It's not going to be OK

[NAB]

...Did you know that the vast majority of people arrested, detained indefinitely, and tortured by the US in Guantanamo were random people picked up to fill arrest quotas?

Horse Hockey!

Nab

[peaceseeker]

...Did you know that the vast majority of people arrested, detained indefinitely, and tortured by the US in Guantanamo were random people picked up to fill arrest quotas?

Horse Hockey!

Nab

I know that you still believe 19 Muslim hijackers were responsible for the attacks of 9/11. There's no need to post your words of wisdom here.

[peaceseeker]

Attention Deficit Democracy
by Ralph Nader
Monday, March 29. 2010

'A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

Economic decay is all around. Poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, job export, consumer debt, pension attrition, and crumbling infrastructure are well documented. The self-destruction of the Wall Street financial giants, with their looting and draining of trillions of other people’s money, have been headlines for two years. During and after their gigantic taxpayer bailouts from Washington, DC, the banks, et al, are still the most powerful force in determining the nature of proposed corrective legislation.

“The banks own this place,” says Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), evoking the opinion of many members of a supine Congress ready to pass weak consumer and investor protection legislation while leaving dominant fewer and larger banks.

Who hasn’t felt the ripoffs and one-sided fine print of the credit card industry? A reform bill finally has passed after years of delay, again weak and incomplete. Shameless over their gouges, the companies have their attorneys already at work to design around the law’s modest strictures.

The drug and health insurance industry, swarming with thousands of lobbyists, got pretty much what they wanted in the new health law. Insurers got millions of new customers subsidized by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars with very little regulation. The drug companies got their dream—no reimportation of cheaper identical drugs, no authority for Uncle Sam to bargain for discount prices, and a very profitable extension of monopoly patent protection for biologic drugs against cheaper, generic drug competition.

For all their gouges, for all their exclusions, their denial of claims and restrictions of benefits, for all their horrendous price increases, the two industries have come out stronger than ever politically and economically. Small wonder their stocks are rising even in a recession.

The junk food processing industry—on the defensive lately due to some excellent documentaries and exposes—are still the most influential of powers on Capitol Hill when it becomes to delaying for years a decent food safety bill, using tax dollars to pump fat, sugar and salt into the stomachs of our children, and fighting adequate inspections. Over seven thousand lives are lost due to contaminated food yearly in the US and many millions of illnesses.

The oil, gas, coal and nuclear power companies are fleecing consumers and taxpayers, depleting and imperiling the environment, yet they continue to block rational energy legislation in Congress to replace carbon and uranium with energy efficiency technology and renewables.

Still, even now after years of cost over-runs and lack of permanent storage for radioactive wastes, the nuclear industry has President Obama, and George W. Bush before him, pushing for many tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer loan guarantees for new nukes. Wall Street won’t finance such a risky technology without you, the taxpayers, guaranteeing against any accident or default.

Both Democrats and Republicans are passing on these outrageous financial and safety risks to taxpayers.

Congress, which receives the brunt of this corporate lobbying—the carrot of money and the stick of financing incumbent challengers—is more of an obstacle to change than ever. In the past after major failures of industry and commerce, there was a higher likelihood of Congressional action. Recall, the Wall Street and banking collapse in the early 1930s. Congress and Franklin Delano Roosevelt produced legislation that saved the banks, peoples’ savings and regulated the stock markets.

From the time of my book, Unsafe at Any Speed’s publication in late November 1965, it took just nine months to federally regulate the powerful auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency.

Contrast the two-year delay after the Bear Stearns collapse and still no reform legislation, and what is pending is weak.

Yet the entrenched members of Congress, responsible for this astonishing gridlock, are almost impossible to dislodge even though polls have Congress at its lowest repute ever. It is a place where the majority is terrified of the corporations and the minority can block even the most anemic legislative efforts with archaic rules, especially in the Senate.

Culturally, the canaries in the coal mine are the children. Childhood has been commercialized by the giant marketers reaching them hour by hour with junk food, violent programming, video games and bad medicine. The result—record obesity, child diabetes and other ailments.

While the companies undermine parental authority, they laugh all the way to the bank, using our public airwaves, among other media, for their lucre. They can be called electronic child molesters.

We published a book in 1996 called Children First!: A Parent’s Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators in the Media. This book is an understatement of the problem compared to the worsening of child manipulation today.

