Political Theater in Congress: Is Toyota being scapegoated to humiliate Japan?

As you may be aware, Japan recently elected a new party into power after decades of dominance by the Liberal Democratic Party. The new party (Democratic Party of Japan) promised to be less "passive" in regards to the US. This has not gone over well within the bowels of the Pentagon:

In November last year, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned Japan that it would face “serious consequences” if the new government did not honour the commitments on the bases given by the former government. During his visit, Gates loudly lobbied for an extension of the military bases agreement.

Imagine if a foreign emissary came here warning us to do as he says or there will be "serious consequences". Such arrogance is why the Japanese are unwilling to continue being our thankless sidekick.

China is also a factor. Japan seems to be throwing its lot in with China and other eastern countries, probably because our bullying behavior and rapidly-declining-in-value currency are getting really annoying.

Is this The Powers That Be's way of getting back at Japan? It's more of a warning than a crippling blow, but things could escalate quickly if the wall of secrecy continues to crumble:

The recent revelations of secret security pacts with the U.S. have inflamed public opinion. The Japanese Foreign Minister has appointed a team of scholars to delve into the Foreign Ministry’s archives to track down secret documents relating to security ties with the U.S.

"Secret agreements"? Yeah, this is when the conspiracy theorist in me starts paying attention. There is a lot more underneath the surface if you start to dig. If you find anything juicy, let me know in the comments.

I should also note that the US Government is currently the majority stakeholder in a direct Toyota competitor: General Motors. If "investigating" a foreign competitor to a state-owned business isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is. Congress has jumped the shark; we'd be better off with a bunch of muppets in charge.

Meanwhile, he Japanese people and their media arewatching events in Congress closely, and they are familiar with Kabuki drama.

Still, the Japanese media have carried a number of articles and broadcast segments analyzing the meaning of the upcoming hearing, many pointing to what they saw as political motives behind the actions by lawmakers and regulators.

Mark my words, this bit of political theater is not a coincidence.

And a Merry False Flag Christmas to you, too, Mr. Underwear Bomber

"Happy new year. Aren't you tired of all the false-flag attacks?"

That's what I want to say to people. I certainly think it would be a conversation-starter, but probably not the kind I'd want. I imagine I'd spend much of the time explaining that I'm not crazy.

I think you have to be crazy to think that a guy can slip through our ridiculous airport security even though he had every red flag in the book blinking around him, including being ratted out by his own dad as a potential terrorist. Yeah, I'm talking about that tool, Mutallab the Underwear Bomber or whatever we're calling him.

This whole episode stinks to high heaven. There is a big part of the story that the media is not focusing on:

Kurt Haskell is an attorney. He and his wife were in Amsterdam that day after a safari and Kurt witnessed the underwear bomber (Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab) before the flight being aided by what Haskell described to be an older Indian gentleman who was well dressed. (emphasis mine)

Who was this sharp-dressed man (besides a ZZtop fan)? No doubt he was Mutallab's handler.

Since Mutallab is a classic patsy, he has the intelligence (and loyalty) of a particularly gullible puppy. He needs help dressing, tying his shoes, boarding flights... and making his bombs work, too. (Thank Allah for that!)

Webster Tarpley has a good analysis of this event and the importance of it in the geopolitical sense. Long story short: Certain parties are trying to involve us in yet another war against yet another Islamic country. Yemen, this time.

But Obama and his advisors should be urged to consider a third explanation far more plausible than either of these. This third explanation would include the desire of a rogue network inside the US government to unleash a new wave of Islamophobic hysteria to rehabilitate the discredited “global war on terror” strategy in a new and more sophisticated form, while imposing a new round of outrageous and degrading search procedures at airports (such as the full body scanners peddled by the venal Michael Chertoff) to soften up the American people for heightened totalitarian control and political repression. All of this, moreover, in ways that will be politically harmful to Obama.

But this Underwear Bombing farce is a double-edged sword; it provides Obama and those who are opposed to this rogue Anglo terror network a chance to follow the clues back to the real puppetmasters, and perhaps even reveal the existence of the moles and their shadow government to the American people.

That may be a bridge too far, but these false flag terror attacks a getting increasingly ridiculous and unbelievable. Are we really supposed to believe that Mutallab was alloweded to fly without the intervention of a politically-connected CIA "handler"?

Mutallab had been denied a visa to enter the United Kingdom, despite the fact that his family owned a luxury apartment in London’s West End. His name had been placed on the UK watch list. Mutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker, personally denounced him to the CIA and the State Department as a possible extremist who was then in Yemen, most probably at a training camp. Nevertheless, Mutallab’s visa was not revoked. Mutallab had met the infamous Anwar Awlaki, who had just received a wave of publicity for his relations with Major Hasan the Fort Hood patsy. Chatter from the Yemen patsy milieu monitored by the US contained references to “the Nigerian” – meaning Mutallab. Mutallab paid cash for his ticket in Ghana, checked no luggage, and entered Nigeria illegally, but was nevertheless permitted to embark on the first leg of his mission. (emphasis mine)

This man was practically a walking, talking, blinking red flag. The excuse that got him past security -- without a passport -- was that he was a Sudanese refugee. But nevermind that; Mutallab was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. His own father pointed him out as a threat to the CIA and what did they do?

Nothing.

It sure seems like the infiltrated CIA is only concerned with getting more power to interfere with our lives, not doing their job with the considerable power they already have.

This is the classic false flag mindset; it's right out of the playbook the neocons used after 9/11. Instead of blaming Bush for the security lapses they screamed that Bush needed more power to intercept these terrorists. Never mind that there was ample warning ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."). There was also a condescending dismissal of the importance of the warning and related intelligence:

We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.

What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Neocons and their rogue network within the government are not interested in stopping terror, only creating it. They use false flag attacks to gradually expand their powerbase while counting on the zero-sum nature of politcal power to drain their enemies of power. We are their enemies, unless we are their (straight Republican-ticket-voting) patsies.

Don't be a patsy. The neocons will keep doing it until they get caught. And as they get increasingly desperate the attacks may grow more deadly.

Please do your part and speak up so the public is primed to absorb this startling information. I already have to take off my shoes at the airport, which is bad enough. Are soon going to have to fly commando-style? Trust me, people, you do not want me taking off my stinky skivvies at the airport security scanner in front of you. Do yourself a favor and stop this joyless game before the next false-flag patsy sticks a bomb up his ass and we all have to get a public rectal exam to board a flight home.

OppositeLand: How Washington Really Works

If you're like most Americans, you probably think that organizations like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are there to protect the common man from white collar criminals on Wall Street.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that the SEC is an agency dedicated to protecting the criminals from the gimpy arm of justice. The Madoff scandal is a perfect example. His Ponzi scheme was operating right out in the open and anybody with enough financial sophistication to work on Wall Street would've been able to figure out the fraud if they had bothered to add up the numbers.

Former fraud investigator Harry Markopolos did add up the numbers:

"The SEC was never capable of catching Mr. Madoff. He could have gone to $100 billion" without being discovered, Markopolos testified. "It took me about five minutes to figure out he was a fraud."

Markopolos had been warning about Madoff's scam since 2000. Nobody listened. He sent his detailed warnings with his reasonings attached and written in such a way I, a financial neophyte, could understand the brazenness of the fraud. It should have been obvious to any SEC fraud investigator within a matter of minutes.

Here's why they didn't pursue the matter:

Madoff, who was at one point chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and sat on SEC advisory committees, was "one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse," Markopolos said.

The SEC would have been investigating one of their own, and that's just not gonna happen; then or now. That would be like Cheney investigating Bush or vice versa. Ain't gonna happen.


