Western Response to Japan

The Real Crime Against Humanity…

Tony Cartalucci | Activist Post…

The Anglo-American multi-trillion dollar global military machine has been defended ad nauseum as essential to protecting free humanity and its progress into a promising future. In reality, it is a criminal facilitator obsessed with pilfering the world’s resources, consolidating power in the hands of feckless feeble minded, short-sighted degenerate financiers, and fostering an unprecedented level of interdependence and vulnerability in every nation brought within their sphere of influence.

One must wonder what sort of world we might be living in today if the trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives squandered in the last 10 years of war profiteering in the Middle East, were instead used to push real education, technological research and development, and real tangible technological progress. Not only would we have sources of power that could replace dangerous and antiquated power plants like the 40 year old Fukushima reactors, but we as Americans might have a naval fleet actually capable of protecting the “free world” from real threats like the one unfolding off the east coast of Japan’s Fukushima prefecture.

Instead, the US fleet is stretched globally involved in a myriad of meddling geopolitical gambits, many of which were intentionally engineered and initiated by corporate-serving policy wonks in Washington and London. Even as Japan drowns, burns, melts-down, evacuates, and workers engage in suicide missions to mitigate the unprecedented disaster unfolding, Washington and London leadership obsessively pursue their pet projects worldwide.

The globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) , and how to allocate military and civilian resources to aid the perpetuation of the US-backed Middle East conflagration, wringing their hands over the fact that their assets are already so thinly stretched between Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Considering the US State Department’s global network of recruiting, training, funding, equipping, and supporting contrived revolutions worldwide on behalf of globalist corporate interests, it shouldn’t surprise us how incompetent and ill-prepared it is to deal with its real duties – maintaining formal relations with foreign nations.

In this case, Japan, mired in a catastrophe that very well endangers the US itself is in dire need of any and all assistance, an effort the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should direct her entire, undivided attention to. Instead, Secretary Hillary Clinton is wasting time in Paris consorting with foreign backed Libyan rebels trying to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation.

The amount of extra-legal, unwarranted, un-Constitutional aid the US is rendering to pro-globalist projects around the world is almost as astronomical as America’s debt incurred through the criminal activity of the Federal Reserves’ economic-alchemists. A nation with the potential, population, and resources of America, led by what amounts to murderous-bullies, degenerate gamblers, and myopically obsessed megalomaniacs is a crime in and of itself.

The globocrats’ negligence over the decades, the squandering of the American people’s resources, human and otherwise, and the incessant meddling geopolitical social engineering has intentionally produced a world dependent on their “international system” and has doomed us to needlessly suffer disasters like the one in Japan. These are disasters that responsible, honorable men and women leading our nations could have prevented and most certainly could have ensured entire navies and armies would be on hand to deal with if all else failed.

The “international system” is a cancer of incompetence, self-destructive greed, that is leaving all of humanity naked and vulnerable to the real challenges of the future. It is a cancer that desperately needs to be excised with the utmost expediency. The twisting feeling we have in our guts when we wake up each morning, realizing the horrors unfolding in Japan and spreading in the winds off their coast is what a real humanitarian disaster looks and feels like, these are the challenges we as humanity face – not contrived rebellions in Libya, not climatology statistics cooked up by Belfer Center’s corporate sponsored shaman, and not fake wars funding 10 years of war profiteering.

These are real challenges that require real leadership, leadership we do not have, but desperately need. Each day these impostors remain in power the effects of their crimes become irreparably more profound. These are men that invent crimes and the criminals allegedly carrying them out to detract from the reality that they are the biggest criminals on earth – their crimes the most grievous against humanity. Their fumbling over Japan, while prioritizing their murderous pilfering and meddling across the Middle East, Central Asia and Northern Africa are unforgivable affirmations we must take to heart and act on now, today. The winds of change are literally coming and we are all about to pay the price for the globalists’ “misleadership.”

The answer is simple. Boycott and replace these corporations with local solutions, stop listening to their lies, stop voting for them entirely in their contrived version of “democracy” and write in names of men and women who truly deserve to be behind the levers of power no matter how unlikely their chance is to win. Become self-sufficient in food, water, power, security, media, and entertainment – pursue the education you were denied within the globalists’ sabotaged school systems. Our lives literally depend on moving on, and doing so without these parasites feeding off of us, posing as the source of civilization when all they do is feed off of civilization.

For more information on alternative economics, getting self-sufficient and moving on without the parasitic, incompetent, globalist oligarchs:

The Lost Key to Real Revolution
Boycott the Globalists
Alternative Economics
Self-Sufficiency

Neo-Con Infomercial: Iranium

Tony Cartalucci | Activist Post…

The bodies of dead American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t even cold in their graves when the liars that put them there turned their attention toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Looking beyond the short-sighted goals of controlling oil or fighting “terrorism,” the global elite are pursing an overarching agenda of establishing global hegemony in continuation of the British Empire’s efforts stretching back centuries.

By controlling the strategic geography and the vast networks of developed oil production infrastructure in the Middle East, the West can then hem the ambitions of rising world powers around the globe, confine them, and force them to concede to their vision of Anglo-American unipolar global governance.

The Anglo-Americans have been attempting to conquer the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. With the London based, British sanctioned Rothschild dynasty backing the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish people of the world were formed into the duped beachhead of Anglo-American ambitions in the region. The Anglo-American occupation beyond their proxy state has shifted overtime. Now their efforts have come to a crescendo after the staged 9/11 attacks, the resulting wars and US troops currently occupying nations on Iran’s east and west borders, all overseeing a chain reaction of US-backed revolutions sweeping the rest of the region.

Brookings Institute articulated the ongoing US policy toward Iran in terms of sanctions, US-backed revolutions, the backing of terrorists inside of Iran, and the provocation of a war the US think-tank concedes Iran does not want. RAND has also weighed in over the years, albeit outside of the realm of public debate, that Iran has possessed chemical and biological weapons for decades, maintains strict control over them, and has yet to disseminate them amongst any non-state actors. RAND and Brookings both conclude that Iranian nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrence and that Iran is a nation that is “aggressive,” but not “reckless.”

The goal of regime change in Iran is not one of America’s self-preservation, but the perpetuation of its dominion over the Middle East and its inability to concede influence to the actual people that live in the region.

Understanding this reality, conceded by the very men leading the march to war with Iran, is key to fully appreciating the level of deception and intellectual dishonesty you are about to see in “Iranium.” It will also add to your understanding, the full depth of depravity the Anglo-American establishment exists in. And finally, it will hopefully open your eyes to how Israel is being used, even gambled with on a daily basis contra to Israel’s self-preservation, to execute the Anglo-American’s designs of global hegemony.

Background

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” — Adolf Hitler

Judging by the treatment given to “Iranium,” the globalists appear to be accommodating their propaganda to the intelligence of a ham sandwich. The “Clarion Fund” production features the usual globalist “Islamophobia” suspects including John Bolton (CFR), Frank Gaffney, and James Woolsey (CFR, Foundation for Defense of Democracies), all signatories of the war mongering Project for a New American Century.

The Clarion Fund itself is merely the propaganda wing of this cadre of war mongering and war profiteering elitists. On Clarion’s “board of advisers” we find Frank Gaffney (PNAC), Daniel Pipes (PNAC, CFR), John Bolton (PNAC, CFR), Clare Lopez (Senior fellow of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy), Harold Rhode (Hudson Institute), and retired General Paul Vallely (Fox News senior military analyst).

