“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Wow – have you ever seen such a flexing of fascist muscle as with Assange and the Wikileaks affair? Imagine what is going on behind the scenes – death threats, trumped up “rape” charges, arrested in London, and Amazon.com, PayPal, and now VISA* trying to shut down his cash flow. Assange is fighting extradition to Sweden, as he believes that that country is merely acting as an intermediary for the Obama Administration, which wants to bring him here and imprison him. Said Assange’s attorney, Mark Stephens,
‘It doesn’t escape me that Sweden was one of those lick-spittle states which used its resources and facilities for rendition flights.
And I say “fascist” not because I like to hurl epithets, but rather because we are witnessing the results of the “marriage of corporation and state, ” Mussolini’s definition of that benign form of governance. Assange exposed state secrets that should not be secret, and the government is hounding him, including the “black-ops” people who are slamming his websites. And now come the corporations, as if they and government are the same entity. (They are, Benito. They are.)
Did any in the mainstream media take note that Obama’s recent Asian trip included forty aircraft, six armored vehicles, and 200 corporate executives? If indeed the junket did cost $200 million a day, it’s just another subsidy.
If Wikileaks achieves nothing else, it is the exposure of this unholy inbreeding that has always been going on, but has happened in spades during the last thirty years. We all know now that the corporations and the state act as one to shut down freedom of speech, because the former now controls the latter. And for that we can thank the soon-to-be-imprisoned Assange.
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Just to toss in a little optimistic news, there are cyberhacks all over the globe, and the best that can happen with the current Obama crackdown on Wikileaks is to enrage them, to organize them. “I am Wikileaks” is encouraging people all over the globe to stand up and be counted. (Will Facebook take them down?)
Raw Story has revealed that one of Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case has CIA connections. (He is not accused of rape, but rather, for failure to use a condom, a unique Swedish interpretation of rape).
The web is a cranky beast, hard to cage. In the United States, net neutrality is a dead letter. Corporations cannot shut down annoying websites due to the first amendment, which still has window-dressing force. But they can marginalize them. And that has been the whole battle – an equal playing field … you know, liberty and justice for all. Quaint.
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*VISA went after Ralph Nader in 2000, forcing him to take down an effective TV ad that portrayed Bush and Gore as part of the same apparatus. He used VISA”s word, “priceless,” and laughed afterward at the high absurdity of suing over ownership of that word.
And then, there’s this: Operation Payback threatens to hack any company’s website that acts against Wikileaks, and has already shut down the Swiss bank PostFinance, which froze Wikileaks funds. They are threatening to go after PayPal as well. Can’t wait.
The Swiss government is resisting pressure from Obama and the French government to shut down the Wikileaks.ch site running in that country. Perhaps they have leverage via their banking laws by which so many American criminals hold secret accounts there.
The website of the Swedish prosecutor’s who is going after Assange was taken down today. Too funny.
And now MasterCard is down too.
Piece of Mindful 
Gonna cut up the VISA, Mark?
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Again I gotta ask you Swede, why the boner for power?
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BTW – yes, I am going to give up my VISA.
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I liked the FDR clip tho.
Say, didn’t he lock up Japanese Americans based on the possibility that they might endanger our security?
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Swede – you are a squirrel in a tree, and I’m using a pellet gun – if I shoot at you on one branch, you are on another before I can pull the trigger. ADHD?
If I ask you a straightforward question, you disappear, as you recently did at 4&20.
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You answer my questions, I’ll respond in kind.
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Easy. FDR imprisoned Japanese. It was the wrong thing to do. Things are never one way or another – you don’t always get what you want from people. What’s your point about that – that if I like much of what FDR did, that I ahve to liek that too? Are things really that black/white for you?
Now, you put up a simple little graph over at 4&20, and I pointed out to you that it was too simple, and further suggested that you do a little legwork about Soical Security, as you didn’t seem to understand the basics of the system.
And I never heard form you again. You jumped branches. Care to tell me more?
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First FDR.