In a 24/7 entertained society frenetic with sound bites, Blackberries, iPods, text messages and emails, there is a deep need for reflection and introspection. We have to discuss face to face in living rooms, school auditoriums, village squares and town meetings what is happening to us and our diminishing democratic processes by the pressures and controls of the insatiable corporate state.

And what needs to be done from the home to the public arenas and marketplaces with old and new superior models, new accountabilities and new thinking.

For our history has shown that whenever the people get more engaged and more serious, they live better on all fronts.'

[kompili]

New money that is created RIGHT NOW has a negative effect on the economy - it not only does not add any wealth to the system it actually subtracts from wealth.

Money creation at the saturation point stops adding to productive efforts and becomes a roll-over affair with only the financial services industry profiting via interest and fees. In other words, money goes out and circles right back around to the banks instead of rippling through a healthy non saturated economy

'Debt Saturation Phase Transition’ If you are interested in knowing what the states is up to. Do some home work. It is all there to see. Canada will follow.

[peaceseeker]

How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
By Chris Hedges - Posted on Apr 5, 2010
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how ... _20100405/


Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)
U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off
By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175228/ ... die_for__/


Big Brother and the Hidden Hand of the "Free Market"
"Managing" Data and Dissent in America
by Tom Burghardt
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=18490


Nanotech Risks, Speculation Drives Gas Prices Up Again, Millions of Swine Flu Vaccines Wasted
Revealing News Articles - April 5, 2010
http://www.wanttoknow.info/10/04_nanote ... ine_wasted


Secrecy News Articles
Excerpts of Key Secrecy News Articles in Major Media
http://www.wanttoknow.info/secrecynewsarticles

[Homeownertoo]

"The aftermath of the financial crisis is poised to bring a simmering fiscal problem in industrial economies to the boiling point", said the Bank of International Settlements, the Swiss-based bank for central bankers and the oldest and most venerable of the world's financial watchdogs. Drastic austerity measures will be needed to head off a compound interest spiral, if it is not already too late for some.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7564748/Sovereign-debt-crisis-at-boiling-point-warns-Bank-for-International-Settlements.html

[peaceseeker]

...Did you know that the vast majority of people arrested, detained indefinitely, and tortured by the US in Guantanamo were random people picked up to fill arrest quotas?

Horse Hockey!

Nab

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
From The Times
April 9, 2010

'George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”. '...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 092435.ece

[Charles Whitman II]

The Illuminati owns all media.
9/11 was a work.
Obama was groomed to be the next piece of the puzzle.
Society is not breaking down, it's working by grand design.
Princess Diana was assaniated
Micheal Jackson was murdered.

Don't forget to trade in your credit cards for a little chip in your hand. It will make things better.

[peaceseeker]

One Marine’s ‘Liberty Walk’ for the Rest of Us
Posted on Apr 11, 2010

By Chris Hedges





Take This Empire and Shove It!
By Cindy Sheehan

“Listen, I can't get involved. I've got work to do. It's not that I like the Empire; I hate it. But there's nothing I can do about it right now... It's all such a long way from here.”
Luke Skywalker in Star Wars

'April 12, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Dear Reader—raise your hand if you don’t know that atrocities happen in war. Now put your hands in the air like you just don’t care.

Psychologist, Robert Jay Lifton, who is a pioneer in the study of what drives otherwise “normal” human beings to commit war crimes calls war: “an atrocity-producing situation.” Atrocities have been committed in every war since the beginning of time, and the sad thing is the barbarity hasn’t decreased. Recently a US soldier tried to justify to me committing atrocities because the "British did it to the Native Americans" in the French-Indian War. This soldier was essentially agreeing with Lifton.

Since war is an atrocity in the first place, war crimes will be committed, period. In many of my speeches soon after Casey was killed, I used to call war “a failure of imagination.” Now I know that’s crap—war is imagined by and for the war machine and gladly perpetrated by its toady elected officials and promoted by its toady media.

This week, several things have upset me about our genocidal foreign policy, but I can’t decide what upsets me more—the genocidal foreign policy or the fact that most of my fellow USAins are sheeple who blindly follow (or not follow) whoever is infecting the Oval Office depending on whether that person has a (D) or an (R) behind his name.