It must warm the cockles of the Iranian people’s hearts, who take to the streets donning the green of yet another US-backed color revolution, to know oilmen, bankers, and war profiteers wholeheartedly stand behind them in their bid to overthrow their own government, destabilize their nation, and leave it at the mercy of a region occupied by the globalists’ invading armies.

Indeed, while “Iranium” tries to build a good case for burying Iran under the destruction of total war, they end their crude propaganda film with a plea to join Iran’s “new revolution.” After reading Brookings Institute’s “Which Path to Persia?” it becomes clear that total war and a color revolution are the only two options left. Considering that “Iranium” was released just this year, directly in the midst of openly US-backed, simultaneous regime changes across the Middle East, the impeccable timing, barring yet another grand globalist coincidence, leaves a lot to think about regarding the depth and premeditated nature of the globalists’ designs.

The Infomercial

“Iranium” conveniently skips past the unpleasant CIA-MI6 Operation Ajax that brought the Shah of Iran into power, and instead begins the film during his downfall at the hands of the Islamic Revolution. A constant and concerted effort is made by “Iranium’s” interviewees to portray Iran as an unstable, apocalyptic, backwards, world domineering regime that not only seeks to destroy the US and Israel but harbors designs of world domination. China and Russia are portrayed as being “bought off” by the Iranians with their oil wealth, while it is suggested that Iran is also using its oil wealth to build an expanding axis of anti-American nations worldwide.

Every “terrorist” attack, from the USS Cole, to 9/11, to roadside bombs in Iraq, is pinned on Iran, along with the promotion of just about every depraved act of barbarism imaginable. True to the spirit of the crude, cartoonish war propaganda films of the World Wars to which “Iranium” is an ode to, evidence and references are side-stepped in favor of unsubstantiated claims and outright lies, portrayed in the most simplistic, childish way imaginable.

For example, Frank Gaffney, at the height of his fear-mongering during the film, cites a “blue ribbon report” claiming that a single EMP burst by an Iranian built nuclear warhead, somehow launched and detonated over the United States would cause 9 out of 10 Americans to die within a year. He fails to mention that this “blue ribbon report” came out of the Heritage Foundation, the chief promoter of the “Clarion Fund” and its film “Iranium” in particular, as well as a nexus of big-business interests directly benefiting from the unending wars the “Clarion Fund” seeks to expand.

All of Heritage Foundation’s corporate “associates” can be found, starting on page 35 of their 2009 annual report.

Conclusion

To say that this cadre, along with promoters like David Horowitz, has done more to send young Israeli and American soldiers off to die senseless deaths than any bomb-strapped Muslim extremist is an understatement. This cadre has played a key role in keeping the “War on Terror” burning, consuming American, Israeli, and Muslim lives, souls, and treasure for a decade. It can be argued that they themselves constitute the greatest danger to the security and prosperity of the misled people of America, Israel, and the world.

However, they don’t actually believe the crass demagoguery they amateurishly peddle on a daily basis. They do it as war propagandist, and not as idealists, but for the bankers, industrialists, and power mongers they associate with. The “Clarion Fund” promotes their films within the halls of theHeritage Foundation, the “David Horowitz Freedom Center,” the Hudson Institute, and a myriad of faux-Conservative, faux-Jewish organizations across the United States.

Iranium is also promoted on Israeli news services like Arutz Sheva 7 Israeli National News, the Fox News of Israel. And just like Fox News, Arutz Sheva could care less about the people they lie to on a daily basis, the future of the nation they are based in, or the countless lives lost on either side as a result of their propaganda. In fact, Arutz Sheva promotes the globalist corporate-financier agenda and the goals of Washington and London so seamlessly, the only distinguishable aspect of their operation is that they are leading Israeli people over the edge of the cliff of imperial pursuit instead of their Western counterparts.

Now Playing

“Iranium” writer Alex Traiman gets airtime on fellow globalist propaganda outfit, Fox News.  Traiman preys on the ignorance of his audience by suggesting Egypt’s ElBaradei represents a threat to the West, failing to mention he sits as a trustee within a prominent US policy think-tank, supposedly managing such threats.

“Iranium” full-length: the propagandized, infinitely dumbed-down version of “Which Path to Persia?” devoid of fact and therefore safe for public consumption.

A Cure for an Ailing Economy

Taxing the Rich…

Healthcare isn’t the only social ill in the U.S. that needs a serious remedy. The list is long and growing: state budget crises, unemployment, infrastructure, education, housing, food assistance, etc. These are all things that must be paid for, but the money seems to be in short supply. When a country is in as much debt as the U.S., – $12 trillion and counting — the tasks at hand seem all but unachievable.

And this is exactly what many politicians would like you to believe.

Fortunately, the seriousness of the crisis is forcing a return to a forgotten, “radical” debate. For the first time in decades, some mainstream media and politicians are posing an extremely controversial question: should we increase taxes on the rich — and if so, how much?

The debate is being open to the public for lack of other options. The social inequality in the U.S. has been rising for decades, and has now reached the point where most of the population has zero disposable income; millions owe much more than they own. The only people who have money to spare are the wealthy. Another reason to tax the rich is that “…tax increases on high-income residents are less harmful than spending cuts; wealthier taxpayers tend to pay higher taxes from savings, not money they would otherwise spend.” (The New York Times, August 3, 2009).

Not pursuing higher taxes on the rich is resulting in social devastation. Look no farther than California, where Governor Schwarzenegger proudly declared that the state budget deficit was balanced “without raising taxes.” Instead, the budget was balanced at the expense of education, health care, welfare, etc. The working class and poor bore nearly the full extent of the burden. This dynamic is quickly turning the country backwards to a world that resembles the last depression.

Indeed, during the great depression tax rates for the wealthiest were raised significantly, from 24% in 1929, to 79% in 1936. Again, it was economic necessity — combined with a growing working class insurgency — that determined the tax increase.

Tax rates for the wealthy remained high for decades — 90% at times — until Reagan “revolutionized” the system. The man Obama speaks so highly of lowered the national income dramatically: taxes for the wealthiest individuals fell from 70% to 33% with both Democrats and Republicans voting for the reduction.

In an attempt to partially fund some of his campaign promises, Obama plans to allow the Bush Jr. tax cuts for the rich to expire, which will raise taxes on the wealthiest a mere 3%. This insufficient amount has caused an uproar in some sections of the elite who use their control over media outlets to vent their frustration — branding Obama as a “socialist” (an insult to actual socialists). Their outrage is genuine, since they believe that giving up a little may cause people to then demand they give up much more.

This increasingly venomous rhetoric against taxing the wealthy often comes with implied threats, the most common being: if you tax the super-wealthy and corporations, they will move themselves and their money oversees. Jobs will thus be lost; the economy will be sabotaged.

It must first be noted that the rich are already professional tax evaders, while corporations are giant welfare recipients. Tax “exemptions,” off-shore tax havens, and the type of logic that allows mega-billionaire Rupert Murdoch to pay 17% in taxes from his stock market “earnings” are just a few of the problems in our tax system that need correcting.

Correcting these numerous, irrational loopholes, while greatly increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations is likely to create the predicted exodus of rich, for the same reasons that the wealthy Venezuelans and Cubans crowd the shores of Miami Beach.