You see, Washington D.C. is kind of like OppositeLand: Everything is the opposite of the way it should be. Our biggest criminals are not just coddled, they are given the keys to the kingdom. When our banks screw up they are given billions for free, but when you are deep in debt you can bet on the credit card industry bribing Congress into passing tougher bankruptcy laws.

If you're able to wrap your head around the absurdity of the situation you might not be that surprised to find that the CIA is funding terrorism, the FBI is protecting criminals and the DEA is protecting drug smugglers. That's the way things work in OppositeLand. Bill Clinton gets impeached for a blowjob and Bush didn't even get censured for pissing all over the Constitution and starting two illegal wars in which over a million people died.

Welcome to OppositeLand, where if you fuck up, you move up. If you have ethics and morals, you can expect to be a social leper or maybe even have your ass killed for your troubles.

2005 Bankruptcy Law Finance Industry Sought has Strangled Economy

Was the banking industry screwed over by its own bankruptcy law? It sure appears to have hurt the economy...

“Before the reform, overindebted households might file bankruptcy and get rid of their credit card debt, and that would free up income to pay the mortgage,” Morgan said. “The new law blocks that escape route and forces better-off households to continue paying credit card debt, which makes it harder than before to continue paying the mortgage.”

The conclusions of Morgan and his colleagues echo earlier findings that the new law’s tougher requirements appear to have increased the number of people defaulting on their mortgages or walking away from their homes rather than seeking bankruptcy protection.

“One of the great lessons and ironies” of the new law, Treasury Department economist David P. Bernstein wrote in a recent paper, was that, by increasing the dollar value of assets susceptible to default, it has weakened many of the financial institutions that sought the new law in the first place.

Man, those guy are fucking idiots, right?
Hmm... I suspect that we need to reference incompetence theory here. These assholes didn't get to the top of the finance industry by being clueless morons eager to throw their body into the arms of Defeat. No, these hard-asses know a lot more about the economy than most people do and they're using that insider knowledge to time the crash of the economy and profit from it.The bankruptcy law was an important part of the crash: it was the trigger. It was the pin that popped the bubble.

The robberbarons in charge of this economy aren't stupid. They know that their inflationary, fiat monetary system creates boom and bust cycles so they simply manipulate those cycles to their favor and crater the system at a time of their choosing.

Cheney's invested in Europe. The Bushes are in South America and the Middle East. I'm sure Hank and Ben are well taken care of, too. The rest of us will be the ones to deal with the fallout from this avoidable disaster. Don't assume the bankruptcy law was unimportant; it emanated from the very heart of the banking industry and its passage was assumed/assured in Congress. That law is now adding to the misery of those suffering in this corpse of a system.

It's time to change. We need to switch to a gold-backed system wherein people can feel safe and plan for the future without the economic rollercoasters juiced by Big Media's propaganda system, creating fear at the opportune moments. We ride on, strapped into a rickety system that is doomed to fail, and soon. The government hasn't been keeping up the rollercoaster. In fact, the top of the hierarchy have sold all the screws and bolts to China for a tidy profit. We are held aloft by hope, inertia and the wings of big-tittied angels.

Well, don't look down. Like Wile E. Coyote, we'd fall if we did. But we have to fall, don't we?
 

It's time to fall up
refuse to die
and start to fly
away from the lie

RNC 2008: Thoughts on the mass arrests and the role of police

I don't hate the police for arresting me without probable cause or any concern for my civil liberties. The problem is institutional and systemic. The police merely carry out orders. The leaders in government and business are the ones who have erected this steel-barricaded oligarchy, and they are ultimately to blame for the sad state of civil liberties in this country, which in turn has lead to a serious downturn in the quality of our political system. Politicians are merely corporate whores; they spend 90% of their time schmoozing for cash in order to afford re-election, which incumbents manage to do over 90% of the time.

People are pissed about this. I am one of them. The cops are no different than barbed wire and steel barricades. They're just an obstacle to freedom set up by the ruling class in order to protect them from us, no matter how peacefully we approach them with our greivances. They don't want to hear about it because it's a zero sum game -- their power depends on the abdication of our liberties. They are not inclined to hear or obey the people because they are not of the people. They are the Oligarchs; the Ruling Elite. They rule by force and manipulation. They are not a government by and for the people, they are a fascist oligarchy run by megalomaniacs for their own twisted gain.

Never take your eye off the ball. The cops are pawns in this just like the rest of us. To see who's playing the game, look to the Superclass.

Do you want the truth? Or do you want to be entertained?

"The American people are today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the Earth."

--Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

--William Colby
CIA Director, 1973-1976

Collusion for Tyranny: The Media is just as guilty as Bush

Kucinich has introduced the Articles of Impeachment against Bush

...and the Media hasn't said shit.

"Liberal Media" my ass! The Media is fucking fascist, end of story. They are utterly controlled by the same corporate interests that control both major political parties. That's why Dennis Kucinich is a pariah in his own party -- he actually looks out for the Constitution and the rights of We The People. Such dedication to Liberty is considered treason in the bowels of both the Democratic and Republican parties.

A few mainstream outlets picked up the story and managed to spend an approximate average of less than 200 words describing the measure. They couldn't even be bothered to list more than a few of the 35 articles of impeachment.

I've seen better reporting in a fucking high school newspaper.

I don't blame the beat reporters; if their editors said "give me 2,000 words" they would have. As is, they probably had to fight to get 200.

But it's disgusting. I mean, jeeze, it's only the impeachment of the goddamn President of the United States of America. They all managed to mention that it's not politically feasible. Well I wonder why that is, you jackasses! It's because you won't cover it! If you did, everything would change, no matter how shitty and biased your coverage. Mr. 25% Approval Rating would not find many advocates in the populace, even if he would in the dominant press. And then you'd look pretty stupid, wouldn't you, defending the murdering megalomaniac who launched an illegal war. Those of us who still remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton know that it takes very little to whip the Media into a frothing frenzy of obsessive, inane coverage. Surely you could do the same for Bush. But you won't.

Because you're traitors.

Yeah, that's right. I said it. And it's true. This president is the most evil, diabolical man ever elected and you, the supposed Fourth Estate, won't criticize him in a voice above a whisper. It's fucking pathetic.

Look at Kucinich's 35 articles of impeachment. There's a lot of red meat here:

#1: Creating a secret propaganda campaign to manufacture a false case for war against Iraq

#2 Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression

#3 Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War

#4 Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States

#14: Misprision of a felony, misuse and exposure of classified information and cover up (Plame outing)

#15: Providing immunity from prosecution for criminal conduct for contractors in Iraq

#17: Illegal detention – detaining indefinitely, and without charge, American citizens and foreign captives (suspension of habeus)

#18: Torture – secretly authorizing and encouraging use of torture, as matter of official policy

#19 Rendition

#24 Spying on citizens violating 4th Amendment

#26 Announcing intent to violate laws w/signing statements, and then violating those laws.

#27 Failing to comply with congressional subpoenas, and instructing others to do so.

#29: Conspiracy to violate voting rights act of 1965, Ohio Sec of State 2004-06

#34: Obstruction into the investigation of 9/11

That's just a few of them. And this isn't wing-nut stuff, this is all stuff that has been discussed at one time or another in the mainstream press. Much of it was hushed up (the NSA spying scandal, election fraud, 9/11 obstruction) but some of it was loud and clear (torture, Plame, illegal Iraq War). Far from being left-wing lunacy, this is the last 7.5 years, distilled into 35 bullet points.

And yet the Media won't cover a congressman trying to hold Bush/Cheney accountable for their crimes.

