger and 'badder' than ever, openly enriching themselves with the spoils of war.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it became necessary to invent exterior threats with which to terrorize the populace, around which to build up a military infrastructure. The threat of 'terrorism' has filled the role to the satisfaction of Pentagon brass asses and war mongers. It does not matter to them that 99 percent of what is CALLED 'terrorism' is but the resistance to illegal U.S. occupations, invasions, and interventions. It does not matter to them that most U.S. incursions since World War II have been illegal and purely imperial, intended to enrich the vast and complex array of defense contractors and Pentagon suck-ups.

The most obvious example remains Bush's attack and invasion of Iraq --clearly a violation of every international principle and/or treaty to which the U.S. is bound. Almost if not everything the U.S. has done internationally is illegal but to merely oppose it --as every people has the right under international law --is called terrorism by the U.S. govt. Bush called his opposition in Iraq either insurgents or terrorists. But if you were an Iraqi, you most certainly would take up arms to defend your nation against the invasion by the evil empire. When the British took arms to reclaim thirteen rebellious colonies, it was William Pitt in Parliament who summed up the situation precisely:

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms -- never! never! never!

Because Ronald Reagan bequeathed us a legacy of imperial lawlessness and arrogance, US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq ARE terrorist acts. Deaths resulting from orders issuing from either Bush or Cheney are war crimes described precisely in the federal laws which prohibit them under the penalty of death. See: U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.

To cover their crimes, U.S. administrations since Reagan have lied to us as a matter of policy. The U.S. government has failed utterly to deal with its own citizens in good faith! It pursues its own agenda and those of its co-conspirators on K-Street and the MIC. It has dealt with the sovereign citizens in bad faith!

A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook.

--Bertolt Brecht.

Therefore: our 'leaders' are crooks and the U.S. government has become a crime syndicate if not a rogue nation. The U.S. must withdraw from every middle eastern nation from which it had hoped to steal resources. If I may paraphrase Pitt: if I were an Iraqi or an Afghan, while a foreign troop was in my country, I would never lay down my arms! NEVER!

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The Empire Falls Back

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

We've grown up with a Christian-Roman version of European and world history, primarily the Fall of Rome. The Romans --we are taught --created a great empire characterized by a sophisticated system of arrow-straight roads that made possible commerce and travel from the far flung reaches of empire from Briton to Constantinople, from Carthage to Germania.

Just outside the borders of empire, we are taught, lived uncivilized, untutored barbarian hordes intent upon harassing, plundering, threatening the Pax Romana that defined the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen. The term Pax Romana always rang false with me. Was it ever at peace but, rather, an Orwellian perpetual war, the 'corporatized' taking of human life required to keep the Leviathan afloat?

Much speculation about the fall of Rome is false. Fundamentalist Christians in America believe Rome fell because it indulged orgies, homosexuality and the feeding of Christians to lions. The more informed may cite Gibbon and sum up the fall of Rome in a phrase: loss of civic virtue. While no one pretends that Rome was in all ways and all times virtuous, the 'loss of civic virtue' applies as well to fiscal profligacy, arrogance and, perhaps most importantly, the consequences of conquest.

Conquest is thought necessary by nation-states like Rome, forgetting that an imperially ambitious nation substitutes conquest for real productivity. Instead of employing persons, Rome seized their farms and sent them off on wars of aggression and conquest. Obvious examples are Dacia and Gaul both of which Rome invaded for 'gold'. More recently, George W. Bush attacked and invaded Iraq for its oil. Little has changed but names and commodities. If you are still inclined to believe the Bushco cover story, please tell me how many bona fide terrorists were captured by Bush and cite a scintilla of evidence that they were anything but Iraqis defending their nation, their homes and families, against an aggressor, a thief, a war criminal. If the Bushco case against 'detainees' at Guantanamo and elsewhere were sound, then why did Bushco so adamantly deny them 'due process' or protections afforded them under the principles of the Geneva Convention? What had Bush to hide but war crimes and atrocities?

