Kill Mugabe. There is a very quick fix to the problem of outrageous, inexcusable tyranny in Zimbabwe: death to Mugabe and his entire inner circle, rained down from the sky in the form of cruise missiles and/or smart bombs from the U.S. military. Will it happen? Not under Bush, it won't. Bush is a coward of the first rank, and his entire Administration are utterly without principle. They barely make noise about an even worse atrocity in Africa, the slauter, by paramilitary action and thru starvation, of millions of people in the Sudan. Those people are (were) black. Not even Barack Obama, a supposed "black" candidate, has advocated liberating the people of Zimbabwe, Darfur or the Sudan more generally thru instantaneous destruction of the ruling cliques thru a "shock and awe" attack.
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The entire leadership elite of the United States today is subhuman scum. They should all be held to account for inaction where action was called for, and wrongful action where no action was called for (in Iraq).
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In Zimbabwe, voting is compulsory. It should be compulsory here, too. But there must be a real choice: "None of the Above" should be on all ballots, in all countries. And term limits should be absolutely ironclad, such that if "None of the Above" wins more votes than any named candidate and a term of office expires without a named candidate winning office, then that office — any office, including President of the United States — is vacated and the laws of succession come into play to put a temporary, acting official (e.g., Acting President) in power until a legitimate vote produces a named winner.
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Then we would have better choices. We wouldn't be forced to vote for the lesser of evils. We could hold out for someone good, in terms of both qualifications and morality.
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But the human race is slime, so this won't happen. We'll content ourselves with bitching, come up with no solutions, implement no solutions. The innocent will continue to die, while people who like to think themselves good do nothing, and evil triumphs EVERY TIME.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,113 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:56 PM

 
Drugs Kill Another 'Genius' — ? The headline on the Associated Press story as carried on AOL today is "Legendary Comedian George Carlin Dies".

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. ***

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

Carlin made his living trivializing drug use. And now he's dead at 71. Speaking of John McCain, who is running for President at that same age, 71, William Saletan in the New York Post yesterday said:

The latest figures suggest that remaining life expectancy for a 70-year-old man is 14 years.

(Tho I provide a link to the original source, I would recommend you not follow it unless you have a popup blocker that defeats fastclick-media ads, because otherwise you face having your machine hijacked for two or three minutes while fastclick fites and defeats your popup blocker.)
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Obviously not everyone now 71 can be expected to reach age 84, but George Carlin died much before his time. Why might that be?

Cocaine use has been associated with both acute and chronic cardiovascular diseases. These include acute myocardial infarction, myocardial ischemia (both silent ischemia and ischemia associated with angina), acceleration of the development of atherosclerosis, myocarditis, cardiomyopathy (both dilated and hypertrophic), arrhythmias, hypertension, aortic dissection, and endocarditis. An estimated 25 million Americans have tried cocaine at least once.

And why would so many people try something so dangerous (and expensive, and illegal, as could cause them permanent problems, as with admission to college or getting a good job, if they are arrested)? Because key people in the popular culture have utterly trivialized hard drugs. In an audio routine now on YouTube, George Carlin implicitly equates children's aspirin and coffee with heroin and cocaine. Now he's dead. Good riddance.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:58 PM

 
I Can Get Some, Satisfaction. (That is, if you didn't recognize it, an allusion to the song "Satisfaction" by the aging British rock band the Rolling Stones.)
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It's not easy being me, but it sure is worthwhile.
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During the course of my life, I have devoted years at a time to my enthusiasms, and left behind major works for others to benefit from.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, I worked in the gay-rights movement, and achieved — or should have achieved — my greatest 'fame' for having first offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. Some people acknowledge that fact. Others don't.
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Why, pray, does one have to go to an Italian website to find this obvious fact explicitly recognized?

Il termine "gay pride" è stato proposto nel 1970 da Craig Schoonmaker, fondatore della rivista gay Homosexuals Intransigent!, per la prima dimostrazione in ricordo di Stonewall.

The morons at Wikipedia deleted an article about me (that, I hasten to point out, I did not write), after two earlier but unsuccessful attempts by my enemies to have it deleted.
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You see, when you have principles in the gay-rights movement, you make enemies of the people who have different principles — or none at all. Enemies from the spelling-reform movement, who oppose the particular reforms I offer, also joined in the drive to drive me out of Wikipedia.
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The discussion conceded that if I really did coin the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, then I would warrant inclusion in Wikipedia. What has to happen before a claim is accepted as fact, when after decades it is not disproved, nor even challenged?
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I first made, in print, the claim to have coined the term "Gay Pride", in 1971 (a year after I coined the term), then put it up on the Internet on March 26, 2001. It has been in archives of gay materials for 37 years, and on the Internet for over seven years. NO ONE has challenged it. No one has come up with an alternative origin for the term. No one. In 37 years.
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You'd think that 37 years without challenge would be enuf to establish the veracity of a claim, wouldn't you? But that is not, apparently, good enuf for Wikipedia.
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I don't need Wikipedia. I've appeared in Who's Who in America, basically for the next stage of my activism, co-founding and promoting the Expansionist Party of the United States.
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I worked at that, intently, for several years starting in early 1977, and achieved some minor success, with appearances on Canadian television, speeches at Canadian universities, and one front-page interview in the now-defunct Washington Star. The Toronto Globe and Mail even published an editorial cartoon about me, in August 1977, I believe. But people with no money can achieve almost nothing. And neither Canadians nor today's useless Americans were willing to exert themselves to bring Canada into the Union. So I moved on.
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In June 2000, I moved from Manhattan (NYC) to Newark, NJ, for various reasons having to do with economics and how unpleasant New York had become in the 35 years I lived there, during which time its population increased from 7 million to well over 8 million. In short order, Newark's population started to rise, such that between 2000 and 2005 Newark grew faster than any other major city in the Northeast. Everyone wants to be near me, don'tcha know.
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I continued to work in Manhattan for a couple of years, then made the transition to employment in Downtown Newark. In time, I transferred much of my enthusiasm from gay rights and Expansionism to boosting Newark. Mind you, I rarely or never give up on prior enthusiasms. I just downgrade them from primary concerns for which I exert myself mightily to secondary or tertiary concerns, for which I exert myself only occasionally and inconsistently.
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Since 2004, I have devoted an increasing portion of my free time to writing a blog about living in Newark. On January 7, 2006 I recast a text blog as a fotoblog, and have endeavored ever since to show at least one, and sometimes many, many fotos of Newark in each blog entry. My Newark fotoblog remains my major enthusiasm to this day.
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There are other things I want to do before my time runs out (I am 63 years old), such as write a book to promote my Fanetik spelling-reform system for English, which I have pursued side-by-side with other interests since about 1970. I might also like to organize a book by a group of men active in the gay-rights movement of the 1960s called something like "Before We Go", to try to impart to younger gay people what we went thru, what we intended, and how seriously wrong things have gone. Perhaps we can put things back on track. Perhaps not. It may be that gay people today are so crazy that no one can slap them back from their world of insanely anti-gay delusion. But we can hope.
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In any case, I am always busy. If, as sometimes happens, I cannot bring myself to update this blog, even for days at a time, it is probably because I am exerting myself mightily to add to my Newark blog, or write my Fanetik book, or put together a coffee-table book about Newark or a memoir by early gay activists — or some other enthusiasm that has seized control of my life in the intervening days.
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Did I say that it's an adventure being me?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,102 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:25 AM

