HOUSE OF PAINE blog

Well it’s that time of year again. The time of year when all good patriotic flag waiving Amerikans everywhere will celebrate the 4th of July and their “independence” from government tyranny and oppression . . . or at least that’s supposed to be what the 4th of July represents. Yes folks, the Faux of July is upon us, and it’s calling out to idiot Amerika. It won’t be long now before the sheep fire up the grills, throw on some burgers, drink a few beers, hoist their flags and pretend they are free; I guess ignorance really is bliss.

Be thankful you still have the “freedom” to use your grills and drink your beer because your “freedom” is only as good as your masters say it is and can be revoked at any time. Don’t plan on celebrating this “freedom” with the very things that our Founding Fathers used to celebrate their independence and freedom with, for you cannot be trusted with such devices. Go ahead and stock up on those faux fireworks that are government regulated and approved; nothing defines freedom like sparklers and smoke bombs!

There will also be those sheep who cannot handle the “freedom” that their government has bestowed upon them and will instead attend a government-regulated and approved fireworks display in their hometown. Their pride will be evident by the sheepish gaze in their eyes as they look to the skies and marvel at the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air, all the while believing that they are free. Although you are not really free, nor are you able to decide what you can do with your own property, don’t let this rain on your parade. Stand up, wave your flag and try to convince yourself that the festivities you are participating in are not a joke.

It will never dawn on most of the sheep that while they celebrate this Faux of July with their faux fireworks that they are participating in a huge farce. Most of them will run around with a beer in one hand and a sparkler in the other while wishing their family and neighbors happy Independence Day, never realizing they are not really free and they never have been. The master’s names and faces may have changed, but we are all still slaves of the tyrannical state.

This is one holiday that really should just be cancelled altogether. It’s really pathetic for a nation of slaves to celebrate freedom and independence when neither one really exists.

Since there obviously is not going to be a revolution in this country anytime soon, I now am hoping that we will be liberated by someone soon, but by whom I am not sure. I for one am still waiting for the freedom fighters to liberate us from our own involuntary servitude and free us from our enslavement. Where are the freedom fighters? I keep hearing about how we are freeing other people in other countries and spreading Dumbocracy in the rest of the world, but I keep waiting for the day when someone liberates us and sets us free. I don’t see it happening anytime soon based on the intellect of the average sheeple on the street, but I keep waiting.

One thing is for sure; it will not come from the likes of Barack Obama or John McCain; the only thing we can expect from either one of these Nazis is more of the same.

More

Comments(0)

Friday, the Dow crashed through its eight-year support level at 11,750. There isn’t much below now to keep it from dropping all the way back down to the 7,500-range. What that will do to American investor psychology and worse, consumer confidence, and therefore spending, and therefore the economy, is only too apparent.

Unsurprisingly, the US war machinery is in full swing at this time. Troop and military asset movements into the Iranian theater are nearly complete, the Israelis have flown their practice-attack of 100-plus fighter jets over the Mediterranean, and Congress has again prostrated itself before its banking-guild rulers who want total government (and therefore banking) of all economic activity.

Congress did this by passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to give retroactive immunity to telcoms spying for the government, and by proposing a resolution (the already infamous H. Con. Res. 362) by which Congress demands that Bush completely blockade Iran in order to force it to stop enriching uranium. This, naturally, is a perfect setup for unleashing the long-planned bombing campaign on Iran. Congressmen know that Iran will not accede to these international demands.

End result: We will probably get another war because of all this, just like we got one back in 2002-03 when the Dow plunged into the chasm this recently broken support level has bridged for these past eight years.

The problem is that, this time, it is a bipartisan gang of US war mongers in our Congress who all appear hell-bent on forcing Bush to attack Iran with a preemptive strike, possibly even an unprovoked nuclear first strike – something that human history so far has not had to deal with.

It is also something that will cause the US to forfeit any legitimate claims of world leadership for the remainder of that history.

Wars are rarely fought over national security issues, as political leaders often claim. At rock bottom, they are mostly fought over economic issues.