More than ever, I remain unimpressed with the assertion that the attack and invasion of Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with the faux 'war on terrorism'! Without an 'imminent threat', the U.S. attack and invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq are war crimes as are illegal detentions, torture, murder and other atrocities.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had anything to do with 911. Someone in the Bush administration had a bright idea: "let's call the opposition to U.S. aggression and conquest by the name 'Insurgent'!" I would not be surprised to learn that this 'phrase' was tested by a DC based consulting firm and focus group.

It takes tremendous courage to speak out against the machine, the Evil Empire, Moloch, Big Brother, the M.I.C. When the Crown persisted against the colonies, William Pitt rose to protest in Parliament:

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms! Never! Never! Never!

--William Pitt,

Many of Rome's enemies were at least as civilized as Rome and, by some standards, more so. Former 'Flying Circus' mainstay Terry Jones, a medieval scholar with several documentaries to his credit, may have pinpointed the source of many myths about Rome --Rome itself. It was Rome, primarily --not its conquered provinces --that wrote its history. Like American historians biased against the Native Americans, Roman historians were surely biased against non-Roman civilizations. The 'Empire' may have written off its conquered as 'uncivilized, savage and barbaric' though many were 'organized, motivated and intelligent individually and in groups, tribes, cities, nations'. Few, if any, posed an 'imminent threat' to Rome. Few, if any, had intentions of overthrowing Rome or plundering the empire. There may have been no terrorist threat to the citizens of Rome. The story of Rome from the point of view of the Britons, German, Gauls, Greeks, Persians, and Africans, is, perhaps, a foretaste of the contrarian history of the United States that is sure to be written.

The Vandals didn't vandalize - the Romans did. The Goths didn't sack Rome - the Romans did. Attila the Hun didn't go to Constantinople to destroy it, but because the Emperor's daughter wanted to marry him. And far from civilizing the societies they conquered the Romans often destroyed much of what they found.

--Terry Jones' Barbarians

Terry Jones vs The Empire

Why I moderate comments

• SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
• Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

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

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Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The time has come to abolish the CIA --to smash it into a thousand pieces --as JFK had promised! Its leadership should be dismissed, investigated and where there is probable cause, CIA members should be indicted and tried for crimes against humanity.

The relationship between the CIA and terrorism is symbiotic, most obviously in the case of the CIAs support, perhaps, its creation of al Qaeda. When the CIA is not perpetrating terrorism, it inspires terrorism in response or supports, nurtures and finances it --in the name of Democracy.

In this and other ways, the CIA perpetuates an "American Holocaust", the deaths of some 6 million people from its inception to the year 1987. For as Long as the CIA Exists, the US will never be safe from terrorism. It has long been time to realize JFK's dream of smashing the CIA into a 'thousand pieces'.

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). 

--Steve Kangas, A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

Pakistan is a case in point.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been propping up Musharraf's military regime with $3.6 billion in economic aid from the US and a US-sponsored consortium, not to mention $900 million in military aid and the postponement of overdue debt repayments totaling $13.5 billion. But now the administration is debating whether Musharraf has become too dependent on Islamic extremist political parties in Pakistan to further US interests, and whether he should be pressured to permit the return of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who have formed an electoral alliance to challenge him in presidential elections scheduled for next year. 

--Pakistan: Friend or Foe? The US shouldn't prop up President Musharraf's military regime, Selig S. Harrison

The late Benazir Bhutto revealed the truth before she was brutally gunned down in the streets of Karachi: US policy causes world terrorism. Conveniently for 'official terrorists, she died before she could tell the rest of the story.

When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation -- namely, life, liberty and justice for all. Dictatorships such as Musharraf's suppress individual rights and freedoms and empower the most extreme elements of society. Oppressed citizens, unable to represent themselves through other means, often turn to extremism and religious fundamentalism. 

Benazir Bhutto, A False Choice for Pakistan

A favorite CIA tactic is the CIA "front".