 
More Betrayal from Democrats. The Democratic-majority House of Representatives yesterday approved a reform to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would effectively endorse the Bush Administration's past abuses and shield telecom companies from both prosecutions and lawsuits for past violations. To his (limited) credit, Democratic Presidential candidate Obama said today he would seek to remove immunity for telecoms from the version of the bill up for consideration next week by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Were the Senate to remove that provision but approve the 'update', a conference committee would then have to hammer out an agreed version for final approval by both houses and submission (apt word) to President Bush.

The FISA bill was approved by the House by a vote of 293-129.

So much for the Democrats as vigilant guardians of our civil liberties.
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As regards Democrats opposing the Iraq War, consider this. On Thursday:

The bill to provide $162 billion to fund U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan well into next year, along with historic increases in college aid for returning troops and help for the unemployed and Midwestern flood victims, sailed through [the House].

And you thought the Democrats were opposed to the Iraq War! Guess again.
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The Democrats are just Little Republicans, Tweedledee to Dumbya's Tweedledumb. There is no one to cheer for, no one to vote for. The System is absolutely and completely broken. And Barack Obama has no solutions. I have, but nobody listens to me.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,102 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:24 PM

 
Fallen Idol. The closer we get to November the clearer it becomes that Barack Obama is unfit to be President. Today he violated a fundamental pledge to restrict fund-raising to public financing. California started permitting gay marriage this week, but Obama continues to oppose it. Where he should have reversed himself, in lite of changed circumstances, he stands firm, in antihomosexual bigotry, but he flipflopped on public financing. If he's against full rights for homosexuals and lesbians, why should they support him? His stance is anti-Liberal, but Liberals are supposed to support him? Now he betrays a solemn pledge on a matter basic to everything Liberals are working for, public financing of campaigns to reduce the influence of money! Barack Obama cannot be trusted, by anyone.
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Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's newstalk show Countdown, who is usually a very Liberal, and thus admirable, man, excused Obama's behavior. That ticked me off, so I sent this email. I saw no email address for Countdown in particular, so had to send it to the general MSNBC "Letters to the Editor" mailbox.

Please stop making excuses for Obama's perfidy. This was not a ploy to force McCain's hand. Obama did not say that if McCain comes around and signs a final agreement to stay within public financing, then the Obama campaign will revert to public financing too. No. Obama violated his pledge; he betrayed his backers in the general public; he ripped a hole in the entire idea of public financing of campaigns. The pretense that he has himself developed a form of public financing would be laffable were it not contemptible. The money he is raising over the Internet won't be shared with McCain! (much less with Ralph Nader). How is that public financing of campaigns? Ridiculous.
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Obama is totally without honor, and millions of Democrats will be voting for McCain this year. If Democrats violate their pledges and expect immunity from indignation, what does any of Obama's promises mean? Nothing. And that is part of why Obama will be TROUNCED in November.
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Liberals can hope that the Democrats take both Houses of Congress by veto-proof majorities, but when Obama is standing against gay marriage even after it starts in California, he is out of step with the very Liberals who are his only chance of taking the White House. Where he should have changed his stance because of changed circumstances, gay marriage, he stands firm, against full rights for gay men and lesbians. He is as much an antigay enemy as Bush, McCain, or Focus on the Family.
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For anyone to pretend to see Obama winning the White House without the South is astonishing in its brazen dishonesty. Nobody believes that there is enuf Obamania in the rest of the country to make up for a thrashing in the South. Newstalk pundits keep talking nonsense, pretending that Obama will not only win an election he cannot possibly win but that he will win by a landslide! Yes, the Solid (Republican) South is going to vote for a black man! Of course it is. The only way Obama could win, if only by a hair, is if McCain does something totally insane, like nominating Condoleeza Rice as Veep. But I seriously doubt that the carefully controlled Republican Party will make so astonishingly suicidal a choice. Pundits cannot possibly believe that Obama stands a chance in the United States of 2008. For you to talk such nonsense is plainly intended only to keep people watching your silly commentary past commercials. Who is fooled?
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You need to change everything about this discussion and face facts: the United States has a HUGE racial problem — yes, today — and is NOT going to elect a black man President in 2008. Period. Obama's historical importance is only as the first black person to win a major-party nomination, so that in a future election someone else, such as Newark's Mayor Cory Booker, might actually win the White House, in 2016 or 2020, when the millions of white people who fled the cities in the 1960s and will NEVER FORGIVE blacks are pretty much all dead. You need to stop talking about a cakewalk by Democrats and talk instead about how Obama can change the minds of tens of millions of Americans who will NEVER vote for a black President. And if he can't — and I'm pretty sure he can't — start asking how long it will be before this country really can elect a black man.
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P.S. Your presenting 'programming' of 30 seconds between far too many commercials is despicable. You're not giving us anything new, merely running (repetitive) "teases" to make it possible for MSNBC to jam more commercials into the hour. Contemptible.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,101 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:24 PM