Iraq and Iran (if Congress and the administration get their way) are the only two countries the US has ever attacked preemptively. They are also the only two oil-producing countries that ever went off the petrodollar. The alleged nuclear ambitions of a terrorist-sponsoring country cannot be the real reason for the planned attack – because terrorist-sponsor North Korea was not only allowed to develop nuclear weapons unmolested, it was even allowed to test-launch a potentially nuclear-tipped ICBM at the US without any military repercussions whatsoever.

There goes the “national security” rationalization for this planned attack.

This fact exposes the attacks for what they really are, tools of US monetary policy. The dollar has no real value internationally, save for the fact that the now militarily enforced necessity for countries to buy dollars in order to buy oil creates artificial demand.

The euro’s existence threatens all of this, now. Oil countries have a dollar-alternative in the euro, and so does the rest of the world. The euro is designed to not be quite as inflationary as the dollar is and has been. This is done by virtue of the ECB’s exclusive mandate of “price stability”, another word for inflation fighting.

Yet, even the euro carries the fiat-disease within it. Even the euro is structurally inflationary – just at a slower pace than the dollar. Ultimately, even the euro will fail, but it has served its intended purpose well: to sideline the US dollar and thereby the dollar-based US empire.

In the final analysis, therefore, the euro is a war currency as well. It is a model currency, designed to centralize economic power in artificial, regional political bodies and away from sovereign national governments. It is a currency designed to abolish the nation state. It serves as the model to be implemented by other regions: North America next, then Asia and Africa, later North and South America combined, and eventually all of these regions will be forced to bow to a supra-regional, global control mechanism.

This will only be achieved by more warfare – except it won’t be called “war” anymore. Future military campaigns will be called “peace actions”, for they will ostensibly be waged to “enforce peace” – a linguistic and conceptual contortion that rivals anything George Orwell could have dreamed up.

So, the world is now faced by an America that claims it wants to “spread democracy” while using its military to tyrannize countries that simply want to sell their oil for another currency. America has become what she always claims to be opposed to: an absolute tyranny that no longer even cloaks itself. Not surprising, given the role assigned to her by her globalist masters in ushering in the preconditions for eventual total centralization.

More

Comments(1)

Normal folks do not want to believe that the human race is dominated by dark forces. But, there is a small group of people who know that it is true, the human race is considered to be livestock, cattle for the real owners of this world, the elite.

Since the day of our creation, mankind has been dominated and shaped by inhuman entities, to behave more like cattle. The shapers themselves know this to be true. They also know that if we are not kept ignorant many of us will one day learn to ask the proper questions, until we finally locate the evidence that proves it is all true. Through diligent research, various people have discovered proof of the machinery that controls America’s economy, its political system, its military, its educational system, its medical system, every facet of life. This knowledge is a direct threat to the elite.

The elite power game is designed to wear the people down, as they move the nation slowly toward a predicted outcome, where the majority becomes exhausted from fighting a losing struggle and completely submits to total elite domination of all resources. When the American masses freely surrender their free will to the dark overlords, in the name of security, the fate of the world will be sealed by this lawless tyranny. Destruction and suffering, such as has never been witnessed by the eyes of man, will be unleashed upon the helpless victim populations of the earth.

Very few people can see this future (no one wants to see it) outside of the elite, who gladly accept it as the price of saving whatever is left of the world for themselves. The masters of humanity count on our blindness and willful ignorance, in order to carry-out their conspiratorial plans. They join in secret organizations, where they are free to openly discuss their schemes amongst their own kind.

The documentation of their plotting is kept locked away from the public in corporate vaults and private libraries. Occasionally, someone on the inside discovers their conscience and leaks word of the devilish plans to the outside world, or maybe they simply slip-up and lose track or control of sequestered documents. In order to deceive us and to stall the day of our realization of the multitude of their crimes against humanity, intensive disinformation is introduced into the webstream, discrediting the truth by impersonating it. We have to be diligent in our research to ascertain the veracity of any documents that we might come across. If their revelations cannot be confirmed my multiple sources, then they must be suspect. The “Pentagon Papers” and “Operation Northwoods” come quickly to mind. Both of these major leaks were later partially corroborated by reports of past deceptive military PSYOPS and CIA covert wars.