I have spoke in dozens of venues since Obama was inaugurated promoting my e-book: Myth America: 20 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution. Everywhere I speak, someone will ask me this question, and it is almost always this exact question, worded in almost the exact same way: “I didn’t agree with George Bush getting us into these wars, but don’t you agree that we have to stay in Afghanistan to protect the women?” When I ask the person if he/she believed that propaganda when Bush was infesting the Oval Office, he/she says with 100% regularity: “No.” And of course, Afghan women were Mrs. George (43) Bush’s greatest cause. Now we have “peace” groups parroting the same line. Sheeple live in Red AND Blue states. The Robber Class counts on at least ½ of the public being in full compliance with its crimes, that’s why they get away with these crimes on a daily basis.

How’s this for “protecting women?” On February 12th, US Special Forces attacked a home near Gardez and in that attack three women were killed. Two of the women were pregnant. Our military claimed that the women were stabbed to death before the US raid, but the truth finally came out—US Special Forces who subsequently tried to dig the bullets out of the women to hide their hideous crimes killed them, too. Cover up—the specialty of The Empire and The Pope. How can we believe anything that comes out of the mouth of Stainly McChrystalMeth much less that the US is “minimizing” civilian deaths?

At the end of last year, eight Afghan students in Ghazi Khan were handcuffed and executed by US troops. Presumably, these eight students were sons of Afghan women—and where is the righteous anger in this country over our military executing school children? I guess if Tiger Woods would keep Little Tiger in his pants, our toady media might report these outrages—but probably not. When I hear about our troops raping 14 year-old girls in Iraq, or executing Afghan schoolboys, I want to burn something down—but I would rightfully be considered “crazy” if I gave into that temporary impulse—while some US troops (in not-so-isolated incidents) behave like sociopathic maniacs and we don't consider them crazy at all and, in fact, we are supposed to “support" them.' ...

[NAB]

...Did you know that the vast majority of people arrested, detained indefinitely, and tortured by the US in Guantanamo were random people picked up to fill arrest quotas?

Horse Hockey!

Nab

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
From The Times
April 9, 2010

'George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”. '...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 092435.ece

I hope that you are not suggesting that article supports in any way what you stated in your post.

Nab

[peaceseeker]

...Did you know that the vast majority of people arrested, detained indefinitely, and tortured by the US in Guantanamo were random people picked up to fill arrest quotas?

Horse Hockey!

Nab

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
From The Times
April 9, 2010

I hope that you are not suggesting that article supports in any way what you stated in your post.

Nab

Yes, I am. I would also suggest that you try and understand what truly happened on 9/11.

...'General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.' ...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 092435.ece

[peaceseeker]

Too smart for our own good: How The “Best and Brightest” may hurt society

March 18, 2010

Book Review

Intellectuals and Society
By Thomas Sowell

Reviewed by Grant Morgan
Frontier Centre for Public Policy

'Should the label “intellectual” be considered one of admiration or derision?

This question is especially relevant given the occupational backgrounds of current occupants of the White House and Stornoway. Barrack Obama, in particular, received widespread acclaim for his intellectual background, earning endorsements from ostensibly conservative pundits such as David Brooks and Christopher Buckley on the basis of his Harvard Law education and impressive vocabulary. Yet the overall impact of professional intellectuals on public life, both positive and negative, has yet to receive a comprehensive study.

Thomas Sowell’s provocative new book looks at this question. Intellectuals and Society will make both public intellectuals and their supporters decidedly uneasy. In this book, Sowell argues that . Specifically, he argues that people defined as “intellectuals” have, for at least the past century, promoted a centralized, statist, and anti-democratic vision which undermines both individual freedom and the effective functioning of the state. Furthermore, they have done so without facing any consequences for the results of their (mostly failed) ideas.' ...

http://www.troymedia.com/?p=9047

[BVulgaris]

This is in comment to the iraq detention facilities....

I think we should look at Gen. Stone who is credited in turning iraq's detainee condition "around".. (in reality he only finds out that US foreign policy is basically causing the problem so he creates a solution to mask the problem).

"The Battlefield inside the Wire: Detention Operations under Major General douglas Stone"
by: Lieutenant Commander Vasilios Tasikas, U.S. Coast Guard

http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryRev ... art011.pdf

"Stone’s principal operating construct revolved around the concept that there was a “battlefield of the mind.”8 He employed measures to identify hardened extremists in the internment facilities and separate them from moderates. He initiated programs that gave the moderates empowering intellectual channels that helped marginalize fanatical influences in the detention compounds and in their hometown neighborhoods. The collateral benefit was to separate “the worst of the worst” from the other detainees, giving hard-core insurgents less chance to spread their malevolent ideology."