 
Flood P(l)ains. The news is filled with accounts of massive flooding in the Midwest, and of the Army Corps of Engineers and local people working to strengthen levees and raise their effective height with sandbags. Isn't this how we got into this mess in the first place?
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Reporters refer to prior record flooding in 1993. I think that must be the year I flew from New Jersey to California with a couple of members of my family, and we looked out the window and saw the water wide across fields on either side of the Mississippi. It was quite a sight — from an airplane thousands of feet above the pain.
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Rivers are meant to flood. The area alongside their banks into which excess water pours, in nature, is called the "flood plain" (or "floodplain", one word). If rivers are allowed to pour over their banks into their natural floodplain along their entire course, no one area is hit very hard, because the volume of water is rarely or never great enuf to fill the entire flood plain, along the river's entire course, to more than a few feet. One of the world's oldest civilizations, Egypt, was dependent upon the regular seasonal flooding of the Nile, which carried rich new nutrients in the form of silt to be deposited over a few miles outward from midstream over its entire course. Somehow the Egyptians could not only survive such regular flooding, but profit from it mightily. But Americans can't. Thousands of years later, with all our technology, we can't adjust to the idea that rivers flood, and live with it. No, we have to FITE Nature, and a lot of the time, we lose.
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The ancient Egyptian stance was literally "go with the flow", and they built a great civilization upon it. Our stance is to fite the flow. As Dr. Phil might ask, "How's that working for you?
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American floodwater policy is profoundly wrongheaded. By channelizing our rivers, we lose much of the historic benefit of periodic flooding. We insist on building houses and barns on low ground, and grazing animals and sowing crops right up to the riverbank. No. Don't do that.
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Accept that rivers flood, and provide for it. Set aside, in low-lying areas subject to flooding, natural wetlands and man-improved parks and water-themed recreational lands for a couple of miles out from the river. Mark the riverbank with Riverwalks, and build levees, if at all, only at a distance great enuf that the height of levee needed there will be much less than it would if the levee were right at the riverbank. Build on stilts, be they obvious or subtle (such as masonry foundations with wide openings on all sides of a crawlspace), all structures that need to be within range of expected flooding. And enjoy the spectacle when the river overtops its banks, from elevated boardwalks, gazebos, and bandstands that convert a flood into a temporarily more magnificent river.
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Celebrate rivers. Enjoy them. Don't fite them.
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(I am amused/annoyed by the public-service announcements that run on my local PBS stations that a flood can happen to anybody, so you need flood insurance because homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Oh? A flood can happen to anybody? I live on a hill, about 190 feet above sea level, and miles from the nearest river, which is at sea level. If my house is affected by a flood, there isn't going to be enuf insurance on the planet to cover the damage. So no, not everybody needs flood insurance. But if you do, yes, you should get it, because standard homeowners insurance really does not cover flood damage. Or hurricane damage, for all those of you tempted to flee the Frost Belt for the Hurricane Belt.)
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To the extent that floods can be destructive even if such overflow features are built, we now have long-term weather forecasting that can model the geographic extent and depth of flooding. If we build an Interstate Highway System for Water, as I keep urging, we can move water out of the expected flood area to other areas for days and even weeks in advance to make room in the areas evacuated for the sudden influx of water volumes we know to expect. If the modeling was wrong and we take away too much water, we can always just reverse the process and move water back. An Interstate Highway System for Water would move water in all directions.
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The Chinese built the first major canal, connecting the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, in about 600 A.D. The earliest portions of that truly Grand Canal (1,100 miles long) were created at some uncertain time, but probably around 500 B.C.! This is not a new idea, people, and is "groundbreaking" only in a literal sense. The Chinese linked together pre-existing small rivers, lakes, and marshes to create a waterway that could be used to divert water and carry shipping. The shipping function sometimes required locks to raise boats over obstacles too large to cut thru, and the Chinese invented the "pound lock" (what we today call simply locks) to do that, surmounting heights of 138 feet — in the 900's A.D. If the Chinese could do that with the primitive technology of their time, what could we not do today?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,101 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:45 PM

 
Color-Blind, or Just Blind? AOL today hilited a story, "Historians Make Their Prediction", in which a number of historians pronounce on the likely outcome in November:

One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any.

The words "race" and "black" DO NOT OCCUR in that story. These historians are looking at this 'race' as being the same as any other, in the past, between white men, and pretending that race could not possibly matter in the ultimate outcome. Are they fools? Or liars? Wishful thinking does not become self-fulfilling prophecy unless people believe it. And Americans don't for an instant really believe that in 2008 we are going to elect a black man, President.
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The reader polls that accompany that silly article on AOL are more in line with reality. After 292,975 votes, the tallies show that 49% planned to vote for McCain, and only 42% for Obama. Even correcting for lack of Internet access by some people in the lower socioeconomic classes, that suggests that these 'experts' on the history of presidential elections don't know what they're talking about. In that the poor don't vote at the rates of the middle class and rich, an Internet poll of this type may be more representative of actual, general-election outcomes than Internet polls on various other topics that do not involve an election.
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The color-blind are not by that virtue alone completely blind. They can still see outlines. They can still see the truth.
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This election is not business-as-usual. Economic or political conditions in past elections that seem on their 'face' comparable to the present will NOT have the same impact in a 'race' between a white man and a black man in the United States of 2008. If Barack Obama were wholly white, instead of half-white (but Obama is perceived as black and self-identified as black), yes, we could expect McCain to lose. That is not the case here. "All things being equal" does not apply when race is thrown into the mix.
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We may lament the fact that large parts of this country, and not just the South, have deeply felt animosities toward blacks. Is it possible for anyone to win the Presidency without winning at least much of the South? Perhaps it is statistically possible. But as a practical matter, no. If the South goes solidly one way, there is not enuf solidarity the other way in the rest of the country to outweigh the South in the electoral college. Especially is this true as regards the role of race in the white suburbs of formerly white-majority major cities.
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Take my city, Newark, NJ, as a case in point. There is a passion for what this city (supposedly) used to be among people who fled in the wake of the infamous Riots of 1967. The white-fliters are livid, 40 years later, that they had to leave a city they LOVED. They will NEVER FORGIVE. They will NEVER FORGET. And they will NEVER vote for a black man for President. What is true of white-fliters from Newark is true of white-fliters from Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Saint Louis, Cleveland, and every other major city of this country that was once preponderantly white but is now largely black. And it doesn't matter if they are in the South, North, East, West. White people in this country are ANGRY. They're angry at crime. They're angry at the loss of their cities. They're angry that they're afraid even to visit the "old neighborhood". They're angry at blacks on welfare and "baby daddies" who abandon their kids (an issue Obama addressed today, Father's Day, as if for the first time) and leave society to raise them — then incarcerate them when they become habitual criminals. White people are angry at 2.3 million people in prison costing taxpayers $60 billion a year (ABC News, 6/6/08). And who, exactly, is in prison?