A very insightful document of questionable origin, entitled, “Silent Weapons for a Quiet War,” (an Operations Research Technical Manual) is alleged to be a document from the highly-secretive elitist Bilderburg Group. This document may be legitimate, or it may also be a carefully constructed piece of disinformation. Whatever it is, it opens even more insights into the potential opinions of the elite towards the American sheeple, or anyone not living up to their lofty cruel standards and ideas for forging a global dictatorship:

“The general public refuses to improve its own mentality and its faith in its fellow man. It has become a herd of proliferating barbarians, and, so’ to speak, a blight upon the fate of the earth. They do not care enough about economic science to learn why they have not been able to avoid war despite religious morality, and their religious or self-gratifying refusal to deal with earthly problems renders the solution of the earthly problem unreachable by them. It is left to those few who are truly willing to think and survive as the fittest to survive, to solve the problem for themselves as the few who really care.”

“This public demand is incredible, so the human god, the political, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing. This public behavior is surrender born of fear, laziness and expediency. It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public. They hire politicians to face reality for them.”

Silent Weapons builds upon the British work begun at Operations Research and by its offshoot studies, in studying the effects of planned shocks upon the “cattle,” in particular the economic effects of specific psychological shocks. From this research they constructed what they called an “economic amplifier,” for stimulating the economy in various ways, by shocking the populace and using the information obtained to control the people, thereby manipulating their free will.

“The low class elements of the society must be brought under total control, i.e., must be house-broken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter…In order to achieve such conformity, the lower class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and occupationally orphaned children…The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the … ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintaining some measure of social order, peace, and tranquility for the ruling upper class.”

“Economic engineers…study the behavior of the economy and the consumer public by carefully selecting a staple commodity such as beef, coffee, gasoline, or sugar and then causing a sudden change or shock in its price or availability, thus kicking everybody’s budget and buying habits out of shape…They then observe the shock waves which result by monitoring the changes in advertising, prices, and sales of that and other commodities…The objective of such studies is to acquire know-how to set the public economy into a predictable state of motion or change, even a controlled self-destructive state of motion which will convince the public that certain “expert” people should take control of the money system and reestablish security (rather than liberty and justice) for all. When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they of course, become totally enslaved, a source of cheap labor.”

“Labor strikes deliver excellent test shocks to an economy, especially in the critical service areas of trucking (transportation), communication, public utilities (energy, water, garbage collection), etc…By shock testing, it is found that there is a direct relationship between the availability of money flowing in an economy and the psychological outlook and response of masses of people dependent upon that availability…For example, there is a measurable, quantitative relationship between the price of gasoline, and the probability that a person would experience a headache, feel a need to watch a violent movie, smoke a cigarette, or go to a tavern for a mug of beer.”

“It is most interesting that, by observing and measuring the economic modes by which the public tries to run from their problems and escape from reality, and by applying the mathematical theory of Operations Research, it is possible to program computers to predict the most probable combination of created events (shocks) which will bring about a complete control and subjugation of the public through a subversion of the public economy (by shaking the plum tree).”

“Keep the public undisciplined and ignorant of basic systems principles on the one hand, while keeping them confused, disorganized, and distracted with matters of no real importance on the other hand.

Disengaging their minds, sabotaging their mental activities, by providing a low quality program of public education in mathematics, logic, systems design, and economics, and by discouraging technical creativity.

Unrelenting emotional affrontations and attacks (mental and emotional rape) by way of a constant barrage of sex, violence, and wars in the media - especially the T.V. and the newspapers.

Shift their thinking from personal needs to highly fabricated outside priorities.

Preclude their interest in and discovery of the silent weapons of social automation technology.

Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no time to think; back on the farm with the other animals.”

