Regarding Syria, there is concern that the Assad regime, which is “evil,” might have chemical weapons, and that there might need to be a military attack to save lives.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. (H. L. Mencken)

My money says that the old WMD gambit works yet again. The US, the greatest terrorist force on the planet, operates as it does because its own population is in a state of perpetual fear and ignorance. I was born in 1950, and so came aboard during the second great Red Scare. This was peacetime propaganda. Joe McCarthy, fallout shelters, duck and cover, air raid drills – all of it was designed to create a climate of fear. I remember my family and neighbors out front of our house looking for Sputnik, the satellite put in space by the evil Soviets. A neighbor a block away built a bomb shelter and stocked it with food and weapons.

Humans naturally follow and trust authority figures. We are not designed as thinking machines. Back in the 1950’s there was not much information around – there was news filtered through Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley on TV and some radio agitators, but not pervasive. So in our defense it can be said of my generation and my parents that we were kept in the dark in part by lack of technology to access the outside world.

But you guys out there now with your computers and Internet – there is no excuse for you not seeing what is happening. None. Really. The ease with which you are manipulated is inexcusable.

The posts below (“My work here is done” and “Technology as our best friend and deadly enemy“) highlighted to me the utter and complete bankruptcy of our political system. If we hired the greatest criminal minds of all time and asked them to design a more corrupt system, they could not do better than this.

Take an ordinary man with no scruples, like Max Baucus, and put him in a position of power. Give him access to women and money, power and prestige, and give him enough attention to satisfy his narcissistic needs. Make sure that it is all legal, so that he does not end up in prison, where his type belongs, or on a used car lot.

Seed him now and then with a little money, and he is your bitch, a male concubine. The pittance, the small amount of money it takes to keep a man like him in power is dwarfed by the massive rewards for the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies who sponsor him. He is an investment that yields returns in a percentage range too high for the human mind to embrace. ACA alone yields billions of dollars in new revenue for a paltry few million it takes to keep this man in office.

I find Baucus to be particularly distasteful, and have similar feelings about Jon Tester and Michael Bennet, since I am a former resident of Montana and currently of of Colorado. These are the worst of the worst, and they rise to power not due to intelligence or integrity, but rather because of a low price tag.

We cannot fix this system, as the corruption is so deep now that it cannot be removed without killing the patient. Every office holder is bribed in some fashion, and has some skeletons that keep him/her in line. They are beyond the reach of the voter, and if replaced, by definition it is another of their ilk to occupy that slot.

We’re bankrupt now.

With Matt Koehler’s permission, I am reprinting below the fold an exchange from a public forum between him and Ben Lamb of the Montana Wildlife Federation regarding Sen Jon Tester’s “Sportsmen’s Act.”

In the 90’s when I was working around and for Montana Wilderness Association, MWF was one of those groups with which we held common objectives, even if we didn’t pick out curtains together. The essential bond was keeping public lands in public hands. Since there are always pressures from private wealth to privatize the commons, preservation requires a national impetus, and for that, we rely on the federal government. Private power seeks to fragment opposition by harping on “local control,” a means of fragmenting opposition into manageable portions. It is natural then that Lamb falls back on “local control” to advance his case that the EPA should not have the power to regulate lead in ammunition.

The exchange below below is preserved intact, and I have duplicated the links. I did take the liberty to italicize some PR language that Lamb used just for the sake of illustrating how that industry works – to come up with coded catchphrases that pack an emotional punch. That’s probably not deliberate – the advertising people, who are usually employed on the moneyed side of these debates, inject these words like a nurse administering morphine to an unconscious patient.

Also, I could help but notice that Lamb carries with him the same package of attitudes that Sen Jon Tester does about environmentalists – banning Koehler from commenting is akin to Tester’s fencing stakeholders out the discussions around his Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. Koehler is among the most respectful of commenters on the blogs, and always brings with him the actual language of bills and debates. However, industry and the moneyed interests have from the beginning attempted to marginalize the environmental community by insinuating that they are elitists; that use of the courts to bring lawbreakers in line is impolite; and that “mainstream” environmental groups (big budgets, foundation backing) are the only true representatives of the public interest. MWF appears to be a minor player in this regard, as its expenses only exceed revenue by about $100K.