How many times have I heard you demean democrats, liberal pundits and bloggers with similar goals and ideals. Chances you agree with the direction their taking on social issues, environmental issues, labor, taxation…etc. But when it comes to the demise of a full blown public option HC bill-damn ’em all to hades.
Now FDR killed thousands with his war and imprisoned thousands of innocents for security reasons. Flawed comparison? Does it rise to the bastardization of EuroCare?
Apparently not to you. None of FDR indiscretions including his overprotection of our nations security even are given a passing thought, private power (like HC) now becomes the demon.
Now SS.
I got a new cell phone. It does everything. GPS, internet, ipod, virtually everything currently available. Will I use all those features-no. Could I even begin to understand the complex circuitry compacted in a 3″X4″ plastic container-again no. All I care is that they live up to our agreement.
SS financial inter-workings is much like that cell phone. I don’t care about the circuitry, I don’t care about the accounting, all I care is promises kept-promises delivered. Those promises cannot be delivered if SS consumes everything.
You see you’d love to bog us all down in the details. You’d love to say, “It’ll never go broke”, “We got all these accounting methods” and of course “Too big to fail” always inspires confidence. Small picture what you want us to concentrate on, big picture is too simplistic.
Well those days are over Mark. We’re on to you.
Big Picture is winning.
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I am striving today to contain my temper. You are a man who picks little things and strings them together and calls them an argument. What you said about FDR are little pieces of a huge picture which I surely do not understand well.
And SS – you don’t understand its finances. That’s all there is to it. You don’t understand its finances. You don’t get how it works. You don’t see that it has worked …
Here – I’ll pull a Swede. When I was a young kid we went to a church picnic on teh Yellowstone, and a kid named Val was fishing near his dad, and got pulled in the current. His Dad, just like you or me, went in after him, and they both drowned. He left behind a widow and three or four other young children, two retarded.
Because he was an American worker, he was automatically part of Social Security. He didn’t have to vest or accumulate a pile of cash. Because of that, his kids received survivor benefits until they turned 18, and the family survived.
There’s nothing in the private sector that would have done that for them. Nothing.
That’s an anecdote, but here’s the “big picture” – the system worked then, works now, and will continue to work into the future if you and yern don’t fuck it up for everyone. Leave it alone. You don’t know what you’re doing.
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“There’s nothing in the private sector that would have done that for them. Nothing.”
How ’bout a cheap term life insurance policy?
Here’s my sad story. Val survives his plunge, ends up working until he’s 64, keels over at work and dies. His wife left him years ago, the retarded kids get a whopping 250 dollar death benefit.
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OK bright guy – how much insurance should this working class guy carry? You know, full living expenses for four or five people for what – 10-15 years? And don’t forget, since he probably wasn’t financially savvy, that some life insurance leach would have sold him a $10,000 whole life policy, warning him to avoid term, since it has no cash value. That’s how they worked in those days.
96% of us are not sociopaths, and have empathy for one another and try to help as best we can. We found that by far the best way to do this is via Social Security – we avoid high fees and commissions, market slumps, and administrative costs of private company bureaucrats. We can do this if we so please. If you and your friends want to fuck up this system, at least have the decency to put your own money behind the new system, so that when it fails, when we find out that insiders have robbed us blind, you’ll be broke too.
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Too late-it’s all ready f-ed up.
And sorry Mark, it’s going to be fixed, or modified, means tested or privatized.
And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.
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I gotta call you here, Swede. I don’t want to be mean, though it has been a bad day. But honestly, you don’t know anything about the program or its current financial condition or future prospects. People have been trying to kill it since Reagan in the early 1980’s, and all have failed. It is financially sound for decades. No other program can say that.
That said, the attacks continue. Obama may succeed where others have failed. Democrats are dumb that way. But the reason for “fixing” it or “modifying” it or “privatizing” it are purely greed and opportunity. Banksters cannot resist the allure of commissions on trillions of dollars, not to mention the money they can make just holding those accounts.
The people who want to save us, you know, they don’t really care about us. You do know that, don’t you. Don’t you?
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Some like women’s underware, others prefer the uniforms and medals. Authoritarians need simple. And they need someone else to do their thinking for them. The goosestep is the only dance they know.
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