The elitists’ control over information, made possible by the creation of a global computer network (the internet), allowed them to absorb all available data from both voluntary and involuntary sources and incorporate the latest facts into their studies for manipulating the unsuspecting masses. The computer-modeling they developed allowed them to accurately predict the real world effect of certain shocks through computer simulations.

“A silent weapon system operates upon data obtained from a docile public by legal (but not always lawful) force…The number of such forms submitted to the I.R.S. is a useful indicator of public consent, an important factor in strategic decision making…When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax.”

The general rule is that there is profit in confusion; the more confusion, the more profit. Therefore, the best approach is to create problems and then offer the solutions.

More

Comments(0)

It’s official. One-President-one-vote. Granting immunity to telephone companies illegally spying on Americans is far worse than business-as-usual, which is that corporations win. In this legislation (FISA), the U.S. Congress, with obscene complicity of majority Democrats, has effectively elevated the U.S. President to absolute Monarch. Magna Carta itself is defiled. If the president says it’s legal, it’s legal. Shame.

You remember Magna Carta. It’s the one Winston Churchill called “…a law which is above the King and which even he must not break.” In yielding sole authority to a single person (aka “the president”) to determine what is lawful, these ersatz representatives of the sovereign American people have effectively said that the President is above the law. Indeed, he makes the law. And is beyond the reach of our Constitutionally enshrined freedoms.

With this Congressional absolution of corporate crimes, Congress has inflicted a terrible wound to our most cherished freedoms. It doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s controlled by the sitting president’s political party. Democrats and Republicans alike have egregiously violated The People’s trust with this abomination.

But not so surprisingly, Democrats who switched from opposing to supporting legal amnesty to telecoms that aided the government’s warrantless wiretapping program received twice as much money, on average, from telcom political action groups than Democrats whose opposed the idea in March and again last Friday, according to an analysis of campaign donations by Maplight.org.

220 Democratic members of the House voted against telecom amnesty in March, when the Democrats unexpectedly rejected a Bush-backed Senate spying bill. But, 94 of those switched their vote last Friday, supporting a bill ironed out by the House leadership that expands the government’s ability to conduct blanket wiretaps inside American telecom facilities and freeing those companies from the 40 or so lawsuits pending in Federal court.

More

Comments(0)

Because it has been co-opted by corporate lobbyists—who always hedge their bets—the Democratic Party no longer houses a genuine left-wing faction that can effectively compete for votes in a way that emulates the success of the far right. Because right-wing extremism and corporate fascism are portrayed in the corporate media as reasonable centrist positions beneficial to the people—that is how they are perceived by those who receive their political education from those sources. Thus extremism packaged as democracy is widely considered to be the norm when, in fact, it is not; it is fanaticism couched as something much more benign or beneficial, even if it is a poison pill. Yet it is this extremism that undermines the interests of the nation’s working class people and keeps them subservient to corporate fascism. Voting for meaningful change is like running on a treadmill and expecting to actually go somewhere.

The problem is that capital, rather than informed citizens interested in democracy, is in control of the electoral process. Capital furthers the interest of capital, rather than the interest of the people, and this creates an irreconcilable conflict with genuine human interests. So we end up with a sociopolitical system that is not only fundamentally unjust; it is also predatory and cannibalistic. It consumes the very people who feed it and give it the appearance of legitimacy: the great unwashed working class.

Capitalism flourishes, for a short time, at least, by socializing costs and by privatizing profits and this concentrates and centralizes power into the hands of a select few. Its real purpose is not to serve people; it is to exploit them. Capitalism isn’t even a natural system; it is a purely human construct that has no basis in nature. It is a synthetic system and, as we have seen through chemistry, synthetic systems tend to become mutagens, and thus promote cancer.