I already told you why. But let it sink in. The Mainstream Media are the ones who made the Bush/Cheney disaster possible. They're the ones who greased the wheels, regurgitated the lies, jumped on the bandwagon and hushed up the really bad shit. Bush, without a fawning press corps, is just another partisan nutcase with a rich daddy. He wouldn't've been re-elected, let alone "elected" in the first place (another coverup there).

Let me lay it down for ya, real simple: If Bush hangs, Brian Williams should hang, too. If Cheney hangs, Tim Russert needs to swing from the same pole. If Rumsfeld goes down to the gallows, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks need to die too. The blood of OVER ONE MILLION IRAQI INNOCENTS is on their hands.

Maybe that's why the Media is so protective of the Bush regime: They know if Bush goes down, they all go down. They've all bloodied their hands and sullied their souls together. Might as well stick together until the bitter end.

But if we don't stop them, they'll turn this nation into a fascist state and make you and I into criminals for believing in justice, peace and freedom. Somehow we've got to stop them, but I just don't know how. I'm just some random guy with a blog. What can I do? There's no one representing my interests in Washington except Dennis Kucinich.

One man, standing up against the Forces of Evil, spitting in the wind and calling for change. This doesn't look good for the underdogs.

Meanwhile, the supposed hope of mankind is cozying up to Israel, possibly attending the secret Bilderberg meeting (another media coverup) and generally doing whatever it takes to get elected. Fair enough. But Barack Obama had better watch out that he doesn't sell his soul in the process.

Maybe the whole Obama campaign is just a mirage, a hallucination by those of us who have dreamed of someone who could bring our government back from the brink of tyranny and outright fascism.

I hope I'm wrong, but it's hard to believe in anything or anybody anymore. We've been utterly betrayed by the government, the media and the elite. It just hurts too much to care anymore. The audacity of hope, indeed.

I'd feel a lot more hopeful if I knew somebody out there was fighting the good fight. I sleep a little sounder knowing Kucinich has the balls of a man twice his size, but he's only one man. We need a few hundred more like him in Congress.

Dennis Kucinich: I salute you. You are a true American patriot.

Continuity of Totalitarianism

There exists, somewhere deep in the belly of the NSA, a database so large, so secret, and so illegal, that few government officials will dare talk about it, even off the record.

Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention. [emphasis mine]

Are you on the list? You have no way of knowing. There's no way to reason with them, to tell them you're not a threat. There's no recourse, no due process, no rights.

This is the dark heart of our government, silently beating away in the darkest corner of a military base somewhere deep underground. There are people in position who long for (or at least plan for) the chance to take power in the next emergency. The Constitution would be suspended, Congress rendered impotent, martial law declared and cities locked down.

For what?

Fear. This government fears its citizens, not because they're all terrorists, but because many of them still believe in democracy. Such people are dangerous. Believing in the Constitution might be enough to get you on the list.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Why? Why do we need to become a police state in order to become "secure"? Well, I already mentioned it above; the people who put these COG plans together are not patriots. They are traitors who wish to dispense with the annoyances of representative government and move instead to a system where everything is much smoother... for those in power.

It's strange that they would throw 200 years of liberty at the first sign of trouble ... if you don't know who these people are. Notice who gets protected in the scenario above. They aren't saving the Constitution, they're saving their own asses. They don't have contingency plans in place to ensure that citizens' rights are upheld; no, they're only concerned with maintaining their power and their control over us.

It's not necessary that the government be saved. We can start a new one and Lord knows it'll be better than the one we've got. But the one we've got is intent on saving its own skin, Constitution and Bill of Rights be damned. This isn't a Continuity of Liberty plan. This is a Discontinuation of Liberty plan.

The totality of this plan, the way every tactically-important aspect has been planned for seizure and "continuity", is to me indicative of Totalitarianism. The state and those in power can't even imagine why we wouldn't want the government to control everything. The idea that we could survive just fine without a bloated Federal government doesn't even occur to them.

You know, the United States of America was originally supposed to be an alliance amongst soveriegn states. If something bad happens in Washington D.C. that shouldn't directly affect Arizona or Minnesota, except as far as Federal money is concerned (the main tool by which the Federal government has tightened its control over the states).

Realize this: We don't need a strong Federal government! We have state and local governments to take care of things important to every American; things like roads, power, water, communications and other services.

And who's planning all this stuff anyway? Surely a competent agency with a devotion to civil liberties, right?

Haha, just kidding. You know we're fucked: It's FEMA!

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary.

Seriously.

Well, I guess I should look at the silver lining: FEMA will probably be just an incompetent at taking our liberties away as at helping those in need... But that's probably optimistic on my part. The reason FEMA sucks at disaster relief is because it was never really set up to be a benevolent agency; the idea behind FEMA was always this: Seizing control of the nation during an emergency.

This is the real purpose of the War on Terror. It's to get us used to the idea that the government needs to step in and take over when things get rough. What they don't tell you is that they're intentionally creating a culture of fear to make the poisonous medecine go down easier, and they're probably working the other end of things too, creating the conditions for terrorists to thrive so they'll launch attacks and trigger the COG plans that were the whole point of the War on Terror in the first place. So, like the War on Drugs, the WOT is reall just a War on Liberty.

All this brings us back to the Main Core database:

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

The fact that there are 8 million of us in this database is nothing less than horrifying. If there were really 8 million terrorists in the USA we'd have people exploding with Baghdad-like regularity... but we don't. Nope, it's far more likely that the people in this database are those like myself who believe in liberty and democracy. We are the true threat a tyrannical government would face in an emergency because we would want the Constitution to be reinstated. The COGers won't let that happen.

That is why we need to be monitored. All of us. All the time. For no reason other than we might be a threat some time in the future. Maybe. The pesky 4th amendment makes this so much more difficult than the government would like, but after years of merciless attack there's not much left of it in the public consciousness or on the law books. Here's a look at what they monitor:

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Basically, you are being monitored at all times. The NSA has been scooping up anything and everything on the internet for years. They already had phone conversations and financial transactions.

The privacy concerns are horrifying enough, but what's worse is that the database is probably useless at preventing terrorism:

In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."

But there is a lot of data on regular Americans who aren't planning any attacks. And that data can be misused, and it probably will be at the first opportunity.

Hell freezes over: The MSM talks about the Global Elite

The mainstream media is covering the global elite: The Superclass.

What is the world coming to? Are we actually going to have an honest discussion on the nature of the Super-rich and their incredibly disproportionate influence upon the world?

I doubt it, but it's still nice to see Newsweek talking about it... of course, the author positively lusts after the power in front of him:

Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Interestingly, no Asians were there, not even the Japanese. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called them 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to them, "You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime to make sure there are no free riders to give you comfort; you know that if you move individually everybody else will move with you."

There was nothing in writing, no rules, no formal process, and while no one asked the Fed to act, the Fed let everyone in the markets know it was acting. The beauty of the process was its absolute efficiency, seeing what a tight circle of large firms with "some global reach" could get done, fast—with an executive committee of only four running the weekly conference call until the crisis was past.

There was nothing in writing because it's not a democratic process. It's an oligarchical one. These super-rich folks have a common interest -- maintaining their power -- and they'll do whatever it takes to accomplish that goal.

The people on the recent calls like those described by Geithner, plus a few thousand more like them, not only in business and finance, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.

It's just like high school. The super-rich have formed their own clique and none of the rest of us are invited "in". Nope, we're outsiders.... which seems odd because there's approximately 6,000 of them and 6,000,000,000 of us.

So how does one become a member? As ever, being rich certainly helps. Many superclass members are wealthy, wealthier in relative terms than any elite ever has been. The top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet.