Overall, black men were incarcerated at 6.5 times the rate of white men. The incarceration rate for black men was highest among black men age 25 to 29. About 11.7% of black males in this age group were incarcerated on June 30, 2006. Across age groups black men were between 5.7 and 8.5 times more likely than white men to be incarcerated.

White rage against black welfare dependency, assaults on society, and the endless fears and costs to whites of protecting against black crime is not simpleminded prejudice, tho there's plenty of that to go around too. What matters in the current context, however, is that a very significant proportion of the American white population — and Asian, and Hispanic — will not vote for a black man, period. In a society in which Republicans and Democrats divide the vote narrowly at the best of times, one moderate white man against another, the suggestion that a black man will trounce a white man in this day and age is LUDICROUS. (The only way it could happen is if McCain chose as running mate someone even more unpalatable than a black man, and I don't think the carefully stage-managed Republican Party is going to let that happen.)
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Race matters. Tho we might wish it didn't, it does. To borrow from a famous exchange in the classic Hollywood melodrama, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?:

"Blanche Hudson" (the actress Joan Crawford): Jane, I'm just trying to explain to you how things really are. You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I weren't still in this [wheel]chair.

"Jane Hudson" (Bette Davis): But you are, Blanche, you are in that chair!

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:33 PM

 
Floods and Droughts; Che's Birthday; Ireland Rejects Lisbon; Corporate Treasonocracy

Wet or Dry, We Always Lose. Major media report that Midwest floods are likely to raise prices for hundreds of products across the economy for the entire Nation, all because we refuse to build what I have been advocating for 11 years, an Interstate Highway System for water. How could a nationwide system of canals, pipelines, impoundments, lakes, and dams possibly cost more than the humongous cumulative tally of flood and drought damage we see every single year?
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In 1997, I speculated:

If we start now, in 30 years killer floods along hundreds of miles of the Ohio or Mississippi, and devastating droughts in Texas or Georgia will be nothing more than tall tales that youngsters will have trouble believing.

Had we in fact started in 1997, we'd be a third of the way thru the creation of an interstate highway system for water, and if the most urgent projects had been addressed first, most of the worst flooding and dessication would already have been remediated.
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But noooooooo. Every year some part of this country is ravaged by floods while others are ravaged by drought. We lose tens of billions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, to each end of the water continuum, every single year. Still we do nothing to move water from where there's too much to where there's too little. How stupid are we as a Nation? Well — and the mention of "well" brings up the fact that millions of wells and entire regional aquifers could be recharged by such a project — it would seem we're pretty damned stupid. Because every year we suffer floods and droughts we needn't suffer, and each year we do nothing to prevent them in future years.
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80th Birthday of Che Guevara. Hollywood has produced a 4½-hour film about the life of Che Guevara, whose birthday is tomorrow, and people involved with the film have expressed pride in having honored that 'dedicated revolutionary'. Never mind that he was a mass murderer intent on imposing totalitarianism upon hundreds of millions of people in the name of, what? socioeconomic 'liberation'? Stupid, naive young people may be won over by this paean to a monster, and think it chic and morally defensible to wear his image on a teeshirt. They should be educated about the worldwide death toll of Communism, some 110 million people killed by Communists directly and in wars to prevent Communism from taking over the whole planet. 110 million is only the midpoint estimate (next to last line in Table 16A at the website "Murder By Communism". The low estimate is 40.5 million; the high, 259.4 million. Let's be "moderate" and go for the middle estimate, a mere 110 MILLION DEAD. Yes, Che Guevara certainly was a hero for participating in that slauter, all for his "ideals".
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What next? A glowing Hollywood memoir of "Adolf Hitler: Hero Misunderstood"? "Tamerlane [Timur the Lame]: Greatest Handicapable Man of All Time"?
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I don't want to hear any defense of Che Guevara nor of any other Communist murderer. I don't want people pointing to Che's diligence and courage in the face of obstacles, nor making him out to be a hero for "dying for his principles", any more than I want to hear about how diligent Jeffrey Dahmer may have been or praising the courage of an armed-robber shooting it out with cops until he is killed in the commission of his (last) crime. When you're dealing with an evil person, the lazier he is, the more incompetent, the better for others. You don't praise his diligence, nor how brilliantly he planned and carried out his crimes.
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The human race is slime, so this film will doubtless inspire tens of thousands of stupid kids to glorify Che Guevara on their chest. Maybe we should regard all such images as targets for pistol practice. Figure a hit right between the eyes as the top score, and go for the gold.
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Ireland Rejects Lisbon. My congratulations to the people of Ireland, who have rejected the attempt to jam down their throat a European Union constitution that they correctly felt was dangerous to their rights and the residual sovereignty of Ireland. If Ireland is entirely to yield its sovereignty to any larger federation, it should be to the United States. The Republic of Ireland would make a wonderful addition to our Union, and such accession would constitute a reunion with millions of Irish emigrants, including part of my extended family (the fun part).

The loss came even after Ireland's three largest political parties, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and business groups IBEC and the American Chamber of Commerce all called for a yes vote. Mounted against them were political parties Sinn Fein and the Socialists and privately funded group Libertas.