"One of Stone’s first orders contested long-held assumptions. While strategic planners and academics have debated the origins of the insurgency, there was little discourse on what motivated the individual fighter in Iraq. Conventional wisdom held that Iraqi insurgents were religious fanatics motivated by extremist sectarian impulses. A U.S. Institute of Peace study concluded that the motivation of the common jihadi foot soldier was ideological, tribal, or religious.9 Other experts averred that the insurgents were former regime loyalists fighting for their motherland.10 U.S. military officials and government strategists alike assumed that most insurgents were “dead-enders” or foreign jihadis—unmarried and angry religious extremists, compelled to carry out acts of violence primarily by Islamic fervor and hatred for American ideals.11 Intuitively, Stone understood that these broad-brush impressions about the enemy, while perhaps accurate in describing the innermost core of many insurgent groups, failed to precisely portray the ordinary Iraqi insurgent fighter. Stone observed that “warriors fight warriors,” but “there’s a difference between somebody who is psychologically wedded to Al-Qaeda’s doctrine, and somebody who was unemployed and forced to go fight.”12 His suppositions not only challenged the views of U.S. military officials in Iraq, but also challenged the overall counterinsurgency strategy employed in detention operations."

"In general terms, here is what U.S. forces discovered about the captured Iraqis. Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs, the minority sect in Iraq; the other roughly 15 percent were Shi’ites.14 Most detainees were not angry young men channeling their religious or patriotic zeal; in fact, most were married with children, and more than a quarter of all detainees had five children or more.15 Interestingly, many of the suspected insurgents did not regularly attend mosque.16 Many divulged that they drank alcohol regularly.17
The unvarnished truth about the typical insurgent is that his stimulus for joining the fight was either physical or financial self-preservation. The primary incentive was financial gain. The facts revealed that the insurgents were either unemployed or held low-paying jobs and saw the insurgency as a way to get some extra money to supplement their meager incomes.18 A close secondary motivation was coerIn general terms, here is what U.S. forces discovered about the captured Iraqis. Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs, the minority sect in Iraq; the other roughly 15 percent were Shi’ites.14 Most detainees were not angry young men channeling their religious or patriotic zeal; in fact, most were married with children, and more than a quarter of all detainees had five children or more.15 Interestingly, many of the suspected insurgents did not regularly attend mosque.16 Many divulged that they drank alcohol regularly.17
The unvarnished truth about the typical insurgent is that his stimulus for joining the fight was either physical or financial self-preservation. The primary incentive was financial gain. The facts revealed that the insurgents were either unemployed or held low-paying jobs and saw the insurgency as a way to get some extra money to supplement their meager incomes.18 A close secondary motivation was coercion or fear caused by a handful of insurgents in their neighborhoods. The insurgents forced them to engage in anti-coalition activity by threatening them or their families.19 Some took up arms for higher-order ideals. Some fought out of a notion of nationalism—an expected response to an invading and occupying foreign military—or a wish to restore the old order—a movement that drew from former Ba’ath party members, Iraqi army officers, and security officials who had served under Saddam Hussein.20 A narrower desire for revenge motivated other insurgents. They wanted to strike back simply because they had friends or relatives who had been killed or wounded by coalition forces.21 However, these detainees were the exception not the norm.

Religious fervor was only on the periphery as a motivation. The vast majority of captured individuals did not identify with an insurgent or terrorist group such as Al-Qaeda. Less than 2,000 captured detainees claimed or were found to have some genuine allegiance or substantial nexus to organized insurgent groups.22
In sum, the vast majority of the detainees were not religiously or ideologically motivated, and few were engaged in hostilities simply to defend their motherland. Instead, the average detainee who engaged in anti-coalition activity—whether planting an improvised explosive device, hiding a weapons cache, acting as a lookout, or delivering stolen weapons—was doing so out of duress. In essence, the average fighter felt compelled to fight out of financial necessity or because of simple brute coercion."

click on the link above to read more.

[BVulgaris]

btw the article on how intellects are affecting the world is incredibly blind.... Ask the question of how education of the masses and the effects of the printing press affected the world and you've got just about the same answer.

[peaceseeker]

Don't be surprised if Sarah Palin is the next (and first woman) president of the US

Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’

By Chris Hedges
Posted on Apr 19, 2010

'Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.” '...