It's very stable. It's orderly, and it works.

But it's not democracy.

In fact, when I said "it works" I meant that the system works. I didn't mention anything about whether or not it works for everybody. Clearly, with most of the world's population in either mild or abject poverty, the system does not work fairly or equitably.

So here's a question: Why do we need these guys?

What benefit do they bring me? Or you? Right now they only bring the status quo, but with the economy faltering (and these guys being in a position to see it coming) it seems to me that they're bringing us a world of pain. The superclass will have time to jump ship. They've probably already moved much of their wealth to Euros or gold. The rest of us? We're just trying to get by.

If they fuck us over, I say it's on. You ruin my standard of living, I might just ruin yours.

The iconic symbol of superclass unity is the Gulfstream private jet. In fact, one way to measure the clout of an event is to count the private jets at the nearest airport. According to Gulfstream, Davos traditionally attracts more of its planes than any other gathering, drawing up to 10 percent of the 1,500 planes in service to Zurich airport. But this year's Olympics in Beijing will give it a run for its money, as typically do events as diverse as the Monaco Grand Prix, China's Boao Forum, the Geneva Auto Show or Allen & Co.'s annual getaway for media magnates in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Globalization looks different when you can tell the pilot when to leave and where to go, and when there are no security lines to wait in when you are heading off for distant destinations. Those who are free to move about the planet this way come to have more in common with themselves than with their own countrymen. "What happened to us, that we walk through the Davos party and know more people than when we were walking across the village green in the town we live in?" wonders Mark Malloch-Brown, former Deputy Secretary General at the United Nations and now a senior official in the British Foreign Ministry.

The Gulfstream jet is a perfect metaphor for these people. They are in the fast lane while the rest of us take the bus. There's only one word for it: Class.

I thought America was supposed to be a classless (or at least upwardly mobile) society, but it seems like we've copied the British class system almost to the letter. Throw some more racism and capitalism in the mix and you've got Britain 2.0. Is that what our founding fathers wanted?

People tell me that I shouldn't wage class warfare, to which I say: "What the fuck are you talking about? The war is over. The rich won a long time ago."

20% of CEOs don't pay taxes

... their companies pick up the bill. Isn't that nice?

You may think I'm just making stuff up, but this info is from a new study (via USA Today):

A new study from The Corporate Library finds that the most common form of perk being granted to CEOs these days is something called a tax "gross-up." In plain English, it means that a company pays the taxes owed by the CEO on benefits granted by the company.

The Corporate Library, a shareholder watchdog group, found that 20% of major American companies, or 657 of nearly 3,300 examined, picked up the tab on at least one tax owed by the CEO.

"We are sure that many U.S. workers would be grateful if their employers also paid their income tax obligations," writes Paul Hodgson of The Corporate Library in the report.

You're damn right, Paul. How fucking sweet would that be?

Those poor, hard-working billionaire CEOs! We can't just hand them a billion dollars and expect them to pay their own taxes can we? Heck, no, we need a welfare program for CEOs.

What utter fascism.

What's that you say? This has nothing to do with fascism? I disagree; here's why:

The guiding fascist principle is "might makes right". Fascism is all about making things orderly, especially for those who rule. Far from being the goal, social equality is looked at as something undesirable, perhaps even unnatural. Fascists love the pyramid structure. They want a firm, unyielding power structure that's easy to understand; they need a strong leader who is completely above everyone else, like a Pharoah or a Emperor. That's why Bush is so popular with so many people who are actually adversely affected by his policies. They love being ruled with an iron fist. The opposite makes them feel afraid, whereas the pyramid structue makes them feel safe. Democracy is chaos. Fascism is order.

So it shouldn't be surprising that our business leaders organize things in a pyramidal, hierarchical fashion as well. It's not necessary to pay CEOs and other execs huge sums of money; they don't really need it, but they do want it. It's a status symbol. Their obscene paycheck makes them a god, a pharoah. It places them way beyond the reach of the rest of us. They represent the ultimate promise of capitalism: to become godlike without being born into it. And of course, if you want to emphasize your godliness, you must also emphasize the weakness of the puny, pathetic mortals who work under you. That's why perfectly rational companies gladly pay obscenely wasteful amounts of money to CEOs while simultaneously pinching pennies when it comes to regular workers.

It's no fun being a god if there's no one to worship you. But it gets funny. Search around and you'll find plenty of people defending CEO salaries and this gross-up technique. They've slurped the Kool-Aid and they think they can become CEOs one day too. It's the American Dream after all.... but what percentage of us actually becomes a CEO?

The article above focuses on 3000 major companies. There are 300 million Americans. You have a 0.001% chance of being one of their CEOs. Good luck.

The Corporate Plutocracy Speaks!

Well, they finally decided to pipe up, and it was on this dude's TV set during American Idol (go figure).

But before I could turn off the sound, the ad was interrupted by the image of a sixty-something businessmen sitting behind a giant desk in a plush corporate office.

A message ran across the bottom of the screen. It said: "A Message from the American Corporate Plutocracy."

Go read the whole thing.

Refuting "Incompetence Theory" in just one sentence

Nefarious people within our government suppress any evidence of malicious intent and instead encourage the perception of incompetence, which often results in the blame being diffused throughout the bureaucracy rather than focused on the individual bad actors in power, who are ultimately responsible, but able to escape justice through a hidden network of friendships and alliances known as the establishment.

935 Lies in 24 months, eh? So, uh.... when do the impeachment hearings start?

So yeah, I know this isn't a big shocker to anybody with a functioning brain stem, but the Bush administration systematically lied its way into the Iraq War. A new study by the Center For Public Integrity has analyzed the public statements of administration officials in the run-up to the war and come up with 935 lies in a two-year span.

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

Everybody makes mistakes. Accidents happen and people do stupid things... but 935 mistakes? No fucking way.

So Many Lies, So Little Time
This was an organized campaign of deception. It was a fraud perpetrated on the American people and, most especially, on the people of Iraq.

935 LIES! That's 1.28 lies per day for 24 months straight by my calculations.

Take a look at the chart below (click for a larger version). You can see that the lies are concentrated around the pre-war and immediate post-invasion period. The peak lying period was the February before the invasion (which began on March 19, 2003). This was no accident.


This is not just a bunch of anonymous interns leaking statements to the press. The study concentrated on just 8 top officials:

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The study can only look at public statements, so we have no way of counting the many lies whispered into the ears of journalists. It's interesting that Karl Rove was not included in this study, but he's more of a behind-the-scenes operator. Also missing are gobs of military men, mid-level staffers, the whole pundit class on TV and many more folks who are not directly connected to the administration. These 935 lies are just a drop in the bucket, but they all originate from very high-ranking officials.

The Impeachment Fantasy
So now that we've got a study in the mainstream press clearly delineating the fact that George W. Bush made at least 260 false statements in just 24 months, that means the impeachment hearings are just around the corner, right?

Wrong.

The Democrats will wag their fingers and cluck their tongues and do.... nothing. The Republicans have long since sold their souls, but it's the Democrats' betrayal that really hurts America. We need a true opposition party more than ever, but we don't have one.

If you've been reading this blog you probably know by now how Washington really works. Democracy, hearings, investigations, intelligence estimates, blah, blah, blah. It's all just for show. The real power resides behind the scenes. The oligarchy, the establishment, the powers that be -- whatever you want to call them -- have decided that there will be no impeachment hearings. So there won't be.

I don't know what else to tell you. "Write your congressperson"? Fat lotta good that will do, but it doesn't hurt to keep the pressure on.