The Irish people apparently understand that there is a dark, dangerous, autocratic, authoritarian, even totalitarian streak in Continental Europe. Anyone who gladly submerges Ireland in such a mass of cultures tolerant of dictatorship risks being crushed, imprisoned, beaten, killed by the very entity they endorse.
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The EU is potentially a huge danger to the world. It must be kept diffuse and weak. Divided, European nations conquered almost the entire planet, with only a handful of exceptions: Abyssinia and the American slave-resettlement country Liberia in Africa —all the rest of the continent was seized by Europeans; Siam (Thailand), Japan, Korea, and parts of China in East Asia; Persia (Iran) in Western Asia — all the rest of that continent being conquered and colonized by Europe. What might a United Europe do? Anyone who is willing to gamble that other planetary forces are so strong now that the rise of a European superpower poses no danger to the planet, is a fool.
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How do we know that European authoritarianism is still strong? Consider this, from the same Bloomberg.com story cited above:

In the U.K., where polls show opponents of the treaty outnumber supporters by two-to-one, Foreign Secretary David Miliband vowed to press on with ratification. The treaty awaits House of Lords approval next week.

The Irish vote has emboldened British opponents, tho — which is more than a bit ironic, given the bitter history between the English and Irish. Again, from Bloomberg:

Critics seized on the Irish result to demand Prime Minister Gordon Brown hold a referendum.

"There are now no excuses left for denying the British people their say, William Hague, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party, said in a statement.

Of course there are excuses left. There are always excuses for authoritarianism in Europe: the people know nothing; the people are fools; the people can't be trusted; we know better. That is the European way.
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Where's that guillotine that the French used on Louis XVI? Oh, I guess it doesn't have to be the same one, tho that would add a glorious glint to revolt. Any guillotine, or rope, or sword, or mob beating will accomplish the same thing.
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The British ruling class, and that of every other EU country, seems intent on ramming thru the Lisbon treaty without paying the slitest attention to the people. Would they prefer a "No" vote or a revolution that kills the ruling class? Guess which I'd prefer. I'll give you a hint: every member of the pro-Lisbon ruling class of all the countries of the EU should be tissue-typed.
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Corporate Treasonocracy. First Miller, then Coors, and now Budweiser? The selloff and destruction of all things American by corporate boards and shareholders who care nothing about this country continues. And the governmental traitors in Washington stand by doing nothing. Make no mistake about it: the people now in charge of "American" corporations and "our" Government have absolutely no loyalty to the United States. Not the tiniest shred of loyalty, nor patriotism, nor national self-esteem. Everything is just money to them. Everything.
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Mind you, they'll wrap themselves in the flag to sell you things, but the U.S. flag means absolutely nothing to them except a marketing tool. They'll refer to foreign cars as "the best cars in America" or "made in America", while actively concealing that the cars they're trying to sell you are of Japanese design and that every cent of profit goes to Japan, not the United States. They'll fill their advertising with American images and identify their foreign-owned beers and cars and every other type of merchandise as American, and they won't ever be prosecuted for false advertising — in part because almost no one is prosecuted for false advertising anymore. Even when someone does prosecute and find someone guilty of false advertising, the false advertising is allowed to continue.
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The scumbag who sells Enzyte, a supposed "male-enhancement" pill, was found guilty of multiple counts of fraud on February 23rd, but the ads keep airing and the bucks keep pouring in as tho no prosecution occurred and the government has approved that message: because, as some other advertiser dares to claim, "We couldn't say it if it wasn't true." So too do the ads for another vile scam of the exact same sort, Extenze, continue, and the advertiser continues to rack up hundreds of thousands of sales because, viewers believe, they couldn't say it on television if it wasn't true. Yes, alas, they could. Yes, indeed, they CAN. And DO.
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No one is punished for false advertising nowadays. No one is imprisoned — or killed, as the Enzyte and Extenze con artists should all be killed — and frauds galore keep pulling in fools to be parted from their money while government stands aside and lets it happen, all in plain sight. The penis-enlargement fraudsters, these corporate mobsters, declare with pride that 100 million pills have been sold! 100 million. And Government does nothing. The System is completely and absolutely corrupt, with the people at the top being rich, so identifying not with the victims of fraud but the "clever" rich people who manage to extract millions of dollars from idiots.
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As to beer, nowhere do we see any indication, of any kind, that Miller or Coors is foreign-owned. And if Anheuser-Busch is sold to foreigners, that fact will be equally well concealed. Americans will continue to think they're drinking American beer, when they are actually drinking Belgian beer, co-owned by Brazilians. We are being progressively colonialized without our knowledge, as one foreign company after another rips chunk after chunk of our patrimony out from under us while our brave Governmental defenders, so eager to send us to war thousands of miles away to keep us "safe" at home (but actually to serve other people's (Israel's) interests) do nothing to defend the home front.
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We will all someday be working for foreigners, who will control our wages, hours, and every other term of our employment, and we will accept that colonialization by transnational corporations because we will have no alternative but starvation, because of course there will be little or no Unemployment pay if we 'voluntarily' leave our job in indignation to look for another, and there will be no other jobs to be had except with different foreign corporations.
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Money has no nationality, because it can all be converted. The rich have no nationalism, only bank accounts. Money flows across borders with ease. So borders mean nothing. And it doesn't matter whether the money that supports the 112-room mansions of the rich started as dollars, euros, reales, yuan, or yen, as long as it buys the property and keeps the gardener and maid and poolboy working. And as working people's options erode away, the rich will be able to pay ever less to their servants, who will gradually become their slaves, for having no option but to accept whatever job is offered at whatever rate of pay and working conditions the rich may deign to offer.
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Americans sometimes think that globalization is a good thing because "we" are on top. No, actually, the bulk of "us" are on the bottom as much as are the latter-day coolies of China and India. The Golden Age of democracy is OVER. It has been displaced in primacy by plutocracy, which grows every day at the expense of all forms of democracy, be they political, corporate, or socioeconomic. Inequality is the new watchword, and the people in power aspire to ever more unequal social, political, and economic arrangements, in which the rich are also the powerful, and if you are not rich, you will never be powerful. The rich will crush the rest of us, and feel good about it. Until we slit their throats.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,099 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:57 PM