If this were to happen, we needn’t stand idly by as they further bankrupt the country. Such a purposely destabilizing act would require their bank accounts be frozen, and their excess property seized. Although harsh sounding, one must remember that this money isn’t legitimately theirs in the first place: they’ve acquired these billions by de-industrializing the country, driving down wages and slashing benefits, betting on housing bubbles and other financial schemes, bank bailouts, etc. In effect, they’ve bankrupted tens of millions of people and — if threatened by higher taxes — want to take their stolen money and run.

It should also be pointed out that the very question of the rich fleeing from higher taxes proves a higher economic law: our economic system is completely owned and manipulated by a tiny majority of ultra-rich individuals, who shield themselves behind omnipotent sounding corporate names: Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Boeing, etc. This is not a topic of abstract philosophizing, but the cause of the country’s economic crisis.

For decades the whole economy has been run by and for the interests of the corporate elite, with the recent bank bailouts proving this beyond any question — the federal treasury has been opened up for the mega-banks to grab trillions of dollars, with no questions asked.

This bankrupting of the country by bank bailouts and foreign wars is being used by sections of the elite to demand the end of a program long-hated by them: Social Security. The bedrock social program that many have referred to as “untouchable” is in danger of being molested by Obama’s corporate-dominated administration. And although Obama has hinted at the coming attack by repeatedly stating that “entitlement programs need to be reformed,” he has yet to be as blunt as the many recent articles appearing in national magazines and newspapers, intended to soften public opinion. The enormous national debt will be used as the pretext for the attack.

This cannot be allowed to happen; working people and the poor have sacrificed enough. The giant shift of wealth that has occurred in the last 40 years towards the wealthy must cease and be drastically reversed. For society to regain any semblance of equilibrium, wealth must be re-distributed on a magnificent scale, since any society that intends to meet the basic needs of its citizens — food, housing, health care, education, etc. — is utterly incompatible with the current situation, where a small group of billionaires enrich themselves off bursting financial bubbles and war profiteering.

The White House and Congress will do anything to avoid the urgently needed tax increases on the wealthy that the economic situation demands. All kinds of complicated tax increases on the working and middle-classes are likely to be proposed, such as the European-style Value Added Tax, and other taxes on consumption.

Labor unions and community organizations must unite to demand that the very wealthy – the top 5 percent of the population — and corporations pay for the economic crisis that they’ve manufactured. The enormous national debt and the dire need to maintain and expand social services make this demand especially urgent. There’s no time to waste.

And while placing the major burden of taxation on the rich who can afford it is an obvious necessity, a redistribution of existing wealth would be only a temporary solution to the current economic crisis. A basic restructuring of our society— taking political, economic, and social control out of the hands of the tiny group who have wielded power since the founding of this country— is the only road to a prosperous and sustainable future.

Rule of Law In Iraq

My address to the Berkeley-Albany Bar Association

I am delighted to be here today. During the course of my 15 minutes of fame upon returning from being an embedded reporter in Iraq, I have been asked to speak by NBC, ABC, NPR, CBS, the BBC and even Fox News. That was no big deal. But when the BABA asked me to speak? I was really excited and pleased. Thank you for having me here today.

Once you have been to Iraq, you see that country very differently. You not only sympathize with the poor Iraqi schmucks over there who are being shot at by US troops, various militias, 12 different kinds of terrorists, both Sunni and Shia resistance fighters, wannabe mafia dons, opportunistic looters, cold-hearted kidnappers, Al Qaeda and Islamic extremists but you also come to sympathize with and really identify with the American soldiers as well. And when I just missed getting blown up when a suicide bomber blew up the Parliament cafeteria and I was there at the hospital when the injured Parliametarians started pouring in, I came to hate war as well.

I would also like to talk for a moment about the fundamental disintegration of the rule of law in Iraq — and if I do, then maybe you might be able to get some MCLE credits from this talk after all. In 2003, George W. Bush unleashed Shock and Awe on the country of Iraq and, in my opinion, this was the equivalent for the poor Iraqis to the carnage recently done to Virginia Tech by a gun-crazed shooter. But then Bush did something equally bad or even worse. As far as I can tell, after his bloody assault on Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Bremmer then systematically went about dismantling all established systems of rule of law over there, including the court system, the public safety system, the legal system and the military. And without its structure to enforce rule of law, the country basically fell apart at the seams.

There’s a moral here. The American justice system may be the brunt of a lot of bad lawyer jokes, but it is also the glue that holds this country together as well. Allegedly.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from working with lawyers — it’s always to end every statement with “allegedly”.

Another thing I have learned from working in law offices is how many times that you guys get hit up for free advice. So I’m gonna force myself to be forbearing here and not ask you for any today either. I’m NOT going to say, “After my experience in trying to get embedded in Iraq and being repeatedly turned down for no valid reason, should I sue the Department of Defense for discrimination? Or not?”

And I’m definitely not going to lay out my case about how they — allegedly — continuously kept me from receiving an embed even though I was sponsored by Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Lee and four different news services including the San Francisco Chronicle. Or how it took me almost a full year to finally get permission to embed. Or how even after being given basic permission to get credentialed, I was repeatedly denied an actual embed.

And you will not hear it from me that even after I got over there, I was not allowed out of the Green Zone while other reporters freely came and went. And neither will you have to listen to me complain about how I have been seeking permission for over a month to return to Iraq for another embed over there and have even had actual units request me and they are STILL not letting me back into the country. Allegedly. I’ll protect you guys from all that. And I won’t even demand that you all take my case up to the Supreme Court!

But I will, however, take the witness stand here and answer any questions you might have regarding my Iraq experience — and if any of you want to cross-examine me, go ahead. Then you can be the judge of whether or not our troops should leave Iraq. But after my own experiences there, I say that we should.

And we should also put Bush and Cheney on trial for war profiteering — and genocide.

Jane Stillwater is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at:

Over Hill, Over Dale: The Militarization of Culture

A very disturbing commercial is being shown on network television in the United States with alarming regularity. I have seen it frequently during the past few weeks on an NBC station that broadcasts from the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.

It opens with a male chorus—perhaps a military choir–singing: “Over hill, over dale; we have hit the dusty trail.” The song has the cadence of a forced march. In muted light soldiers are seen wading through fetid water with weapons aloft, while well coordinated precision military operations are unfolding all around, like a Rogers and Hammerstein musical. We are supposed to be impressed with the military and technological prowess on display, awed into admiration for it; awed into submission to it, the oracle of our times.

As a montage of war images flicker across the screen, each of them portraying military operations (none of them showing the real horrors of war); a male voice extols the virtues of technological warfare and the unification of all military branches. Air force. Navy. Marines. Army. One force. The commercial ends with the statement, “Northrop Grumman: Defining the future.”

The infomercial clearly targets a male audience. Northrop Grumman and other defense contractors are realizing staggering profits from U.S. imperial policy in the Middle East and around the globe. The social and environmental costs, as always, are born by others. This is corporate welfare in its most hideous form—socialized costs and privatized profits. It is parasitic capitalism in its most malignant incarnation. It is the kind of propaganda Americans are exposed to their every waking moment.

No one who views the advertisement is going to run out and buy an advanced weapons system from Northrop Grumman. Thus one must ponder the real purpose of the ad. The message is not designed to sell weapons systems; it was created to sell the American people on the notion of superior technological prowess, perpetual warfare and war profiteering that guarantees, for a little while longer, at least, an unsustainable way of life: ideas that have already won widespread acceptance among the slumbering masses and the willfully ignorant.