The Oligarchs' Dilemma
Just try not get too depressed. Yes, American "democracy" makes Pakistan look like an oasis of liberty, but it's not all bad. I've got a feeling that there are some people in the establishment who want to change things. No doubt they're biding their time, waiting for things to fall into place. But we don't have much time. I don't think the Bush team plans to leave office, 'cause if they do they'll have to leave the country, too. Even the oligarchy can't stop a limited investigation into the Bush regime by any successive Democratic administration. They have to continue the illusion of democracy, even if it hurts them in the short term. And that could mean a war crimes tribunal for Bush and crew.

Cheney knows this so it's more likely that there will be another terrorist attack before or shortly after the elections (before inaugeration). Bush will declare martial law, lock down the nation, suspend the constitution and retain power "temporarily" until the emergency has passed. Of course, just like in Musharraf's Pakistan, the emergency will never pass.

If there are any oligarchs still loyal to the constitution, they will have to move quickly. There's a very small window (less than a year now) to execute their counter-coup. Bush will move to arrest the constitutional loyalists on trumped-up charges. Impeachment is the only remedy. We'll need to take to the streets and camp out in every single senator's office and demand justice.

If and when it does happen we'll have to be ready. We need to stand up for democracy, no matter what the cost. The future of America hangs in the balance.

Jeb Bush on "Truth"

Jeb Bush, the president's li'l brother, has a little warning for all of you who would doggedly pursue the truth, no matter what it may be:

The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can't deposit the truth in a bank. You can't buy groceries with the truth. You can't pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross all the way to the homeless shelter. And if you think that the million or so people in this country that are really interested in the truth about their government can support people who would tell them the truth, you got another thing coming. Because the million or so people in this country that are truly interested in the truth don't have any money.

-- Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida

It might sound like he's talking out of his ass, but I suspect he's not. He's part of an elite clique that holds power in this and many other countries, and you can bet they've studied their opposition very closely. Their opposition is a small contingent of kooks and nutcases who actually believe that the truth is important. I bet the elite looked in the NSA's gigantic spying database, crunched some numbers and figured out that they only have to worry about a million or so people, out of the 300 million US citizens in this country.

That's only 1 out of 300, but it's still a lot of people. Of course, he's right: We don't have any money. But we do have a need for truth, and despite what the Jeb Bushes of the world may tell you, that's the most important thing.

I wear the albatross of truth with pride, but I can understand why people would be reluctant to do so. The truth is dangerous, especially when powerful men like Jeb Bush are so adamantly opposed to the real truth. People learn to keep their mouths shut. Go along to get along. Join the herd.

But then I guess you can't really complain when politicians lie to you if you're not going stand up for truth. Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others that have been tried. Perhaps we've gotten the government we deserve. Perhaps it was our laissez faire attitude towards truth that got us into this mess in the first place and allowed it to fester and burst in such a gooey explosion of lies and bullshit.

Maybe the million or so of us should move somewhere else. Maybe Americans would rather live in deception than stand up for the truth. I don't know. But I believe that the truth matters somehow, more than Jeb could ever know. And if Americans don't like the truth, I'm pretty sure they don't like the feeling that they've been lied to either.

Let that be a warning for Jeb and his pals. Americans don't like being played for fools... and the truth is that that is exactly what Jeb and the elite are doing.

No wonder they're no friends of the truth.

Benazir Bhutto was obviously assassinated by Musharraf

Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto is dead. She was shot by her assassin, who then blew himself up.

Bhutto's archenemy, Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, who has the most to gain from her death, tried to make it look as though he hadn't wished for such a thing:

Musharraf blamed Islamic extremists for Bhutto's death and said he would redouble his efforts to fight them.

"This is the work of those terrorists with whom we are engaged in war," he said in a nationally televised speech. "I have been saying that the nation faces the greatest threats from these terrorists. ... We will not rest until we eliminate these terrorists and root them out."

Right, right, right. "Terrorists." Gotcha. Anything bad happens, it's dem damn dirty terr'rists.

Isn't it weird how the terrorists' are so kean to assassinate a politician with no actual power who may or may not have had a shot at the presidency? Especially when the presidency is currently occupied by a secular militant Bush-crony who hated Bhutto?

Hmmm....

Meanwhile, our esteemed president was quick to blame teh terr'rists too:

In the U.S., a tense looking President Bush strongly condemned the attack "by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy."

Undermine Pakistanti democracy? You mean, like by supporting a dictator instead of demonstrators agitating for liberty? I guess that makes Bush a "murderous extremist." Even more interesting is how he already knows that it was some lone gunman ("extremist" is a great catch-all) when there hasn't been an investigation yet.

In fact, all of the neocon/fascist front have already condemned the attack, from Sarkozy to Karzai to Gordon Brown to the Pope. They were so quick with statements you have to wonder if they knew it was coming. And every single one of them has accepted Musharraf's version of events without question.

Interesting....

Of course, Americans are in the thrall of a malicious and corrupt media establishment. There will be no questioning the official version of events.

The Pakistanis at least are not so stupid:

Many chanted slogans against Musharraf, accusing him of complicity in her killing.

"We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment ... but they paid no heed to our requests," Malik said.

As news of her death spread, angry supporters took to the streets.

In Pakistan it's obvious. The president's most esteemed foe is dead with a bullet in her neck. Do the fucking math.

Musharraf is a military man. The military is the most powerful institution in Pakistan and their intelligence service, the ISI, is a known collaborator with the CIA (some say it's just a CIA puppet). The motive, means and opportunity are all right there. But we Americans -- you know home of the brave, land of the free -- will swallow the Musharraf propaganda like manna because our Dear Leader and his corrupt, oligarchical establishment have their fingers in this wicked little pie.

Pakistan is necessary for the perpetuation of other frauds, including the al Qaeda myth. That's why control of Pakistan cannot be allowed to return to the hands of a democrat. The secret could be revealed, and that is most certainly worth killing for.

This is not the first attempt on Bhutto's life:

Bhutto had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18. On the same day, she narrowly escaped injury when her homecoming parade in Karachi was targeted in a suicide attack that killed more than 140 people.

That was Musharraf's first "welcome back" message. Now, he has said "goodbye."

Now here comes the lie:

Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida and the Taliban hated Bhutto for her close ties to the Americans and support for the war on terrorism. A local Taliban leader reportedly threatened to greet Bhutto's return to the country with suicide bombings.

That's a straight-up lie. First of all the Taliban has no claim on Pakistan; they are (ostensibly) Afghanis who are more concerned with fighting the Bush-puppet Hamad Karzai. Second, if al Qaeda truly hated Bush and the Americans they would target Musharraf, since he is Bush's closest and most powerful ally in Pakistan. Bhutto's death does nothing but strengthen his hand. The truth is that the CIA and the ISI worked together to train and create al Qaeda for bin Laden as a convenient scapegoat for anything and everything.

Now al Qaeda is getting the blame again. How convenient for a dictator like Musharraf (or Bush) to have a shadowy, ultra-evil organization to blame for everything. How convenient that al Qaeda apparently hates the same people that Bush and Musharraf do. How convenient that al Qaeda never seems to manage to kill right-wing hardliners but has amazing success with leftist pro-liberty politicians. How extremely fucking convenient.

The CIA/ISI/al-Qaeda axis is just a modern day Gestapo. They are an all-purpose assassination squad under control of the evil proto-fascist oligarchs who rule this planet.

It's time for people to wake up and see through the lies. How many more people have to die before we finally learn we're being played for fools?

UPDATE 12/28: The police charged with providing security for Bhutto left their posts shortly before the assassination.

Perhaps more shockingly, an attendee at the rally where Bhutto was killed says police charged with protecting her "abandoned their posts," leaving just a handful of Bhutto's own bodyguards protecting her.