Due in part to their extreme political naiveté and to delusional thinking, too many people have accepted corporate fascism as a centrist or “normal” position. Thus they have unwittingly allowed predatory and cannibalistic forces—unregulated markets—to determine the fate of the nation and its people. Neoconservatives and neoliberals, alike, have defined the free market as an unregulated market, which has become their concept of democracy. The so called free market is not under the control of human beings in any meaningful sense, and it does not respond to human needs. Like a creation of Frankenstein, it is a man-made monster that has escaped from the laboratory and is wreaking havoc across the countryside, menacing everyone and everything in its gargantuan steel-booted path.

By themselves, markets are not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly people need commerce and trade. However, it is when markets are deregulated—as required by the adherents of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics—that they turn upon people and become predatory, undemocratic, and cannibalistic. When markets are given more power and more rights than people, people will cede not only their power to them, but also their humanity. This is how markets have become all-powerful entities that have no soul or conscience and are answerable to no one: monstrosities in every sense of the word.

I would argue, however, that the object of commerce and trade should be to serve people and to benefit the whole of society, rather than to generate enormous profits for the benefit of a select few. Commerce without democracy cannot help us toward a free and democratic society; it can only undermine our every effort at genuine democratization.

While Barach Obama has run for the presidency on the premise of change, his ideology is fundamentally the same as the presidents who came before him: the economic theories of Milton Friedman and the belief in corporate deregulation; profits before people. Obama’s economic advisers subscribe to the same economic theorem that brought us the trickle down economics of Ronald Reagan and his disastrous foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy advisers subscribe to the same philosophy that brought us the invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine; every one of them a war-mongering imperialist with close ties to the military industrial complex with its nexus of profiteering. His energy policy team has great faith in clean coal and safe nuclear energy, neither of which exists.

Because the Obama team is anything but revolutionary, it is unreasonable to expect them to produce polices significantly different than the ones that are already in play. We saw this with Bill Clinton who campaigned on promises to do one thing but, once elected, did another. Clinton won office by being more right-wing than his republican opponent. That was no victory for progressives. How could it be?

This is not to say that Barach Obama is a bad person in any way. Certainly, he is an intelligent man of reasonably good character and a fine orator, but that does not qualify him as representative of the people or the democracy they so desperately need. Is he a better choice than John McCain? Without doubt he is. But then, so is almost anyone else. A toadstool would be a better choice than McCain. We must remember that Obama has been groomed to become president some day and that grooming was provided by special interests whose unstated purpose is to undermine genuine democracy by substituting an imposter in its place. They are convinced that the American people won’t know the difference. So don’t expect any significant changes under Obama, despite all of the campaign rhetoric to the contrary.

The presence of McCain makes the very moderate Obama an appealing alternative and that assures victory for the status quo. It frightens progressive voters away from supporting real progressives like Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. Barach Obama was the real choice of the established orthodoxy all along. The marketing strategists have used John McCain to funnel the votes toward Obama and away from genuine progressives. That is where the real fight was. You can call it voting in the absence of real choice because that is precisely what it is. The same policies that have been in play for decades will continue on and we will keep getting a similar result.

Obama’s recent endorsement of warrantless wire-tapping is not only evidence of his belonging to the established orthodoxy; it directly connects him to the draconian policies of the Bush regime and to those of Senator McCain. No true progressive would want to be associated with the unlawful and unjustified surveillance of law-abiding citizens. This is a red flag that must not be ignored.

This is why the country continues to quietly drift further to the right: there is no real choice in elections and we continue to behave as if there are. It is the capitalist system that is at fault, not the candidates themselves who play the game according to the dictum of its inventors. They, too, as despicable as some of them are, are its unwitting victims.

What hope is there for genuine progressives in a game that is rigged? If we are ever to become responsible citizens, we must learn how to separate the contents of the box from the fancy packaging. The same old ideology, regardless of who espouses it, will not lead to meaningful change; nor will pursing the same old methods. If we are going to be satisfied with that, then we can continue to be pawns in a rich man’s game and accept the results of the game without complaint. If we expect better, then we must begin by demanding better of ourselves by recognizing what is being done in our name and doing something about it. But first we must awaken from our stupor and come to the realization that democracy means direct citizen action.