Matt asked me to emphasize that he speaks for himself below, and not as a representative of any group with which he might be affiliated. He might also be politely suggesting that I not insinuate that he and I are working together – far from it. Everything above the line here reflects my own snarky attitude, and not Matt’s careful comments. (Full debate is beneath the fold.)
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Continue reading “Lead in ammunition: An exchange of viewpoints” →

I worked for some very rich oil dudes in my early career, and each December they were forced with a choice: “Do I want to put my money in the ground, or turn it over to the government.” Without fail, they put it in the ground. It may have impacted their freedom, but it also served a greater good. The privileges of wealth should not override the health of our economy, especially when wealth results from mere rent-seeking.

The following is from economist Michael Hudson, who seems to have figured out the game:

Democracy involves subordinating financial dynamics to serve economic balance and growth – taxing rentier* income or keeping basic monopolies in the public domain. Untaxing or privatizing property income “frees” it to be pledged to the banks, to be capitalized into larger loans. Financed by debt leveraging, asset-price inflation increases rentier wealth while indebting the economy at large. The economy shrinks, falling into negative equity. …

…The private bank debts taken onto government balance sheets in Ireland and Greece have been turned into taxpayer obligations. The same is true for America’s $13 trillion added since September of 2008 …

…To put matters bluntly, the result has been junk economics. Its aim is to disable public checks and balances, shifting power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning an taxation is accusers of being the “road to serfdom,” as if “free markets” controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic.”

In other words, “free markets” are the real “road to serfdom,” as can be seen all around us. The science of economics has it all backwards.
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*A “rentier” is an entity, such as Bain Capital, engaged in “rent seeking,” or skimming off of income-producing activities rather than creating new wealth. The ultimate lie of economics is that mere wealth accumulation is a societal good. Wealth created from a newly created activity, as investing in a new invention, is not the same as merely buying stock in an existing enterprise and collecting dividends and capital gains. This is the economic basis for high marginal tax rates** – not to confiscate wealth, but to direct investment towards its highest and best use. Investors should always be given the choice – invest or pay tax.
**Two other benefits of high marginal tax rates: Charitable giving is encouraged by a high-tax environment. Given a choice between turning it over to the government or charity, investors most often choose charities. Secondly, municipal bonds flourish. A tax-free bond in a high tax environment is a powerful investment, so that cities, countries, states, neighborhoods have access to low-cost financing.

As Chomsky often reminds us, the US not only supports despotic regimes all over the planet, but also acts in a formulaic manner when those regimes are challenged. The old dictator becomes a bad guy that we have always known about, and he is replaced with a good guy who later turns out to be a bad guy too.

I was a little sick at heart during the Egyptian uprising for two related reasons: Hillary Clinton was working the situation, meaning that she was lining up the new dictator, and US military aid continued without a hiccup, meaning that the new regime did not threaten either US or (subordinate) Israeli interests.

Well golly, it turns out that Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, is also Egypt’s new thug.

Tunisia’s new government is turning on the tear gas as well. Hillary can leave office with a “Mission Accomplished” banner overhead. She did her job. The thugs still rule.

• Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. (Carl Sagan)
• It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. (Mark Twain)

I wrote an overlong piece yesterday, and was dissatisfied. I kept coming back and fixing it. Finally last night, while in a meditative state fixated on sitcom star Heather Locklear, I realized that anything that hard to write had to be nonsense. I had tried to summarize the rules of politics, but realized that all I was doing was trying to help gamblers understand Las Vegas. It’s a pointless exercise. Gamblers love to gamble, and partisans are the last to understand politics.