We are supposed to believe that the Military Industrial Complex, a conglomeration of defense contractors with its long poisonous tentacles firmly lodged in the gangrened flesh of government, is protecting us and our way of life from a hostile world intent on destroying both. We are supposed to see perpetual war in Orwellian terms of peace; ignorance as strength, evil as good. Destruction of the commons and our civil liberties by fascist corporatism is supposedly good for the country because it is good for the war profiteers in government and Northrop Grumman—which is only the tip of a much larger malignancy rooted deeply in the cadaverous flesh of American society.

If Northrop Grumman is indeed defining the future, America—and the world—are in deep trouble. We are witnessing the blatant militarization of our culture by the forces of darkness, the machines of misery and death.

Hummers, a military vehicle, populate the roads and highways of America, even as the last drops of cheap oil are being sucked from the sands of the occupied territories. The human costs of war that sustain patterns of conspicuous consumption and waste never enter the minds of consumers. After all we are an exceptional people. The costs are born by others and kept hidden from view.

The glorification of war is nearly ubiquitous in the culture. You see it in the vehicles we drive, aggressive behavior, excessive national pride, flag waving, military style clothing, movies, video games; and now—television commercials. The American consumer is essentially becoming a piece of computer hardware programmed to download propaganda and to execute its commands without thinking. It does what it is programmed to do.

Northrop Grumman, the neocons, and their timorous accomplices in Congress are all peddling the same bogus image to the American people. Like the forces portrayed in the television ad, they are a well financed, well organized array of seemingly disparate forces fighting as one. Who are they fighting? We the people. Democracy. Truth. Peace. Organized labor. Working class people the world over.

Charles Sullivan is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and freelance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at .

Apply the Constitution – Impeach – Part 2

It is incumbent upon the U.S. Congress to uphold their constitutional duties. If not, they are also culpable for the same egregious crimes. After Bush was embedded again in 2004, the Democrats considered impeachment – Conyers followed through. However, in May 2006, Nancy Pelosi, who had served as Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives since the fall of 2002, said that “impeachment was off the table.” So, she can circumvent the constitution, ignore high crimes and misdemeanors and discourage the people from insisting that their representatives follow the rule of law. Pelosi, aware of the outrageous war profiteering, reiterated at a news conference on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 that “impeachment was off the table.” Who is pulling her strings? She also said that “Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.” Bush invited her to lunch on Thursday, November 9, 2006.

Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives on January 4, 2007. [1] Apparently, political cronyism and job placement opportunities do not recognize party lines. In a 2005 speech to the AIPAC, the second largest lobby in Washington, Nancy Pelosi said: “One thing, however is unchanged, America’s commitment to the safety and security of the state of Israel is unwavering. America and Israel share an unbreakable bond: in peace and war; and in prosperity and in hardship.” She also said: “The greatest threat to Israel’s right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.” [2] She apparently speaks out of both sides of her mouth all in the same time frame. [3]

Now, Americans must speak out. Our senators have made it more difficult for the citizens to contact them to let them know how we feel. Shame on them – they closed down those easy-access email boxes, making it that much harder for our Senators to represent us. [4] If according to the constitution, senators were chosen by their state legislators instead of the people, they might be more responsible! [5]

The International Commission of Inquiry on the Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration convened in October 2005 and January 2006 to evaluate testimony. Their indictment is a four page word document and includes:

1. The Bush administration authorized a war of aggression against Iraq.
2. The Bush administration authorized conduct of the war that involved the commission of “war crimes.”
3. The Bush administration authorized the occupation of Iraq involving, and continuing to involve, the commission of “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity” and other illegal acts.

The Bush administration breaks numerous international laws including: The Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Conventions of 1949, Conventions I-IV, August 12, 1949, Additional Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, opened for signature on December 12, 1977. [6] Their deliberate use of environmentally toxic depleted uranium weapons, napalm, and white phosphorous against Afghani and Iraqi citizens is egregious. Additionally, the Bush administration authorized the use of torture and abuse in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law and domestic constitutional and statutory law. They sanctioned rendition flights, illegal detention, and the withdrawal of habeas corpus, murder of dissidents and other crimes which constitutes another set of indictments. [7]

In addition, an alliance of over 100 non partisan grassroots organizations has vigorously campaigned for impeachment for both Bush and Cheney for high crimes and misdemeanors. Thousands upon thousands are calling for impeachment. Books have been written defining the abundant reasons for impeachment. Yet, the press remains silent!

Broadcast and the print media should impartially report all of the cryptic details. When it is casually mentioned by pro-war shills, it is attributed to crazy anti-war, anti-American “liberals” who supposedly don’t support the troops and should be impeached themselves for even questioning the war. [8] Harry Reid is accused of “putting the troops in harms way.” How about the fascists that put the troops there to begin with? Unless Americans raise their voices for freedom, all dissent about anything will be criminalized.

If and when a Bush or Cheney impeachment is mentioned, details about the reasons are conveniently omitted as if the masses can’t be trusted with too much truth and information. Americans have the predisposition to be great, given our avowed love of freedom; Americans also have the propensity to be tyrannical, given our talents and naïveté. Freedom-loving people want freedom for everyone else so we are easy dupes when our government claims to be spreading democracy. Actually, we are not a democracy, but a republic.

Secrecy and politics are closely allied. In the June, 1992 published interview granted by George H. W. Bush to Sarah McClendon, Bush said: “Sarah, if the American people ever find out what the Bushes have done, they would chase us down the streets and lynch us.” The same situation, possibly worse, exists over a decade later – “If Americans truly knew exactly what was going on in their names, they would mass outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, scale the gates, haul these perpetrators out of the White House by their shirt collars, and put them on trial immediately for crimes against humanity.” [9]

Impeachment is not a liberal/conservative issue – it is an American issue. According to the constitution, the primary power in the United States is with the people. This power includes the authority to impeach. The Congress is to act as representatives of the people. They have no power in and of themselves, other than what the people have given them or power they have unrighteously, greedily seized. In impeachment, the House impeaches and the Senate convicts and removes.

The call for impeachment starts in the House, usually with a resolution that asks the house to create a committee for the investigation of possible misconduct to evaluate the feasibility of impeachment. Typically, articles of impeachment are created by a member, an investigative committee, an independent counsel, a grand jury. If the House votes in the majority, then the issue moves forward within the House. Select Committees are established, staffed and funded by the Rules Committee. Upon completion of the report by the Select Committee, the issue is referred to the Judiciary Committee, now headed by John Conyers, which plays the main role in presidential impeachments. They evaluate, hear testimony, question witnesses, review documents and present their findings to the House. If 51% approve, the impeachment process goes to the Senate.

All one hundred Senators function as jurors. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Bush buddy, John Roberts Jr. serves as the judge. Sixty-seven percent (2/3) of the Senate may disqualify an individual from holding a federal office and remove a vice president or president. Further justice would have to take place through a civil or criminal suit. If both Bush and Cheney were removed, the Speaker of the House would succeed them. If Bush, alone, were removed Shotgun Cheney would become president – even scarier! Pelosi, as president, would impact the Democrat’s agenda in 2008. One can certainly see how political cronyism may inhibit the impeachment process.

Distracted American citizens, uneducated or forgetful regarding their Constitutional freedoms, are kept deliberately ignorant by the press. The mythical free press should utilize their liberties, according to the First Amendment, to expose the escapades of the Bush administration and its close connections to the military/industrial complex. Instead, the corporate owned media exercises their freedom to print the “news” that benefits their owners, the bankers and the accommodating government.