More

Comments(1)

“Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany joined President Bush on Wednesday in calling for further sanctions against Iran if it does not suspend its uranium enrichment program.” Mr. Bush stressed again that “all options are on the table,” which would include military force.

(New York Times, 6/11/2008)

It’s no secret that the U.S. is currently putting the finishing touches on several contingency plans for attacking Iranian nuclear and military facilities. With American ground forces stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan, none of the most likely scenarios involve a ground invasion. Not that this administration wouldn’t prefer to march into the seat of Shiite Islam behind a solid, moving line of M1 Abrams tanks and proclaim the country for democracy. The fact is that even the President knows he can’t pull that off any more so he and the neo-cons will have to settle for Shock and Awe Lite.

If the US invades Iran this year it will be done using hundreds of sorties by carrier based aircraft already stationed in the Persian Gulf and from land based aircraft located in Iraq and Qatar. They will strike the known nuclear facilities located in and around Tehran and the rest of the country as well as bases containing major units of the Iranian military, anti-aircraft installations and units of the Revolutionary Guard (a separate and potent Iranian para-military organization).

Will this military action stop Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear power? Probably not. It will probably not even destroy all of their nuclear research facilities, the most sensitive of which are known to be underground, protected by tons of earth and reinforced concrete and steel designed to survive almost all attacks using conventional munitions. The Iranian military and Revolutionary Guard will most likely survive as well, although they will suffer significant casualties and major bases and command centers will undoubtedly be destroyed. However, since Iran has both a functioning Air Force, Navy (including submarines) and modern anti-aircraft capabilities, U.S. fighter-bombers will suffer casualties as well. This will not be a “Cake Walk” as with the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the Iraqi Army simply melted away and the Iraqi Air Force never even launched a single aircraft.

If the United States attacks Iran either this summer or this fall, the American people had better be prepared for a shock that may perhaps be even greater to the national psyche (and economy) than 9/11. First of all, there will be significant U.S. casualties in the initial invasion. American jets will be shot down and the American pilots who are not killed will be taken prisoner - including female pilots. Iranian Yakhonts 26, Sunburn 22 and Exocet missiles will seek out and strike U.S. naval battle groups bottled up in the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf with very deadly results. American sailors will be killed and U.S. ships will be badly damaged and perhaps sunk. The American people may even witness the first attack on an American Aircraft carrier since World War II.

More

Comments(3)

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

– George Carlin

The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972.

When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.

“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians,” he explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today’s half-a-loaf reformers. “Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.’”

Needless to say, George Carlin was not on message for 2008’s “change we can believe in” election season.

His was a darker and more serious take on the crisis — and the change of consciousness, sweeping in scope and revolutionary in character, that was required to address it.

Carlin may have stopped voting in 1972. But America’s most consistently savage social commentator for the best part of a half century, who has died at age 71, did not give up on politics.

In recent years, in front of audiences that were not always liberal, he tore apart the neo-conservative assault on liberty with a clarity rarely evidenced in the popular culture.

Recalling George Bush’s ranting about how the endless “war on terror” is a battle for freedom, Carlin echoed James Madison’s thinking with a simple question: “Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin. “The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism — more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry — Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words.

Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.

He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.

More

Comments(1)

British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban.

Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons, condemned by human rights groups as “brutal”, on several occasions, including against a cave complex.

The use of the Hellfire AGM-114N weapons has been deemed so successful they will now be fired from RAF Reaper unmanned drones controlled by “pilots” at Creech air force base in Nevada, an MoD spokesman added.

Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, were first combat-tested by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their use by Russia against civilians in Chechnya in the 1990s was condemned worldwide.

The secret decision to buy the Hellfire AGM-114N missiles was made earlier this year following problems attacking Taliban fortified positions.

British Apache pilots complained that standard Hellfire antitank missiles were going straight through buildings and out of the other side. Even when they did explode, there were limited casualties among the Taliban inside, particularly when a building contained a number of rooms.

American Apache pilots overcame the problem in Iraq with the thermobaric Hellfire.