The May 12 terrorist attacks on the al Hamra, Jadawal and Vinnell compounds in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, which killed more than 90 people, were not merely assaults on “symbols” of the imperialist West. The bombers were also intent on weakening the rule of Saudi royal family. 

While the timing of the bombings in Saudi Arabia and in other countries — just hours before US Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Saudi Arabia — suggested a coordinated assault on US targets, the bombings in Riyadh were targeted at key props of the reactionary regime. 

All three Saudi Arabian targets were associated with Saudi Arabia's role as a US client state: residential compounds housing mainly expatriates working in the country, the offices of the Vinnell Corporation and the residences of its employees. 

Vinnell, founded in California in 1931, first gained a foothold in Saudi Arabia in 1975. An article by Matt Gaul in the June 1998 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, revealed that it was the culmination of a close relationship between the corporation, the US military and Washington's intelligence agencies. This relationship stretched back to the end of World War II, when the US government used the company to ship supplies to the China's counter-revolutionary party, the Kuomintang. 

During the 1950s and '60s, Vinnell constructed US military airfields in Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Thailand and southern Vietnam. According to Gaul, it was during this period that Albert Vinnell, the corporation's founder, “offered his staff's services to the [CIA], and several CIA agents used employment with Vinnell as cover for operations in Africa and the Middle East”. 

-- Rohan Pearce, CIA front targeted in terrorist attacks, 28 May 2003

How does the CIA do it?

It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.  

--Steve Kangas, A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

The CIA install and supports dictators like Musharraf, whom it most certainly trained. The CIA is ruthless in its on-going efforts to eliminate with torture and murder, if necessary, all opposition to the interests of American imperialists. Saddam Hussein was among the dictators propped up by the US, the CIA specifically. Saddam ran afoul of Bush Sr by opposing efforts by the Bush regime to keep the price of oil high. The transcript of US Ambassador April Glaspie's interview with Hussein on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait proves conclusively that Hussein had been set up by the master spy --George Bush Sr.

The CIAs allegiance to the US oil industry is overt and is most certainly at the very heart of well-founded suspicions about the CIA, Texas oil barons, and JFK. Dealy Plaza is said to have been the nexus of all three!
The origins of Bush's war in Iraq may be found in the Arab Oil embargo of the 1970s.

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.  

In the geopolitical vision driving current US policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. 

--Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones

JFK promised to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces". Bill Clinton, on the 50th anniversary of "the company", defended it with an absurdity that one might have expected from the GOP, the American right wing, extremist right wingnuts! Americans, Clinton said, don't know or understand what the CIA does and should, therefore, lay off! What if the allies had simply 'laid off' Hitler, given him his way in Europe and eventually complete access to the oil fields of the Middle East.

Not knowing what the CIA is up to is precisely the problem. Bill Clinton is as dead wrong on this issue as Barack Obama is dead wrong about Ronald Reagan. Both positions are premised upon the idea that the American people are stupid and those that are not ought to be! The fact is: the CIA is out of control and they will continue to get away with it as long as the American people are either ignorant, kept in the dark, or both! The CIA is unaccountable and because it is, it remains a cancerous source of unchecked corruption and most certainly the inspiration for generations of American hating terrorists who will fight back in kind!

Much has been written about the CIA’s operations, [The Modus Operandi of the CIA] by insiders and outsiders. One insider who has chronicled what he witnessed in the CIA is Ralph McGehee. He worked for the CIA from 1952 until 1977 and now writes about intelligence matters, notably the book Deadly Deceits -- My 25 years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1983). He has compiled a computer data base on CIA activities. Persons interested may write to him at: 422 Arkansas Ave., Herndon, VA 22070. (See http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_SOP.html .) Here are some excerpts of what he has written:

“...it is essential to provide background on the scope and nature of its worldwide operations. Between 1961 and 1975 the Agency conducted 900 major or sensitive operations, and thousands of lesser covert actions. The majority of its operations were propaganda, election or paramilitary. Countries of major concern, such as Indonesia in the early 1960s, were usually subjected to the CIA's most concerted attention. Critics of the CIA have aptly described the mainstays of such attention: "discrediting political groups... by forged documents that may be attributed to them. . . ." faking "communist weapon shipments,'' capturing communist documents and then inserting forgeries prepared by the Agency's Technical Services Division.  