As of March 2007, Congress has approved the colossal amount of about $510 billion for military operations, foreign base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veteran’s health care since 9/11. This amount covered three military operations: Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Operation Noble Eagle for enhanced security and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. [10] Other figures may be even more accurate considering we have as many as 16,000 wounded military who need long term care. [11]

The Kucinich documents state that, as a result of the coalition invasion, 654,965 Iraqi civilians died well above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation between March 2003 and July of 2006. This is based on a study by the Johns Hopkins University which appears very reliable. Approximately 601,000 of these deaths are attributed to violent causes. These egregious figures constitute a humanitarian emergency – it is called genocide. [12]

Iraq did not attack America! One country cannot bomb another country into democracy, a fallacious excuse. Sure, Hussein was a monster – we should know, the CIA bought and paid for him until he nationalized oil. Cheney and his pentagon propaganda machine focused on Iraq, a 1992 PNAC-planned war, long before 9/11, a “shock and awe,” fear-producing event that functioned as the Reichstag fire of America. If the populace feels frightened or insecure, they are more easily controlled. Fear of the terrorists makes it easier for Bush to use the national Security Agency to spy on our email and letters. A friend, who should know better, remarked that if she “wasn’t doing anything wrong, what difference did it make if the government reads all of my mail and email?” The events of 9/11 apparently stifled our courage, made us forget the Constitution, our history and our power to think independently and envision the terrible probabilities.

Clinton, another insider, a globalist player, was impeached for lying about sex. Yet he was never convicted or removed from office. No one died as a result of that particular lie, he didn’t lie us into a lengthy war, condone torture or rendition flights (that we know of). I must give Bush some credit for honesty – he didn’t lie when he was confronted about using the NSA to spy on the citizens and it is actually an impeachable offense. Clinton also did not scrap our constitution by agreeing to consolidate Mexico, the United States and Canada into the North American Community. On April 30, 2007, Bush signed an unconstitutional treaty with the European Union committing the U.S. to a “deeper transatlantic economic integration” now that we are “at the forefront of globalization.” “The Transatlantic Economic Council is hereby established.” Bush failed to inform Congress, let alone obtain ratification. This document was signed by George W. Bush, Angela Merkel, President of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. [13] We are speedily approaching the One World Order, a government of elitists and slaves – which category do you think most of us will fall into?

With Clinton, Congress voted to impeach. With Bush and Cheney, it is a substantial online grassroots effort. Congress completely ignored Clinton’s numerous covert acts of treason. Okay, so maybe that is the key – Congress really wasn’t looking for serious, treasonous-type, impeachable offenses – they were just positioning political perceptions. His sexual escapades and impeachment proceedings were not lost on the American public who then looked for morality and responsibility in the next presidential election. Almost as if choreographed, the accommodating press and high-priced public relations built the “right” candidates – the other faction of the globalist, treacherous puppets-for-the-bankers bringing us even closer to the New World Order.

Naïve voters trusted the candidates, the ballot-eating voting machines, and the duplicitous press and were given the results of the election by the Supreme Court. That was months after 58,000 individuals (mostly Democrats) were disenfranchised by the office of Governor Jeb Bush, along with the assistance of his Secretary of State, accommodating Katherine Harris. All of this went unreported. For the voting public, this was not exactly a legitimate way for the elite-chosen puppet who campaigned on moral values to begin his term of office and solemnly swear an oath to uphold the constitution whose authority he immediately conspired to exceed. “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“Government is set up — and here’s what a Declaration of Independence is about — government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence, when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.” [14] Equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not merely for Americans, but for the peoples of other countries.

“So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies that have taken trillions of dollars from this country’s treasury and used it for war and militarism. That’s what patriotism would require today.” [15]

[1] Nancy Pelosi, House of Representatives, Biography, http://www.house.gov/pelosi/biography/bio.html Accessed May 8, 2007
[2] With Hand on Heart: Pelosi Admits Israel Comes First by Joshua Frank, May 31, 2005, Accessed May 8, 2007,
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jfrank.php?articleid=6157
[3] Nancy Pelosi Blog, November 7, 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-nancy-pelosi/one-hundred-hours_b_33529.html?p=2 Accessed May 8, 2007
[4] E-Mail Boxes of All U.S. Senators are CLOSED, http://fourwinds10.com/NewsServer/ArticleFunctions/ArticleDetails.php?ArticleID=15044 Accessed May 7, 2007
[5] U.S. Constitution: Article I, Section 3, http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/constitution/article01/index.html#1.3 Accessed May 7, 2007
[6] The Bush Commission Indictment, Word Document, http://www.bushcommission.org/Indictments/War%20indictment.doc Access May 5, 2007
[7] The Bush Commission Indictment, Word Document, http://www.bushcommission.org/Indictments/Torture%20indictment.doc Access May 5, 2007
[8] Harry Reid Should Resign or Be Impeached! http://www.cfiflistmanager.org/impeachharryreidnm.html Accessed May 4, 2007
[9] Impeach the President, the Case Against Bush and Cheney edited by Dennis Loo & Peter Phillips, preface. See Dennis Loo Blog, http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2006/12/most-recent-review-of-impeach-president.html
December 29, 2006, accessed May 4, 2007
[10] The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, PDF file, http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/clo3.pdf Accessed May 7, 2007
[11] Iraq war could cost $2.6 trillion, January 10, 2006 – 1:15PM, Accessed May 7, 2007
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/iraq-war-could-cost-26-trillion/2006/01/10/1136851198921.html See also the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0110/dailyUpdate.html
[12] Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,
[13] Framework for Advancing Transatlantic Economic Integration Between the United States of America and the European Union, April 30, 2007,
Accessed May 8, 2007, Read the entire document!!
[14] Zinn on Patriotism, April 18, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/stories/50654/ Accessed May 4, 2007
[15] Ibid

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center. She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
email:

Apply the Constitution – Impeach – Part 1

Professed “conservative” pundits repeatedly claim that the media is “liberal.” Seductive, subtle brainwashing consisting of persistent, repetitious allegations methodically establishes spurious theories totally unsupported by evidence. One definition of propaganda states: “the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.” [1]

If the media were actually “liberal,” the war-supporting government spinmeisters like Rush Limbaugh, bully Bill O’Reilly, Michael “let’s focus like a laser beam” Medved, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, the self-contradictory, self-congratulatory Michael Savage and a host of others would not have the opportunity to regularly spin and twist the news or, in the case of radio, hang up on callers who ask provocative questions. One of Ingraham’s introductory audio clips states: “We go to work, we go to church, we go to war.” In my mind church and war are incongruent. I suppose the Afghanis and Iraqis could say: “We go to work, we go to church, we get bombed.”

We actually have far rightwing, monopoly-owned, government-friendly television and radio networks posing as “fair and balanced,” “we report, you decide” specialists. Who is objective, who really reports? Apparently, given the lack of objectivity, it is easier and far more career-secure to read copy, reprint press releases, transmit pentagon-provided stories, promote the Neo-Con agenda or use creations from high-priced public relations operations. The “news” is a biased profusion of misinformation, disinformation or utter silence on significant but apparently taboo subjects combined with vilification and intimidation at appropriate junctures.