 
Disingenuosness on Impeachment. Last nite, MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann discussed the courageous attempt yesterday by diminutive Cleveland Congressman Dennis Kucinich to get the House of Representatives to move on impeaching Dumbya. Olbermann pointed out that the House leadership has done everything in its power to block impeachment of this criminal 'President' and his core advisors (what I call the Real Presidency, as distinct from the Puppet Presidency of George W. Bush himself, who is merely the teflon posterboy for a collective leadership, the faceless cabal that is the Actual Presidency of the United States today). Olbermann expressed/feigned surprise at the unwillingness of even Democrats to remove this stain from our national honor, and explored issues such as what, if anything, can be done to Bush once he is permitted to leave the White House without legal disgrace on January 20th. Olbermann also feigned puzzlement over the absolute lack of a groundswell of support for impeachment from opinion leaders in media, even Liberal mainstream media.
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Oh, please. Let's stop pretending that anything will ever be done by the people now in charge of the U.S. Government and media over the war against Iraq. The war was for ISRAEL, pure and simple, and every single important player in the United States Government and major media is a SLAVE to Israel. They dare not say a WORD against Israel, not even to exert themselves to prevent the NEXT war for Israel, against Iran!
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According to the "crawl" on CNN or Fox (I watch so much news I can't keep sources straight mentally unless I can attach a name or face of an on-air personality), Israel is making very strident, very public noises that an attack upon Iran is damned near inevitable. Israel apparently expects to get away with any attack of its own upon Iran, and even to draw the United States into a full-scale air war or even ground invasion if Iran dares to do anything at all in reaction to an attack upon its sovereign territory by Radical Zionists. The major media of the United States, which are completely under the thumb of Zionist Jews, will do NOTHING to stop yet another war for Israel. No, that will be consigned to poorly organized and almost completely unfunded Liberal-Leftists, with absolutely no support from any major figure in the U.S. Government, in either party, or any major publication or broadcaster. Israel owns the U.S. Government lock, stock, and barrel, and dominates ALL major U.S. media, without so much as a single exception.
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So the United States Congress will do nothing to punish Radical Zionists in the White House who attacked Iraq at Israel's orders, and the American people, furious and disgusted with how absolutely unrepresentative and unresponsive Congress has become, will be unable to do a thing to stop Radical Zionists from launching yet another war for Israel, even if that should escalate within days or mere weeks into World War III. If we do not march resolutely into WW III for Israel, we will stand aside and permit Israel to attack yet another of its neighbors — it has attacked every single country on its borders, and even countries over 1,000 miles distant — with impunity. We will continue to ship $3 billion of U.S. tax moneys to Israel each and every year to pay for its endless war upon all its neighbors. For our Government's insane actions, the people of the United States will be targeted for death. Yet, to borrow a now-hackneyed phrase, "None dare call it treason"!
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Olbermann called upon Howard Fineman of Newsweek to offer his thoughts. Howard Fineman is Jewish. He said nothing about a Jewish hand behind the silence of the Congressional leadership. Why would he? In every discussion in newstalk television, on every topic, Jews are hugely overrepresented. Jews are 2% of the U.S. population, which means that only 1 in 50 commentators we see should be Jewish. In fact, the figure is more like 1 in 4, or even more.
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Fineman and Olbermann (by the way, Wikipedia says that Olbermann is "of German ancestry", and thus probably not himself Jewish) mention David Axelrod, Barack Obama's campaign manager, but leave out one key piece of information: David Axelrod is Jewish. That couldn't possibly have any impact on his views nor Obama's regarding the "permanent war" that Israel has set us on, against a billion Moslems. No, of course not.
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The New York Times did a story April 1, 2007 on Axelrod's relationship to Obama. Neither "Jew" nor "Jewish" occurs in that story. You are not to know that Obama's top advisor is Jewish.
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Nor are Americans in general to know how many key figures in media, corporate and editorial areas both, are Jewish. If Americans knew that, they might wonder if we are getting disinterested and honest reports about the Middle East or being endlessly inundated by Zionist propaganda.
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The pretense is that we should not be concerned that a person's Jewishness might affect his national and political loyalties. Oh? The Australian Jewish News on May 8, 2007 quoted the new President of France, thus:

IN an interview Nicolas Sarkozy gave in 2004, he expressed an extraordinary understanding of the plight of the Jewish people for a home: "Should I remind you the visceral attachment of every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel."

Sarkozy himself is Catholic, but half of his ancestry is Jewish. The AJN story details that family history, and in no way disowns or tempers the statement that "Every Jew ... knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel." Quite the contrary, it praises Sarkozy for showing "extraordinary understanding" of the Jewish mind. If that is not a forthrite justification for dual loyalty, or even treason to the country any Jew may have been born into and superior loyalty to Israel, what is?
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Where would the rest of us go if things turned bad in our own country? How many of us feel that our very life may depend on preserving another country, so that loyalty to that country is a "visceral" need, relating to self-preservation, and thus the very highest loyalty, indeed, biological imperative?
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Preserving Israel as a Jewish country, no matter the cost, is thus the most important thing in the world to Jews. Should it be to anyone else whatsoever?
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The creation of Israel has produced catastrophic consequences, drained hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars from American taxpayers; produced attacks on our soil that have killed almost 3,000 Americans; produced attacks on U.S. interests around the world that have killed hundreds more; produced the war against Iraq that has killed almost 4,100 American soldiers and unknown numbers of civilian contractors (not to mention the literally uncounted thousands, or tens or scores of thousands, of Iraqis killed in that ongoing massive crime); threatens to produce another war for Israel, this time against Iran; and might even produce WW III if the attack on Iran (or some other future action by Israel's governing loons) escalates out of control.
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But we apparently feel trapped, with no means of escape, because the idea that there is an alternative to the continued existence of Israel is unthinkable for the Jews. And the Jews control the United States. You are not to think that, no matter that it is completely true.
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How are we to know who's a Jew and who is not? Some American Jews are perfectly content to have their Jewishness known, probably because they are not secret Israelis but wholehearted Americans. But what of covert Israeli agents in media and government? How are we to judge whether they are working for us or for Israel? Plainly, we need more information.
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How would Americans react if every Jew in media were identified with a star of David alongside his or her name in the credits of news programs, movies, and news stories? What if every member of both houses of Congress who is Jewish were also so identified? Would Americans accept with equanimity that masses and masses of Jews are found everywhere in media, and that Jews have something like 6 TIMES their proportion of the population, in Congress? Of course, to show the disproportion we would first have to explode the ridiculous myth that Judaism is "one of the three great religions of the United States", which suggests that Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are represented in the population by a 33%-33%-33% split. Very few Americans understand that Jews are actually only 2% — TWO PERCENT — of the U.S. population. How would Americans react if they were to discover that Jews are astonishingly over-represented?
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The Jerusalem Post (do I really need to point out that that is a Jewish newspaper?) reported on January 4, 2007, under the headline, "Most Jews ever set to enter Congress":