--Ralph McGehee

Much of the rest of the world knows the truth about the CIA; Americans are kept in the dark. The media dare not tell the truth about the CIA and the Bush administration, in particular, is complicit. Rare media outlets that dare tell the truth are demonized. Writers and "liberal" activist Steve Kangas turned up dead just outside the office of Richard Mellon Scaife, the multi-billionaire about whom it is no stretch to say he coordinated and bankrolled the "vast right wing conspiracy" to impeach, remove and, in other ways, smear Bill Clinton.

As more documents are declassified and the hidden history is made painfully clear, the CIA’s predictable response is compared to the Medieval Church’s oppressive response to the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, there are many things about the CIAs relationship to the world around it that are medieval: intolerance, fear, repression, secrecy and torture. Initially, the CIA would merely harass American writers but foreign writers were tortured and/or murdered. With the death of Steve Kangas, one wonders if the CIA now operates against the domestic media. What's next? An inquisition?
The CIA, whose very is name is enough to inspire generations of "terrorists", has outlived its usefulness.

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'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny their existence. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'organized crime'.

If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said that corporations are people! But if should you call the five idiots who have conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you will be denounced as a nut job! But what term best describes a body of jurists who believe that mere words on paper are a real, living breathing persons! I am referring to the SCOTUS decision which makes 'corporations' people! Any rag tag collection of crooks, ne'erdowells and/or robber barons can send money to the Secretary State in Delaware and receive in return a nice binder with impressive documents in it along with a genuine Delaware corporate seal! Thereafter, you --to0 --will be a real person! The Delaware Secretary of State had made it so! Now --I ask you --who is nuts?

The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. What is organized crime if not a conspiracy? In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America, it was necessary to promote all kinds of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' roll, and crime syndicates.

But what are 'crime syndicates' if not conspiracies? The right wing establishment are themselves conspiracy theorists when it is useful but not otherwise. 911 is a case in point. The official theory of 19 Arab Hijackers is a conspiracy theory favored by the Bush administration though there is absolutely no admissible evidence to support it. It is 'Orwellian' that anyone proposing any 'other' conspiracy theory is labeled a 'conspiracy theorist' and reviled or called other names.

This tactic is transparent, sophomoric, stupid, fallacious and harmful. It has forever divided America and it is hard not to believe that was its major objective. If so, it succeeded. Unless the guilty are arrested, tried and held to account, generations hence will still debate whether or not 911 was an 'inside job' though there was never and never will be a shred of hard or admissible evidence to support a word of it.

Law and order was a big issue among the 'sixties' GOP hoping to exploit fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam, a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts. They succeeded in making a killing!

George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --had already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities'.

The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I met the Senior Bush who was not so well known at the time.

After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal in the Forbidden City.

Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics", Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed.

Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was Ronald Reagan who was ascendant. It was Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for a conspiracy of this type: traitors guilty of high treason:

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.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.

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

No one ever called the Sr a Bush a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!

"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."

- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.

In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men'! This conspiracy of Hitler, his minions and financiers, was a conspiracy in which a record survives. It was --in fact --a conspiracy consisting of Adolph Hitler and his corporate/business supporters to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.

Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)  

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3)

--William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' in which the oil fields of the the Middle East, Iraq in particular, were 'divvied' up among the conspirators long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspirators' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium i,.e, 'conspiracy'.

The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001 [PDF], several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the Jews of Europe.

... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.

Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.
The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.

--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

Very little is ever accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution. It is SCOTUS who has proclaimed that corporations are people even as the right wing is proven to have a stake in convincing you that conspiracies do not exist.