The political environment began to change in the early 1970s when far right-wing corporate owners used their influence and money to establish think tanks, their own publishing houses and create major media conglomerates. America was inundated with “right-wing checkbook journalism” which functioned as smear campaigns against innocent people on the wrong side of the right-wing ideology. [2] Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute employed savvy marketing and expensive public relations to promote their philosophy disguised as constitutional conservatism. These, the think tanks and media, are the epitome of perception management throughout the United States. Comatose conformity and unquestioning obedience are the ultimate objectives.

The government, despite the authoritative aura and the royal treatment accorded the leaders, is not holy; it is an artificial entity created by the people. Over time, a gradual turnabout occurred – officials became the masters and the people became the submissive servants, resulting in a very obedient populace, not unlike the Germans under the Nazis. The difference between the trusting Germans and the trusting Americans is that our technological advantages have resulted in greater access to information but the majority is too conditioned to acknowledge and learn from the historical similarities. Hindsight is excellent – It is easy to imagine alternative courageous choices that the Germans should have made right up until we discover that we, ourselves, are in the same exact situation. Perhaps, Germany was just a trial run.

Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine why the Germans were so willing to obey Hitler and came to the conclusion that Fascism succeeded because the Germans were somehow more obedient and compliant than others. [3] Under certain circumstances, people obey even when instructions from authority figures conflict with their values and conscience. They build crematoriums, toss emaciated cadavers into mass graves, work in detention centers, torture, kill, rape and use napalm and phosphorous on the poor, the elderly, and the women and children in Vietnam or Fallujah. War, initiated by the rich but fought mostly by commoners, is simply murder on a mass scale. Media-driven, desensitized hate promotes the most heinous behavior in otherwise ordinary, law-abiding, non-critical-thinking citizens once their political leaders use the media to identify enemies – who are other ordinary human beings who happen to live in resource-rich foreign countries. Just take your assigned place in the lemming line and march along with the others. Ten-hut! Your left, your left…

On May 5, 2007, the Iraqi parliament considered the feasibility of allowing U.S. oil companies to take control of Iraq’s oil industry. The bill was approved by the Iraqi government in February after months of bitter discussion. [DLS1] Ramzy Salman says that the law was created for the benefit of the U.S. oil companies. Of the Iraqi citizens recently polled, only one percent thought the invasion was about establishing a democracy. Forty-three percent felt that the invasion was about stealing Iraqi’s oil. [4] Iraq has proven reserves of 115 billion barrels and another 215 to 240 billion barrels not yet proven with a cost of about $1 a barrel to extract. Opposition to foreign exploitation caused strikes by oil workers (also known as insurgents?) in 2005. The Iraq newspapers also oppose foreign investment. “Resentment over ‘insufficient benefits’ to Iraqis led to the popularity of the Baath government and nationalization of the oil industry in 1975.” [5] So, who is footing the astronomical bills and sacrificing their lives so Rockefeller can seize Iraq’s oil and Halliburton can build inferior facilities at exorbitant fees and reward their government buddies who made it all happen? We can’t expect War-Profiteer Cheney or the Bush relatives at Carlyle to work cheap, can we? [6]

As Major General Smedley Butler pointed out years ago, war is a racket designed to make a few people rich and a lot of other people dead, wounded, suffering long-term catastrophic illness, misplaced, homeless and without hope. [7]

“Conservative” and “liberal” are synthetic labels perpetuated to coerce the populace to choose sides – an illustration of Hegelian Dialectics, a contrived, orchestrated opposition designed to divide, indoctrinate and maintain a specific obedient mindset. The trusting masses sympathetically support the poor pathetic “victimized” conservative minority pundits with their Ministry of Truth messages against the big bad wolf “liberal” adversaries. Have you noticed that the minority is much more visible, vocal, numerous and prominent than the so-called “liberal” majority? Coincidentally, the performers, the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” are both either controlled or committed members of the globalist organization, the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).

For the last forty years both Democrat and Republican administrations have selected members of the CFR to fill about 10 percent of all the high government positions. This should be of significant interest to any astute citizen. [8] Of course, this interesting fact is not publicized. CFR members running for office don’t even bother to mention this affiliation to their constituents. [9] The current administration pulled their strength from another ominous organization, the Project for a New American Century, which has provided Bush with his unconstitutional pro-war foreign policy.

David “You can buy anything in this world for money” Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR from 1970-1985 said the following at a Bilderberg meeting in Germany in 1991: “We’re grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.” [10]

If the media were genuinely objective, the populace would be absolutely deluged with reports about Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) current efforts to initiate impeachment proceedings against Halliburton stock holder Dick Cheney. The Articles of Impeachment, House Resolution 333, introduced on April 24, 2007, with all the supporting documentation is extremely compelling. Every American citizen should read this comprehensive and incriminating evidence of the individual who lied America into an illegal war. [11] Though not mentioned in the resolution, Cheney had jurisdiction over NORAD on 9/11 when the Pentagon, the headquarters of the greatest military power in the world was attacked. About thirty-five minutes passed between United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the second WTC tower at 9:02:54 a.m. and the missile (or whatever) hit the Pentagon. “The Pentagon says American Airlines Flight 77 hit them at 9:37. Other published reports have American Airlines Flight 77 striking at 9:40 to 9:43.” [12] Either the Pentagon hit was premeditated and permitted or Dick Cheney is a bumbling incompetent. Stupidity is not impeachable but…

On December 18, 2005, Rep. John Conyers introduced House Resolution 635 which would create a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, and retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment. [13] The media, by not mentioning this resolution, will be complicit if it fails. Let’s do everything we can to make it public. By the spring of 2006 there were thirty-eight members of the House of Representatives that co-sponsored this bill. [14] A 250 page report was prepared, The Constitution in Crisis, at the direction of Conyers. In conjunction, there is an excellent book, George W. Bush Versus the U.S. Constitution, an excellent read, compiled by the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff.

Conyers also introduced House Resolution 636 and 637 on December 18, 2005:
“H.Res.636 and H.Res.637 would censure, respectively, Bush and Cheney for failing to respond to requests for information concerning allegations that they and others in the Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for the war, countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of the Administration, for failing to adequately account for certain misstatements they made regarding the war, and – in the case of President Bush – for failing to comply with Executive Order 12958.” [15] And Clinton was impeached for lying about having sex!

[1] Answers.com http://www.answers.com/topic/propaganda Accessed May 4, 2007
[2] Checkbook Journalism by Deanna Spingola, July 5, 2006
[3] Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram, pages 1-6
[4] New Iraq Oil Law To Open Iraq’s Oil Reserves to Western Companies, February 20th, 2007, Accessed May 7, 2007, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523250
[5] Christian Science Monitor, Why Iraq’s new oil law won’t last, March 5, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0305/p17s01-cogn.html Accessed May 7, 2007
[6] Bush Family War Profiteering by Evelyn Pringle, April 13, 2007, http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/21215 Accessed May 8, 2007
[7] War is a Racket by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient: Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC [Retired], http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm accessed May 4, 2007
[8] Cuba and the Council on Foreign Relations by Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., Thursday, Feb. 15, 2001 http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/2/15/224945.shtml accessed May 4, 2007
accessed May 4, 2007
[9] Cheney Laughs About His Unspoken CFR Directorship, Video accessed May 7, 2007,
[10] Conspiracy Nuts and Conspiracy Theories, http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/conspiracy_ nuts_theories.htm accessed May 4, 2007
[11] Supporting Documents for H Resolution 333, http://kucinich.house.gov/SpotlightIssues/documents.htm Accessed May 5, 2007
[12] The Most Comprehensive 9/11 Timeline by Mark Elsis, http://www.911timeline.net/ Accessed May 8, 2007
[13] House Resolution 635 introduced by Rep. John Conyers, PDF, http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/hres635.PDF Accessed 4 May 2007
[14] Thomas, Library of Congress, H.RES.635, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HE00635:@@@P Accessed May 4, 2007
[15] Help Us Pass H Resolution 635 to Create an Investigation into Grounds for Impeachment, Accessed May 7, 2007
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/635

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center. She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
email:

Upon Red Rivers of Genocide

Living Inside Hell on Earth

Daily upon the rivers that birthed civilization can the flow of crimson colored blood be seen journeying over liquid roadways through the land of Mesopotamia, its accumulated and growing volume the result of scattered bodies, bullet hole riddled men and bloated humans, all silent witnesses to the devastation that has cursed the Iraqi people.