As commenter pk_analyst points out below Bhutto was shot with an AK-47 rifle. Now the spinning, changing storylines and Big Lies come into play. In order to do a proper cover-up the authorities will have to eliminate the gun (many are saying she hit her head on some sort of lever instead of taking a bullet) and throw all the blame on mysertious al Qaeda members who may or may not even exist.

While some intelligence officials, especially within the US, were quick to finger al Qaeda militants as responsible for Bhutto's death, it remains unclear precisely who was responsible and some speculation has centered on Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, its military or even forces loyal to the current president Pervez Musharraf. Rawalpindi, where Bhutto was killed, is the garrison city that houses the Pakistani military's headquarters.

Just to be clear, "intelligence officials" almost certainly means "CIA officials." The CIA is busily spinning the press. This is misinformation, folks. You are being lied to indirectly by your government and somewhat unwittingly by the media. Just so you know.

Conspiracy for World Domination Confirmed by David Rockefeller

I would like to sincerely thank David Rockefeller, chairman of every internationalist organization you can think of, for coming out and admiting that there is a global conspiracy to unite the world under a one world government.

It gets annoying, you know, constantly explaining this to people, only to receive blank stares or mockery in response. I've long wished the Establishment (or "Illuminati" if you prefer) would just come out and admit it. It's not like we're in a position to do anything about it anyway. Well David Rockefeller (or D-Rock, as his friends in the international finanace 'hood call him) has finally cleared the air:

"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." - From Rockefeller's "Memoirs", (p.405).

Uh, yes, that is the charge, Rockie, and what's more we charge you with using any and every means at your disposal to accomplish this, including bribery, murder, lying, fraud, coups, mind-control, and, ironically, belligerent nationalism.

He continues with an even more revealing passage:

"The anti-Rockefeller focus of these otherwise incompatible political positions owes much to Populism. 'Populists' believe in conspiracies, and one of the most enduring is that a secret group of international bankers and capitalists, and their minions, control the world's economy. Because of my name and prominence as the head of the Chase for many years, I have earned the distinction of 'conspirator in chief' from some of these people.

"Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half-century. Not only was the very real threat posed by Soviet Communism overcome, but there have been fundamental improvements in societies around the world, particularly in the United States, as a result of global trade, improved communications, and the heightened interaction of people from different cultures. Populists rarely mention these positive consequences, nor can they cogently explain how they would have sustained American economic growth and the expansion of our political power without them."

You will notice that he does not deny it. If anything he has confirmed that their is a "secret group of international bankers and capitalists, and their minions, [who] control the world's economy". What more is there to say?

Just this: Certainly we all appreciate the many benefits of modern capitalism and the technological goodies we've gotten our hands on. But at what cost? Politically, economically and ecologically it's a loser for those of us who aren't moguls. Who is going to control the one-world government he so fervently desires? If past performance is any indication of future performance, we can expect these internationalists to keep all the power to themselves. Democracy is simply "incompatible" with his smooth, orderly, one-world utopia.

The scary thing here is the idea, now realized before our eyes, that not all people who want to conquer the world are madmen. Some of them, clearly, know exactly what they're doing; they plan decades ahead, carefully lay the groundwork and, with considerable patience, skill and cunning, achieve their goals through whatever methods required.

The whole affair is amazingly complex, but then again, so is collecting stamps, memorizing Tolkein or learning to program in C++. I suppose when you're the billionaire son of a billionaire you need to have a hobby to keep occupied.

Democrats Eat Poo

Our current Constitutional Crisis summed up in one pithy comic:

It wouldn't be so depressing if it weren't so true. The myth of partisanship is just that; a myth. In reality, both parties are controlled by a higher party: The Money Party (or the Business Party if you prefer).

If the two parties were boxers, the Democrats would be the one throwing the fight. The Republicans would be the one biting the other guy's ear off.

Money as debt: The root of the new slavery

If you've ever felt like you're a slave to money, this video will explain quite simply how that is in fact true. It's the best video on money creation I've ever seen.



Be sure to check out all five sections. Here's part 2.

Warren Buffett says the system is rigged

Warren Buffett is no stranger to money. He's one of the richest men in the world; I think he's in third place at the moment.When he says the tax code is more lenient to the ultra-rich I'm inclined to believe him. After all, it was a bunch of rich guys who bought the politicians who wrote it.

The very rich in America pay taxes at a lower rate than most working people, and, due to a wrinkle in the tax code, private-equity partners enjoy some of the lowest tax rates of all. At a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser in New York last month, Warren Buffett, no stranger to wealth, told an audience filled with bankers and real-estate developers the system was, in effect, rigged. "This is what Congress in its wisdom did: the 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter." Buffett (who is a director of NEWSWEEK's parent, The Washington Post Company) offered a million dollars to any fellow magnate who could prove he had higher tax rates than his secretary.

We shouldn't be surprised by this, but should be pissed off enough to fix it. It's time to put some people in Congress who aren't beholden to the rich. Right now there are two types of congress-critters: Those who were brought into office by rich men and those who are rich men. That's not democracy; that's oligarchy.

The creepy thing is that these people really do all know each other:

He [Steve Schwarzman] told The New York Times three years ago that he saw Averell Harriman, a financier who became an envoy to Russia and adviser to Democratic presidents, as a kind of role model. When Schwarzman was a brash young Yale student in 1969, he wrote Harriman, asking for an audience (the two had been in the same secret society, Skull and Bones; Schwarzman was a class behind George W. Bush).

Powerful folks all know each other. They keep tabs on each other. They help each other. They go to the same schools; they have access to the halls of power. They are the moneyed-elite. They are The Establishment, The Oligarchy: Your True Masters. Bow before them, peasant.

The Cloak of Stupidity

The Oligarchy won't allow impeachment.

However, if you want to remove the Oligarchy you have to remove Bush first. It's a Catch-22 born in Hell and swaddled in conspiracy. Some people suggest that the Democratic Congress is simply incompetent and divided. I think it's much more likely that they are servile and paid-for.

Check out this awesome article from Glenn Greenwald. He nails the Democratic-controlled Congress for being the sell-outs they are.

Impeachment is necessary, but the Democrats resist where there's merit while the Republicans rushed forth without the People behind them. Both parties are a bunch of fuck-ups. They're so incompetent that there's no difference between that and evil. When that's the case you have evil hiding itself behind a Cloak of Stupidity. Ironically, it's a brilliant plan.

Whoever said "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity," was essentially writing evil a blank check. It seems the quote itself is stupid...or evil. Hanlon, however, created the quotation as more of a joke, not a axiom set in stone. Foolish are those who set store by it.

The Dark Ones will gladly use the Cloak of Stupidity to escape perceived culpability because the repercussions for negligence are much less severe than those for malice. It's a simple cost-benefit analysis for the neocons: "We're not evil, we're stupid!" I predict you'll be hearing that excuse a lot in the near future. Don't fall for it. If you wear the Cloak of Stupidity you deserve to be stripped naked, warts laid bear.

The Oligarchy reacts to sunlight like a vampire does. Expose the Hidden Hand and you'll be one step closer to impeachment and true liberty.

Bush's Grandfather Planned Fascist Coup In America

A new BBC Radio 4 investigation [realplayer] sheds new light on a subject that has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, to overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler. [/digg]

Indeed, these same people have always been in power in America. Look at Dodd's note to Roosevelt, where he says, "I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime" (emphasis mine). Look how upfront he is about the ruling families. It's stated as an uncontroversial fact. It's only in recent times that people who talk about such things have been branded conspiracy nuts and/or class warriors.