Because conspiracies exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex --a conspiracy of 'rich men' so accurately described by St. Thomas More. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.

For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for that nation's gold. The Roman sesterces was worthless. When the empire was, in fact, sold to nobleman Didius Julianus the transaction was completed in in Greek Drachmas not worthless Roman sesterces.

The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling "shouting fire in a crowded theater" Holmes' stated that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." I submit that Debs did not shout 'fire' falsely. Debs, indeed, perceived a 'clear and present danger' to the Republic. I submit that it is more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?

Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people. We are told that by the Supreme Court where at least five of the nine members are co-conspirators in a 'conspiracy of rich men'.

If the Military-Industrial Complex is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore? The 'conspiracy rich men' has been careless. Nevertheless, we are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy.

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!

I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

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Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Fascism

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

As events this week have proven, SCOTUS is too highly venerated. Their latest outrage is the decree that 'corporations are people' and may spend as much money as they like in order to get their stooges into public office.

It is the worst decision since Bush v Gore which was, at the time, compared to Dred-Scott, a decision of 1857 in which seven of nine Supreme Court Justices declared that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen --the court stated --Dred Scott had no rights whatsoever and could not sue in a Federal Court! The court ruled that he must remain a slave. Dred Scott was denied the very personhood that the court now BESTOWS upon mere legal abstractions. This is absurd, stupid and intolerable.

The court was wrong then. It was wrong again with Bush v Gore! The court is wrong now, dead wrong! Corporations are not people and should, by right, have no rights whatsoever and should, by right, exist only for as long as the people may find them useful or tolerable. Of late, their venal behavior and the wars of naked aggression that are fought on their behalf alone have become intolerable. It is time to reassess the status that is given both the Supreme Court and to the corporations.

Both court and corporations should be not so gently reminded that 'we the people' are sovereign. 'We the people' are the boss'. 'We the people' have financed this farce with our moneys! 'We the people' demand a change NOW! We the people should stop financing wars of naked aggression waged on behalf of mere 'legal abstractions' now deemed by a dishonest court to be 'people!. Perhaps a real revolution will consider extensive reforms in the one case and outright abolition in another. Revolution now!

Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes blew it when he failed to defend Eugene Debs' rights of free speech. He compared Debs' statements in opposition to US entry into WWI to 'yelling fire in a crowded theatre'. But if there really is a fire, yelling fire seems to me to be the prudent thing to do! Seems to me that the venerable Justice Holmes made a cute but glaringly invalid analogy! Seems to me that true patriots have not only a right but a moral responsibility to oppose their nation's entry into foolhardly, vainglorious wars of naked aggression. It seems to me prudent that we demand an open, free and fair debate.

Otherwise, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich and the military-industrial complex which divides the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and the other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater who hide behind the monicker --'defense contrctors'.

For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. The booty du jour is oil! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship.

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Holmes were alive, I will tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!

I am yelling FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!

In his remarkably undistinguished 20-year stint as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has rarely called attention to himself for original jurisprudential thinking. But if Thomas had had his way with Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, in which the court decided this week to remove critically important limits on campaign financing, an already horrible decision would have been made far, far worse. Crazy worse.

Thomas went along with the majority in agreeing that corporations and unions can once more be permitted to spend freely on political issues, thus driving a stake through the heart of the democratic process in the United States. But he dissented in part, because he didn't think the ruling went far enough. Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them.

That's right. Thomas came out against the principle of transparency, and for the right of corporations to spend millions of dollars to influence public policy without having to tell anyone what they were up to. It's hard to imagine a less democratic stance.

Thomas did have his reasons, however. He blamed the gays. In the heated war over Proposition 8 in California, he wrote, any individual who contributed as little as $100 in favor of the ban on same-sex marriage was required to disclose his or her name and address to the public, and thus opened themselves up to harassment.

--This Week in Crazy: Clarence Thomas

Also see:

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

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