The weapons are so controversial that MoD weapons and legal experts spent 18 months debating whether British troops could use them without breaking international law.

Eventually, they decided to get round the ethical problems by redefining the weapons.

“We no longer accept the term thermobaric [for the AGM-114N] as there is no internationally agreed definition,” said an MoD spokesman. “We call it an enhanced blast weapon.”

The redefinition has allowed British forces to use the weapons legally, but is undermined by the publicity of their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, which markets them as thermobaric.

When the American military bought them in 2005, President George W Bush said: “There are going to be some awfully surprised terrorists when the thermobaric Hellfire comes knocking.”

Despite the Bush rhetoric, it is unlikely anyone targeted by the missile would know much about it. The laser-guided missile has a warhead packed with fluorinated aluminium powder surrounding a small charge.

When it hits the target, the charge disperses the aluminium powder throughout the target building. The cloud then ignites, causing a massive secondary blast that tears throughout any enclosed space.

The blast creates a vacuum which draws air and debris back in, creating pressure of up to 430lb per sq in. The more heavily the building is protected, the more concentrated the blast.

The cloud of burning aluminium powder means victims often die from asphyxiation before the pressure shreds their organs.

Jim Gribschaw, Lockheed Martin’s programme director for air-to-ground missiles systems, said the thermobaric Hellfire was “capable of reaching around corners to strike enemy forces hiding in cases, bunkers and hardened multi-room complexes.”

Human Rights Watch argues they are “particularly brutal” and that their blast “makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take shelter”.

Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said: “It is staggering the MoD has added these weapons to Britain’s arsenal in cloak-and-dagger secrecy. Parliament has never assented to their use.”

He added: “Gordon Brown claimed the moral high ground when Britain supported a ban on cluster munitions but leaving a loophole for these weapons casts a different picture on the true position.”

More

Comments(0)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims that a key positive feature of the new wiretap “compromise” is that the bill reaffirms that the President must follow the law, even though the same bill virtually assures that no one will be held accountable for George W. Bush’s violation of the earlier spying law.

In other words, in the guise of rejecting Bush’s theories of an all-powerful presidency that is above the law, the Democratic leadership cleared the way for the President and his collaborators to evade punishment for defying the law.

So, why should anyone assume that the new legislative edict demanding that the President obey the law will get any more respect than the old one, which established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as the “exclusive” means for authorizing electronic spying?

It wasn’t that Bush and his team didn’t understand the old law’s language; they simply believed they could violate the law without consequence, under the radical theory that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror” – the President’s powers trump all laws as well as the constitutional rights of citizens.

Essentially, Bush was betting that even if his warrantless wiretap program was disclosed – as it was in December 2005 – that he could trust his Republican congressional allies to protect him and could count on most Democrats not to have the guts to challenge him.

His bet proved to be a smart one. After the New York Times revealed the warrantless wiretaps 2½ years ago, Congress took no steps to hold Bush accountable. Before the 2006 elections, Pelosi declared that Bush’s impeachment was “off the table.”

Then, on the eve of the August 2007 recess, the Democratic-controlled Congress was stampeded into passing the “Protect America Act,” which effectively legalized what Bush had already done and expanded his spying powers even more.

Beyond the breathtaking scope of this new authority, the Bush administration also snuck in a clause that granted forward-looking immunity from lawsuits to communications service providers that assisted the spying.

That removed one of the few safeguards against Bush’s warrantless wiretaps: the concern among service providers that they might be sued by customers for handing over constitutionally protected information without a warrant.

In short, the “Protect America Act” made warrantless surveillance legally cost free for a collaborating service provider, tilting the scales even further in favor of the government’s spying powers.

The more powerful message from the latest Democratic compromise is that a President – at least a Republican one – can break the wiretap law under the cover of national security and expect to ride out the consequences.

Rather than reaffirming the rule of law and the Constitution’s checks and balances, as Pelosi claimed, the new FISA “compromise” may have done the opposite, signaling that the President is above the law.

More

Comments(1)