A record number of Jewish members will enter Congress Thursday, but more remarkable are the unparalleled positions of power they will hold on committees related to Israel, many local Jewish activists say.

Six new Jewish legislators will be joining 37 familiar faces as the 110th Congress convenes, making the total the highest-ever, according to Doug Bloomfield, a former legislative director for AIPAC. ***

Let's do some calculations. There are 435 members of the House and 100 in the Senate, for a total of 535. Six new plus 37 old Jewish members = 43 Jews, of 535 total members = 8%, 4 times what a 2% Jewish minority should have, randomly speaking. In the Senate, it's even worse. The Jewish Virtual Library says:

The 110th U.S. Senate will have a record number of Jews — 13 — with the election
of Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), who both served as
Representatives in the 109th Congress. All Jewish incumbents running in the 2006
election were elected for another term in the Senate.

The math here is easy. 13 of 100 members = 13% — 6½ TIMES what Jews could be expected to have, given their proportion of the population. BOTH Senators from the Nation's most populous state, California, are Jews, indeed, Jewish WOMEN. California is 3.3% Jewish, yet 100% of its representatives in the United States Senate are Jewish. To whom does that make sense?
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By contrast, the Senate is 1% black — well, actually only 0.5% black, in that the ONLY "black" Senator is Barack Obama, and he is only HALF black. Blacks comprise over 12% of the total population but have 1 Senator. What about Hispanics, who comprise more than 14% of the population?

Hispanics should have 14 to 15 Senators in the U.S. Senate. The reality is that today, Hispanics have ZERO Senators representing them in the U.S. Senate.

So the enormous over-representation of Jews in Congress comes at the price of enormous under-representation of major segments of the population.
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How can I bring home how bad Jewish over-representation is for society? If blacks, instead of being horrendously under-represented, were as over-represented as the Jews, 78% of the Senate would be black. If Hispanics were as over-represented as the Jews, 97.5% of the Senate would be Hispanic! Would we believe such a body to be representative of the Nation, and have the Nation's best interests at heart? After all, black Americans and Hispanic Americans are all Americans, right? Surely they'd watch out for us if they controlled the Government. After all, the whites who control the Government have taken such good care of blacks and Hispanics, haven't they?
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U.S. policies, in the Mideast and every other area of geography and subject matter, reflect not the views and interests of the people of the United States but of the people who occupy public office. It is their concerns and their biases that matter, not yours, not mine. Jews care about Jewish interests and push those interests, no matter whether they be in the best interest of the United States or NOT. And because they hold key positions of power on foreign-policy matters, Jews have even more disproportionate power in the formation of U.S. policy in the Middle East. If, as Sarkozy suggests, they are all at least subconsciously devoted to the preservation of Israel above all else, the people of the United States are being seriously misused by people who do not have our best interests at heart.
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Thus, dissolving the Israeli government and merging Israeli territory into a United Palestine is absolutely unthinkable to the Jews who control U.S. Middle Eastern policy. Even evacuating safely to the United States every single Jew who wants to leave Palestine before or immediately following reunification of Palestine is not an acceptable alternative for American Jews because of the subconscious fear Sarkozy spoke to.
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• What happens if Americans wake to the insanity of the New Theology in which Christianity IS Judaism and all Christians have an obligation to defend Israel to the death or, even if Israel is abolished and the Jews moved to the United States, Christians wake to the insult to themselves of the Jews calling themselves God's "Chosen People" and thus asserting expressly that Christians are NOT "Chosen"?
• What if Americans start tallying up the costs of U.S. support for Israel, and when the hard figures stare out from white paper or video monitors, they are appalled?
• What if Americans decide that tolerating the Jews is far more trouble than it's worth, and start cracking down on Jewish religious expression in public, in private, anywhere?
• What if Americans decide that Jews cannot be trusted because they are intrinsically disloyal, feeling loyalty only to other Jews, not to the United States? In an assimilationist society, people who refuse to assimilate can easily be viewed as rejecting society, which moves many people to reject them in turn.
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"Then what?", think these Jews. So no, Israel cannot be abolished, even if not a single Jew is killed in the process. It must go on, no matter how high the costs in blood and treasure, even if the Jews must fite the Moslems to the last Christian!
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Thus it is that not one major medium in the United States has ever said aloud editorially, nor even hinted, that the creation of Israel was a horrendous, abysmally and contemptibly STUPID mistake that has led to endless war, and that the only way out of this ever-worsening nitemare is to un-create Israel and merge it into a multiethnic, multireligious, multiparty, democratic United Palestine. Not one.
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Every single major publication and broadcaster in the United States is militantly Zionist or cowed into silence by the Jews. Every single one. Not one major political commentator, in government or media, is courageous enuf to say

"I am American. I have no loyalty to any foreign country. Not one. Not Israel, not Ireland, not Canada, Mexico, Britain, Italy, Russia, China, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, nor any other on Earth. I am American, and I will not sell out my country to Israel or any other country. If the interests of the United States require us to cut all ties to Israel, I have no problem with that. The interests, and principles, of the United States are the only interests and the only principles I care about. Anybody who doesn't think that, is free to leave this country any time they want. In fact, they would be well advised to leave. Pronto."