Even then, Oligarchy had hold over our nation, but at least people were aware of it. Now the oligarchy rules from the shadows.

Post Reveals Dick Cheney Spies On White House Staffers

The Washington Post's profile of Dick Cheney reveals there is "unannounced standing order" in the White House: "Documents prepared for the national security adviser, another White House official said, were 'routed outside the formal process' to Cheney, too." [/digg]

This is unbelieveable. Cheney has set up a Shadow White House, a secret one designed to give him control over information going from and to Bush.

Sorry if this blog seems like the "Dick Cheney really sucks, mkay" blog lately, but I think it's amazing how blatantly unconstitutional Cheney's mindset and the Bush/Cheney White House really is. We need to get this asshole out of here NOW. He has remade the executive branch in his own image, but with himself floating above the pyramid like an all-seeing eye. Sauron, er, I mean, Cheney, is clearly trying to build a dictatorship.

Somebody has called for a general strike. At this point, I'm prepared to second that motion.

Cheney tells agency that VP's office is not part of the executive branch

The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney told an agency within the National Archives that for purposes of securing classified information, the Vice President's office is not an 'entity within the executive branch' according to a letter released Thursday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. [/digg]

See? This is why Dick needs hookers (and hooker disposal services) -- being the master of a super-governmental agency, floating above the executive, legislative and judicial branches is tough work.

Hookers. Dick needs hookers.

Support the Dick Cheney Hooker Disposal Act of 2007

Ladies and gentlemen of the internet, today I would like to introduce a bill for consideration by The Congress of the United States of America. Please join me in supporting this critical piece of legislation.

In the rough and tumble world of politics a man needs a chance to unwind at the end of the day so he can face tomorrow refreshed and ready to go. This is especially important when that man is engaged in the stressful task of starting wars and silencing enemies. Isn't it time to give back to the man who has taken so very much? I hope you'll join me in lobbying Congress to pass The Dick Cheney Hooker Disposal Act of 2007.

Full text of this important bill:

110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 6660

To amend the Department of Hookers and Cheap Cigars Department Act of 1914, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

June 18, 2007

---

A BILL

To amend the Department of Hookers and Cheap Cigars Department Act of 1914, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the "The Dick Cheney Hooker Disposal Act of 2007".

SEC. 2. It shall be resolved forthwith that—

(a) Any prostitutes the Vice President of the United States of America, His Honor Richard B. Cheney wishes to dispose of shall have duly deposited into the account relating to her post-use period via her microchip implant a credit of not less than 8,000 U.S. dollars and not more than 1 million ($1,000,000) U.S. dollars, plus free shipping in Wyoming.

(b) Definitions- For purposes of this section—

(1) The term "prostitute" shall be defined as "a woman who for whatever reason has sex with Dick Cheney and is not his wife" and shall be used throughout this bill.

(2) The term "hooker" shall have identical meaning herein.

(3) The term “pimp” shall refer to the business associate of a hooker

(c) All prostitutes shall be supplied by Madam Palfrey or a duly appointed representative (or "Pimp").

SEC. 3. Hooker disposal in accordance with Hooker Disbursement and Collection Agency (HDCA) rules and regulations

(a) All prostitutes must be disposed of in a method befitting the secreting of all evidence of prostitute fucking and killing from the general public. Since they never read these bills, they'll never fucking know. Therefore, all prostitute remains must be remanded to the control of the Chief Deputy of the Hooker Disbursement and Collection Agency (HDCA) or his duly appointed representative.

(b) It is resolved that hooker remains must be deposited into—

(1) The cement foundation of new buildings or

(2) Blended with molten steal

(c) So as to ensure no evidence will be found of the Department of Hookers and Cheap Cigars Department Act of 1914, and all subsequent legislation, including this Act.

(d) Furthermore, it is resolved that Dick Cheney's hooker disposal is hereby given utmost priority over other hooker disposal requirements, including

(1) The President's (POTUS) Playboy Bunnys Get Fucked Department and related activities, known as Section 69-G, and

(2) all other hooker disposal priorities.

SEC. 4. It is further resolved that funding for this act shall—

(a) Be acquired by secretly re-routing funds appropriated to the Faking Unsolicited Concern for Kids, Orphans, Females and Freedom (FUCKOFF) Act of 1969 and

(b) From the Central Intelligence Agency’s (C.I.A.) Secret Slush Fund for Hookers and Blow.

---

You may be wondering if I'm serious. You're damn right I'm serious.

We live in an age of unprecedented government corruption and corporate malfeasance and few people seem to care. The point of this admittedly cynical satire to make people think. In my wildest wet dream this bill would be introduced and even debated on the floor of House of Representatives. I don't expect them to pass it; shit, I'd be the first to say they should vote against it.

Getting the bill passed is not the point. I'd just like to see a member of the House introduce it to make a point about how incredibly corrupt and evil our government has become. There are so many secret or just oft-ignored parts of the government all running around doing god-knows-what with the trillions of dollars the taxpayers have given them, it's hard to imagine the government is even aware of what its doing.

Like an octopus with a million tentacles a few must inevitably be up to no good. A few errant tentacles I can accept but when a man like Dick Cheney takes control of the Octopus' cranium and controls it so effectively I begin to wonder if maybe corruption is the plan. Cheney's deft control of the war machine revealed that corruption is not the exception; it's the norm. And if he's ordered a prostitute or two? Well, maybe reality is more corrupt and decrepit than my darkest nightmares.

Please, join me in supporting a bill that you don't really support. It's a crazy choice for crazy times.

Why do we let the Media decide who our candidates will be?

Taking part in a televised debate can be a make-it-or-break-it moment for any presidential candidate. But what if you're not allowed to debate at all?

A diabolical Catch-22
As many of you are aware, not all candidates are allowed to debate in a given broadcast debate. This has been a problem for years. During the last presidential election both the Libertarian and Green party candidates were actually arrested trying to get into a debate they had been explicitly banned from!

Most candidates are excluded from the debate simply because the Media (big M) deems them minor/unknown/unpopular candidates. Well, of course they're unknown; they're not allowed to debate on national TV!! Bit of a Catch-22, wouldn't you say?

A most insidious and foul Catch-22, I would say. Here's why: We supposedly live in a democracy. It's not really a democracy, it's a republic (that's a story for another day), but we like to pretend that the people really have a say. The hidden reality is that the bosses of the major television stations are making decisions that define the course of our nation, and they're doing it from private boardrooms sequestered on the 100th floor of a skyscraper, and there's nothing any of us can do about it because they aren't elected or accountable to anybody but the company's shareholders -- ya know... other rich people.

Why should the CEO of CNN have such power? Why should he (and it's almost certainly a he) determine who will and won't be the next president of the United States before the people ever get a chance to vote in a primary?

Isn't that censorship? Isn't that more like an oligarchy than a democracy? Why do we let them get away with it?

Well, until recently most people didn't even know about the problem. And we didn't have the power to make a difference anyway. But things are changing.

Social Media saves the day
Social Media has finally offered regular people like you and me a voice. Sites like Digg, while not perfect, have enabled users to vote (you know, like a democracy) on what stories they think are worthy.
Two candidates, Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, owe most of their young supporters to the users of two social media sites: Digg and Reddit. Without those two sites neither candidate had a hope in hell of cracking the oligarchy and getting significant, objective coverage by the mainstream media (MSM).

Why does the media censor and ostracize certain candidates?
The candidates that find themselves locked out of televised debates tend to have a few things in common: They tend to be unpopular or unknown (but that is not always the case). Their campaigns are usually poorly funded (maybe because it's hard to raise funds if you get no coverage) and sometimes they have views that are contrary to the political mainstream.