It all started at Intelligent Discontent in what ended up being a five-sided debate around two points of view, me against four others. An amazing feature of that debate was this insane fact: When the Republicans funneled $500,000 in money of unknown origin to help Rick Hill in his campaign for governor of Montana, these Democrats were incensed. When the Democrats funneled $1 million of unknown origin to do a powerful campaign close for Jon Tester, these same players were delighted.

It was this brick wall of hypocrisy that launched my long and mercifully discarded piece.

In the two-party system, corruption only exists in the other party. When people like me mention that both look quite the same to outsiders, they rationalize, and call on their intellectuals to make sense of it.

As I watched beautiful Heather last night I realized the real problem I was having with that long piece: I understand politics quite well, usually after-the-fact. It is people who give me trouble. I mentioned to a friend via email recently that firebrands are easy to understand – Randians, libertarians, fascists (going by other names), Tea Party imbeciles and others are wedded to slogans. It’s easy to rally around slogans. It’s “common sense.”

Democrats are far more complex, as they have no base philosophy and no three-word slogan that can summarize their nothingness. So they rally around candidates. So naturally, when the candidates betray an ideal, Democrats continue to support them. Theirs is not an idealistic enterprise. It is a clearinghouse used to gather funds to elect people calling themselves “Democrat.” Nothing more.

I’ve long said that “Democrats are the problem,” and I stand by that four-word slogan. With Obama’s reelection we will have more aggressive wars, torture, indefinite detentions, continued tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity and attacks on our social safety net, targeted assassinations, attacks on civilians and suppression of human freedom all over the globe. This is not the Neocon agenda – this is the enhanced Neocon agenda. When I listed them at ID, the response I got from “Namelessrange” was “blah blah blah.”

This response only makes sense if the man is the issue, and nothing else.

American two-party politics are not about principles, ideals, an informed citizenry or human dignity. It’s all about elections. Obama and Tester got reelected. Nothing else matters.

Democrats are the problem, you see.

A few months back I reluctantly plunged headlong into the ongoing investigation by others into the events of 9/11/01. I say “reluctantly” not because I am on some mission, but rather because I know myself, my obsessive nature, and that I would be absorbed until spent. Below is a summary of my sifting of books, YouTubes, movies and interviews. There are tons of such platforms out there on this subject, and most of it is nonsense. There is a thread of substance weaving through it, serious people who have done serious work. But it’s hard to separate wheat from chaff.

I find a self-directed Q&A format an easy writing device. Here goes:

• Q: Who did it?
• A: Unknown. It’s much easier to say who did not do it, specifically, Osama bin Laden and those 20 others. But that is not the question to ask. First, we need to know what happened.
• Q: It’s not obvious to you?
• A: It appeared so. But it is not at all obvious. 9/11 was a large operation, both military and psychological – the preparation had to have taken years. There are many sub-operations within the events of that day – placement of Bush in the presidency, use of the news media to plant the ideas of “Al Qaeda,” “Osama bin Laden,” and “planes hitting buildings.”
• Q: Osama didn’t do it?
• A: It appears he was as surprised as all of us – that’s what I read in his final interview before he died in 2001. He was not terribly smart; apparently did not even know that the US was backing him as he fought the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. And anyway, he certainly did not have access to the resources necessary to shut down the national air defense system that day. But set that aside. The question is, again, what happened?
• Q: So what happened?
• A: Maybe two planes were taken off course. They didn’t hit anything.
• Q: I saw them hit the buildings.
• A: We all did. More on that later. Here is the key to 9/11 in my mind: There were a large number of military and civilian drills going on that day that distracted our people, used vital resources, sent F16’s off to Alaska, and confused everyone. The military does this on a regular basis to keep their people sharp. One of fifteen or so drills on 9/11/01 was a scenario where planes would be flown into the Twin Towers. As the day unfolded, NORAD and other personnel were looking at blips on radar screens they thought to be part of drills.

Continue reading “PSYOP” →