Both major parties are completely subservient to the Israel lobby. No criticism of Israel is permitted in print or aloud on any major medium, unless the requisite obeisance to the "right of Israel to exist" is very prominently made.
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No one is permitted to say that the Palestinians are right, the Jews wrong, and there will never be peace on the basis of imposing perpetual injustice upon Arabs and according perpetual supremacy to Jews. If anyone compares the position of Jews in Palestine to the position of whites in the U.S. South in the era of segregation or of whites in South Africa during the apartheid era, s/he is condemned as a simple-minded "anti-Semite", which closes off all discussion. "Anti-Semitism" is, in a thoroughly Judaized United States, the very worst of all possible insults, and anyone so labeled will be forbidden access to the airwaves or to print in major media, and all discussion of what s/he has said or might say if asked questions is forbidden.
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Unless the ability of Radical Zionists to silence all criticism of Israel is broken; unless Americans can actually debate the wisdom or folly of preserving Israel at all costs, even if trying to do so should produce World War III, we will continue to suffer all the consequences of permanent war and the risk of escalation at any time, from one catastrophic miscalculation to another all the way up to full-scale intercontinental war which, even if fought with conventional weapons, could kill scores of millions of people, and perhaps even hundreds of millions of people — including the bulk of the population of Israel.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,095 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:47 PM

 
Paying for Globalization. The United States almost single-handedly created the monster that has now raised oil prices so high that over 100 million Americans are now experiencing real hardship in merely getting from place to place, and, this coming winter, will be very hard-pressed to stay warm. Because the Republican Party has transferred something like $1 trillion in cash and 14 million jobs, with ongoing paychecks, from Americans to China, and in lesser measure to India and other parts of the Third World, mostly in Asia. That unprecedented transfer of employment and wealth has produced the very demand in China, mainly, and then those other places, that is blamed for raising the price of oil, supposedly permanently! So not only have we lost millions of good jobs, but we now must pay, in perpetuity, extravagantly high prices for oil, or change all our private transportation and heating and many other aspects of our lives in the First World, and, until that is done (and maybe even after it is done) lose the good life we spent centuries building. We won't be able to fly. We won't be able to drive. We will not be able to travel for vacation. We will not feel comfortable taking vacation, for fear that yet more businesses will ship more jobs, including our own, overseas.
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Brilliant.
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Worse, the cheap goods we traded all this for will inescapably become more expensive, as the costs of transporting them 10,000 miles at a time of astronomical oil prices, rises, and so does demand for the same goods in the Third World. And the unsustainable deficits the U.S. continues to roll up are already producing a drop in the dollar on world currency markets. If China lets its currency rise to realistic market levels, everything from China will cost much more than it now does.
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What lasting benefit, then, will we have enjoyed from the catastrophe the Republican free-traders have produced, which threatens to become a calamity, a great step higher than catastrophe?
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The Chinese we have so richly helped have become not our friends but our enemies. They are using our money to build their military, and turning their youth into rabid nationalists who react with indignation to even the tiniest slite to their national dignity from the U.S. or other countries. China is plainly preparing — and the Pentagon has known this for decades! — for a drive, including actual military war, to push the United States completely out of Asia and become the dominant power at least of that continent, on which more than half the world's population resides, and possibly on planet Earth entire, rendering the United States and every other country, into slaves of the Butchers of Beijing. Paid for by U.S. dollars.
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The only silver lining is that extraordinary oil prices might finally throw into high gear the necessary conversion from petroleum to hydrogen and other sustainable energy sources, from solar power (which includes wind, hydroelectric, and wave power), to tidal power, geothermal energy, etc., which might finally bring down the cost of all these technologies once they are very widespread and economies of scale take over.
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How long will that take? Five years? 15? 30? And how much of the First World will be ravaged, how badly, in the interim?
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How much popular destitution can the First World take before all social orders are shaken to their foundations?
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I have observed here on various occasions that in no way but money are the disparities between individuals so immense. Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, quantified this (how accurately, I cannot say) in December 2006, in a long article in Rolling Stone titled "The Great Wealth Transfer".

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line -- representing those Americans living in extreme poverty -- is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle -- the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

I have also repeatedly said that the United States is on its way to becoming the northermost nation of Latin America, not in speaking Spanish but in having a society of profound socioeconomic-political inequality in which a tiny, tiny proportion of the population controls almost all the wealth and power. Krugman confirms this:

A generation ago the distribution of income in the United States didn't look all that different from that of other advanced countries. ... Today, we're completely out of line with other advanced countries. ... These days, to find societies as unequal as the United States you have to look beyond the advanced world, to Latin America. And if that comparison doesn't frighten you, it should.

Will the United States in particular, with 200 million guns in the hands of a public that could become profoundly impoverished within a decade, experience violent revolution, or only fratricidal mass murder, as the frustrated and desperate lash out promiscuously at people immediately at hand rather than targeting their rage on the monsters in the plutocracy responsible for this mess?
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That is, will they kill the Bushes and Cheneys and oil executives (who, in addition to actual price effects of increased demand, are taking advantage of the confused situation to gouge) and executives of all major corporations responsible for ruining our lives? Will they slauter the megamillionaires and billionaires who have made obscene fortunes thru stock manipulation and other economically useless activities? Will they invade the offices of the Radical Right thinktanks and spray machinegun bullets in all directions? That could achieve real change in very short order. But the rich will fite. They are certain that generalized poverty will empower them to hire all the armed guards they need to survive any challenge from a disorganized mob. They are also certain they can start enuf foreign wars to distract people from domestic problems — a proven strategy for blunting disorganized popular revolt. You recruit the most frustrated and send them to die overseas, so they can't come home and kill the ruling class.
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But could American Plutocracy survive a revolution that does not lash out in all directions but narrowly and ideologically targets the plutocrats, oligarchs, and obscenely rich?
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We have at least one thing to thank China for, the blessing/curse, "May you live in interesting times."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,092 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:05 PM

 

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:38 PM