Tainted with the flow of human wickedness, the Tigris and Euphrates spread their polluted waters over the entire culture of Iraq, like sewers of human waste contaminating land, water and air, their toxins of evil and torture and murder and suffering spreading a noxious fog over cities and towns, its cocktail of death and destruction infecting the fabric of society, the very foundation of Iraq cracked and shattered by the spillage of human energy, that crimson liquid granting life.

Upon red rivers of genocide do twenty five million human beings sip out of, forced to endure the aftertaste of rotting flesh, drinking from the chalice of human violence, swallowing the red liquid of their nation’s blood, bathing in its corrupted waterways as their country slowly, yet surely, hemorrhages to death. Unable to close a gaping and now pussing wound, unable to stitch back together lacerated flesh, millions upon millions of human beings have become the gangrened body infected by America’s disastrous debacle, slowly rotting from within, turning vile in color and putrid in smell with each passing day, their only salvation the amputation of the whole, the division of their nation, the destruction and partition of Iraq.

To twenty five million Iraqis hell on Earth has been introduced to their land by the demons roaming the halls of American power that care not an ounce for the misery and wickedness now roaming like a vulture over Iraq’s skies. For human evil has been imported into the Cradle of Civilization, an export birthed, nurtured and molded by Old Glory itself, under the watchful eyes of Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, crafted by debasement and corruption, becoming the most successful product launch America has sent abroad in many, many years. For the war culture has perfected the art of sadistic mass murder, a new edition introduced like a software program, resurrected every few decades to enrich war profiteers and greed mongers while making comfortable the lives of those residing inside the belly of the beast. Like a virus the American angel of death has spread far and wide, free of antidotes or miracle cures, given the freedom that is denied Iraqis, like a haze enveloping almost every city and town, village and farm, infecting madness and hatred and vengeance and anger into the minds of millions, injecting civil war upon Iraq and genocide upon the Iraqi people.

Upon the affliction that has befallen them, born of lies, deceit and criminality, against all precepts of human and international law, rising out of smoldering ashes and destroyed skyscrapers, fashioned by incompetent daydreamers and pathological deviants, Iraqis – whose only true curse is having evolved for millennia in the lands pregnant with the devil’s excrement – find themselves stuck in a nightmare whose waking hour will not come and whose terror cannot be made to disappear. To them, the nightmare is all too real, as evident as the smell of burning flesh or the concussion of the next explosion, as real as the searing shrapnel tearing and ripping open body parts or the decapitated and mangled head of a loved one.

This nightmare does not wake, nor does it allow eyes to open, becoming as real as the destruction of homes, livelihoods or rape of an older sister. Whether murdered execution style with a bullet to the head or murdered by an American smart bomb, the Iraqi nightmare seems only to end upon the last breaths of life, upon the expiration of human energy. Only then does fire and phosphorous and bullets and missiles and beheadings turn to nothingness; only then does hell on Earth subside and peace prosper.

The omnipotent darkness of genocide, American style, has been resurrected in lands ancient and mesmerizing, where history began and where humanity was nurtured and reared. From the fertile bosom and succulent nectars of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers humankind took a great leap forward, advancing in civilization, growing in numbers, evolving in time. Today, from rivers once offering life only death and the products of human malevolence can be seen, courtesy of greed, arrogance and apathy, of the self-aggrandized narcissism and inexperienced idiocy that blinds and insulates populations smeared in comfort and willful ignorance. Through the silence and acquiescence of Americans, through the complete indifference to the plight of 25 million Iraqis, genocide has become America’s foreign policy in Iraq, becoming Iraq’s new normal, rising to the present as it once did in the past, a disease thriving wherever America’s armies land, just as it once did in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, where in the span of a century the lives of tens of millions of human beings were systematically erased from the face of Earth.

Genocide, that most malevolent of human activities, that most common of historical realities, that most useful of American foreign policy objectives, a demon that invariably never fails to leave our mammalian psychology, becoming as common to our history as music is to our culture, has been birthed in the land of sand and dunes, becoming as common as scorching temperatures, rising like ancient Babylon once did to lay claim to Mesopotamia. Upon rivers that once brought life now only death floats by; where fertile mud once flowed now human blood gushes. Where sustenance once flourished only misery can now be irrigated; where once fish were pulled out in bountiful amounts now bodies of rotting human flesh are fished out of the water.

For what can you call what is happening in Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century anything but genocide, the complete and systematic decimation – the annihilation – of an entire culture, of an entire society, of an entire nation? What do you call the death, mostly by violent murder, state sponsored terrorism, American birthed civil war, sectarian violence and counterterrorism operations, of 655,000 human beings if not mass murder, genocide, the genesis of Holocaust? Two to three percent of the Iraqi population has been exterminated, never to breathe life again, never to see children grow up, never to see mothers give birth or see fathers become proud grandfathers. Two to three percent of Iraq’s people lie six feet under, buried under the massive and monstrous American military machine. If two to three percent of America was killed in the span of three years, a number reaching 6 to 9 million individuals, what would happen to the United States? What would happen if a city the size of Los Angeles or New York or Chicago was wiped off the face of the nation? The equivalent of this hypothetical is happening today in Iraq.

Entire families have disappeared, entire ways of life extinguished; the devastation of daily anarchy, occupation, chaos, thirst for vengeance and civil war results in several hundred deaths by murder every single day in Iraq. Every month in Iraq at least 3,000 civilians die at the hands of human wickedness, creating an Iraqi 9/11 every 30 days, every 720 hours. Rivers and puddles of blood flowing through Iraq’s streets never seem to run dry, with each new day spawning the next bloodbath of body parts and devastated flesh. The Iraqi genocide refuses to relent, thriving off of human psychology, off of a culture of revenge and honor, off of a brutal guerilla resistance to foreign occupation. In each case of murder, torture or intolerable suffering, the common denominator is always the invasion of Iraq by America and the subsequent occupation that has become a catalyst to the horrors facing average Iraqis today. Each day only seems to make things worse; each year only cements the continuing decent into human Hell. From the bowels of hell the demons of mankind have risen in the land of Mesopotamia.

Children rise one day to innocence only to fall asleep to malevolence. Teenagers once full of idealism, hope and love are now possessed by hate, anger and psychological maiming. Young adults hoping for a fruitful life now have only the memories of the past to sustain them, their potential and opportunity now eroded, their talents and abilities quashed. Mothers and fathers once hoping for a better tomorrow for their children now see nothing but decades of decimation to come. Grandmothers and grandfathers look at the present and remember the past, cursing the devil’s excrement, condemning the Anglo-American world, shedding tears over the crushed vibrancy of a destroyed society. Through the eyes of babies a world of violence and murder becomes routine, along with bloated bellies and diseased bodies, hungry mouths and depleted brain power. Through the eyes of babies Iraq and its cities burn in a fiery inferno of man killing man, its pillars crumbling under the weight of the evil birthed through American intervention. This, today, is reality and truth to 25 million Iraqis, or to those who remain, unable to flee.