But sometimes the political mainstream is very much at odds with the desires of the voting public. A perfect example is the continued prohibition of cannabis (you know: "marijuana"), an issue on which the politicians are most definitely out of step with most of America, which favors medicinal pot by an astonishing 78% margin. Net candidate Mike Gravel recently came out in support of legalizing cannabis, which he says should be for sale in liquor stores. For a mainstream, "media-approved" candidate, such a position would be political suicide. Why?

Perhaps the media has been shaping our political landscape for such a long time nobody can even remember a time when they weren't. Perhaps there are certain forces at work behind the scenes that determine what is considered politically acceptable and what is considered "extremist."

It's hard not to see the media as a controlling, suppressing force when they blatantly censor certain candidates. Ron Paul's performance in the recent Republican debate at the Reagan Library was hailed by many observers, but when it came time to review the field and do some analysis ABC News made a curious omission: Ron Paul.

He wasn't even available as an option for viewers to vote for. He wasn't mentioned anywhere in David Chalain's analysis. If not for a web uprising (involving Digg and Reddit) Ron Paul would probably still be excluded. When ABC finally backed down (after deleting a storm of comments asking, "Where's Ron?") Ron Paul ran away with a landslide victory in the online poll. The numbers are incredible (and no doubt skewed by a reaction to the censorship). Paul clearly has a massive groundswell of public support.... but in the corporate realm he has apparently earned only hand-waving dismissal and contempt.

What are we supposed to think of this? When there are 10 candidates at a debate and viewers are only allowed to vote for 9 of them is that not censorship? Is that not electioneering by a major corporation?
And when they back down and include the suppressed candidate and he wins the poll, how do they respond? They write an article in which they find people to scratch their heads and say, "who knows how this Ron Paul got popular. Must be sumthin' to do with them internets." Then they conclude he has no chance of winning and that this is just an exercise in teenage rebellion (or something) and wave their hands, content that they will never have to talk about him again.

Democratic candidate Mike Gravel has experienced the exact same treatment, but on the other side of the aisle. Gravel and Paul are both painted as "extremists" within their respective parties, so we'd can conclude that Paul is a right-wing extremist and Gravel is a left-wing extremist, right?

Not quite. Both candidates are populists, espousing "common sense" positions that many average Americans hold, but which are not endorsed by many mainstream politicians. Both are opposed to the Iraq War (and always were), both question Prohibition, both are wary of a pre-emptive strike against Iran and both are suspicious of the corporate media that excludes them from debates. In short, they have a lot in common with the public they are trying to represent.

Meanwhile, the Media's favorite Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, goes around saying fascist shit like this:

We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

[ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]

You have free speech so I can be heard.

Is that what most Americans believe? Wasn't America founded by overthrowing the "lawful authority" of the British? And this "Freedom is about authority" stuff sounds like a parody of George Orwell's 1984... but Rudy was being serious! "You have free speech so I can be heard"?!! Saturday Night Live couldn't parody Rudy any better than he does himself.

Which candidate is really an "extremist"? Which candidate is fundamentally out-of-line with the thinking of mainstream America? Well, maybe America really does want fascism instead of freedom, but the noise on the internet would seem to indicate otherwise.

Media Control and Manipulation
It seems like ancient history now, but it was actually the recent past when the mainstream media controlled every avenue of information and expression in this country. Nowadays we can talk about these things and send our message out to a wide audience, but as recently as 12 years ago it simply was not possible for a middle class person to route around the MSM. Suddenly most people can afford machines that are more powerful than a printing press, and allow common people to talk to each other without the Media's filter. That's why the Media is so upset about blogging and social media -- they're so used to having an absolute stranglehold over the conversation in this country.

The Media is used to controlling:

• what information citizens receive
• what information citizens are allowed to share with one another on the national stage
• discussion and framing of issues in mainstream press
• which issues receive national coverage (and which are ignored)
• who gets to talk about the issues in the press (and who doesn't)
• how political actors are portrayed (villain or hero or neutral)

Social Media smashes that control grid and puts power in the hands of the many, rather than the few. This is a recent development so the full ramifications are not yet clear, but one thing we are finding out is that the Media has been using their incredible power to highlight certain candidates and suppress others.

The media has a paternalist streak that is really out of place in this day and age. The Washington Post thinks they know best and they aren't afraid to tell you that they already know Gravel & Paul are not going to be elected, so why don't we just eject them from the debates already?

The Democratic debate in South Carolina featured eight candidates, while 10 crammed into the GOP debate in California last Thursday. Voters trying to sort out their presidential choices aren't helped by debates cluttered with the likes of Mike Gravel (hint: he's a former senator from Alaska) on the Democratic side and Ron Paul (hint: he's a libertarian House member from Texas) among the Republicans.

Thank goodness for our dear corporate masters. If they didn't come in any set things straight we'd have to learn somebody's name and what they stand for. MY GOD! The very idea exhausts me.

Sarcasm aside, this sort of thing has been going on for generations. That's why an editorial like the one above doesn't seem odd to them; this is standard operating procedure! The Media has identified the candidates they don't like (the ones that aren't easily bought/co-opted) and now they've decided to tell you, Dear Voter, than you needn't concern yourself with these troublesome miscreants. Big Media will make things simple for you by excluding them.

...But wait a minute. Isn't this a democracy? Don't the voters decide who is voted off the proverbial island?

Well, now you know better. That is not the way America works. America is run by a ruling class of oligarchs no different than the ones who control Russia. The difference is the American media freely admits that oligarchs run Russia, but they would sooner give their mansions to the poor than admit America is the same. The exact reverse scenario plays out in Russia where the Russian (government/oligarch-controlled) media is free to disparage America and mock its corrupt institutions, while speaking ill of Russia is a good way to get your broadcasting license revoked.

The awful truth is that America has long been controlled by the rich, just like most nations throughout history. They have remade American society and government to suit themselves and they have grown very comfortable on their throne.

What is an Oligarchy?
Stephen Fleischman, himself a former mainstream media man, tackles the reality of the Oligarchy in an article for Counterpunch:

My dictionary says an oligarchy is a form of government where most or all political power effectively rests with a small segment of the society. As Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, puts it, "Oligarchies are often controlled by a few powerful families whose children are raised and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy, often at some sort of expense to those governed." Does that sound like the administration of George W. Bush?

Why, yes it does! That must be a weird coincidence. ... right?

I wish I could tell you more about the Oligarchy, but it operates in secret and prefers that most citizens do not even know it exists. In fact, by using the mainstream media the Oligarchy is able to program us so that even if we are provided with irrefutable evidence of the existence of said Oligarchy, many will still deny it and disbelieve it.

You're probably wondering "How?!"

Have you ever been called a "conspiracy theorist?" Well, it tends to end any meaningful discussion of the facts and immediately puts the onus on the accused to defend himself from the charge leveled at him. The Media has a few "magic words" like this at their disposal. It's amazing how effective they can be. Nobody wants to be called a conspiracy theorist... but isn't that just an ad hominem attack? It's no different than calling someone a poopy-head.

I suspect there may be more to it than that. In a future post I'll look into how the Oligarchy exploits its control of the media for fun and profit.

What should we do about it?
At a certain point we in the 'net community need to stand up and say, "To hell with you guys. We're hosting our own debate and we'll invite everybody!" We just need to set up a website with a group of people dedicated to hosting the cyber-debate; we'll get some buzz going and then what candidate will say "no" to a chance to get his/her message out to such an elusive audience?

The media can't be trusted to define, design and delineate the ground rules for our national debate. Candidates are having trouble getting their message across because of the media's filter. It's time to cut out the middle man.