Genesis of Holocaust

The lives of 25 million human beings lie in ruins, destroyed like the rubble and mortar that lines city streets and boulevards. The Iraqi genocide is what we at present see, a reality fated to continue well into the future, without a hint of when it will stop, a direct and proximate cause of America’s war crimes and its illegal and immoral occupation. The curse upon Iraqis, begun with the act of economic genocide called sanctions, imposed, implemented and supervised by America in the 1990’s – which resulted in the death of up to 1.5 million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children lacking proper nourishment or medicines – and continued with Bush’s Crusade against Iraq, an operation of blatant terrorism disguised under the state’s veil of Lady Liberty and Old Glory, has in the span of a decade and a half become a shameful and criminal Holocaust, resulting in the death of perhaps two million human beings. If the mass murder by radiation through America’s weapon of mass destruction, depleted uranium munitions, is added to the calculations, the Iraqi Holocaust approaches some of the worst crimes of human civilization in the brief history of our species.

The monster engendered by George W. Bush, the military-energy industrial complex and the neocons has become an unstoppable force whose momentum has spiraled out of control, its life growing and evolving not in accordance with the commands from Washington but rather from the vicious cycle of devastation now feeding its unquenchable appetite for blood and malice. Like a hurricane it gains speed and strength from warm liquid, in this case human blood, becoming a vicious circle of mass murder that cannot be halted.

Has the greed and hunger for unsurpassed wealth and power been worth the genocide of Iraqis? Has it been worth the indescribable pain and suffering and anger and hatred emanating from millions of Iraqis against the United States? To you and me the answer is surely no; to the war mongers and greed addicts in power, however, it has been worth every penny, for they care nothing for ordinary Iraqis, having not one drop of remorse or empathy or humanity in their ice cold veins from where only the green of the Almighty dollar and the thick black oil of the devil’s excrement is allowed to flow. To them, the Iraqi genocide is seen only through the macabre vision of dollar signs and enhanced power. To these individuals, they would just as easily squash a cockroach than care about 300 deaths a day in Iraq.

How high will the final tally of dead Iraqis reach? How much killing and murder and maiming and destruction is left to achieve? How much longer will the blueprint for Central America during the Cold War be implemented in Iraq, with its counterinsurgency operations full of torture, disappearances, mass executions and death squads? Will the final death count approach the two to three million dead that were recorded in Vietnam, that the American military left in its wake as it retreated from its embassy’s rooftop? Will the killing stop only when there is nothing left to kill, only when the enemies of America have exhausted destroying each other, when they realize that they have been made to fight each other so as not to unite and fight the common enemy, just as the pathological occupiers desired in a classic example of divide and conquer?

The Iraqi genocide will not be destroyed until America is kicked out of Iraq, until its bases are overrun, until the Green Zone is sacked, until the last remaining Americans are evacuated with helicopters from the rooms of Saddam’s old palaces, for it will never leave voluntarily. It has created a mess it cannot extricate itself out of, both strategically and financially. It has invested too much precious treasure, to say nothing of blood, in the pursuit and control of Iraq’s energy resources. It has built more than a dozen permanent bases, it has firmly planted itself in a most geostrategic location, the easier to wage battle against tomorrow’s rivals, Russia and China. America has made the first move in the great chess match for control of Earth’s remaining petroleum. It cannot now simply pack up and leave, no matter how costly the enterprise, no matter how much blood is spilled. With its reputation in tatters, with its military trapped in quicksand, with its leaders as incompetent and arrogant as they are unwise, America will, like a spoiled and undisciplined child of wealth, thinking itself privileged and enveloped under hallucinations of chosen grandeur, refuse to listen to reason, preferring to suffocate under the immense weight of the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the nation than declare defeat and retreat.

The killing and destruction will continue, with America as catalyst, as the malignancy destroying the invaded nation with the cancer of human wickedness, until the term genocide is replaced by the word Holocaust, until millions lie in graves, their bodies returning to dust and earth and grass, the winds carrying radiation poisoning becoming the silent reminders and perpetual killers of America’s foray into the Iraqi deserts. Millions of Iraqis, those already born and those yet to come, are destined to die at the hands of what America wrought. Thousands will die of bullet holes to the head, while thousands more will be murdered by bombs and missiles. Still many more will die of preventable disease, dead for lack of sanitation, lack of potable water, lack of electricity, medicine and nutritious food. Tens of thousands will die of lack of security, as anarchy and chaos and civil war devastate Iraqi culture and society. Untold numbers of Iraqis will die of cancers and diseases resulting from radiation poisoning caused by the use of hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions. Thousands of newborns will be born mutated or deformed, distorted in ways human babies have never looked before; thousands more will never be born at all, for stillborn will they enter this planet, becoming the lucky few to escape the human hell their parents must confront and escape.

Up to a million Iraqis, those lucky enough to possess some form of infinitesimal wealth, have fled their native country, never to return to their homes, their lives left behind. Displaced by America’s occupation and the resulting insecurity and guerilla warfare, uncounted millions have decided that it is better to risk leaving Iraq than remaining under the real threat of becoming one more statistic in a Baghdad morgue. The Iraqi Diaspora has begun, with those allotted a little luck in money and fate creating a mass exodus from Mesopotamia, choosing poverty abroad rather than insecurity and constant threat at home. Already hundreds of thousands of professionals have left the cities, from professors to doctors, leaving Iraq a desolate and anemic society, never to return to the nation of their birth. As a result, hundreds of thousand of students are without teachers, millions of civilians are without doctors.

Yet for the poor of Iraq, for those comprising the salt of the earth, the great majority of Iraq’s citizens whose resources prevent escape from the gates of hell on Earth, only the certainty of living in constant fear of death or injury awaits, their lives reduced to an understanding that the last breath they take could very well be their final gasp of air. For the poor of Iraq, America and its brutal occupation, with its massive debacle of historical proportions, makes Saddam Hussein seem like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, how many Iraqis today wish Saddam was still in power? Iraq, after all, was safe, secure and at peace with him at the helm, a reality that today does not exist.

While brutal and a dictator, he was nonetheless the fulcrum upon which all of Iraq stood united, in control, free of terrorism, a non-threat to its neighbors, much less to George W. Bush’s America. Yet even today his war crimes pale in comparison with those unleashed by George W. Bush, yet it is Saddam that will soon hang from a noose. It was Saddam that acted as the thread and needle needed to stitch Iraq together. Without him the entire deck of cards has come tumbling down. With a western created nation such as Iraq, with borders delineated according to European interests and not ethnic or religious realities, only a strong-arm despot sponsored by the west could maintain control, becoming the thread holding the nation together. Unfortunately for America, George W. Bush and his neocon handlers have no interest in learning history or its many lessons.

The Folly of Ignoring History’s Lessons

What those who discard or ridicule the study of history fail to realize is that history – not the kind that is written by powers or winners but by reality – is but the decoded pattern of repeated psychologies and behaviors of our past and the blueprint for understanding our present and future. It is our demons, mistakes, lessons, triumphs, wonders and evolution as a civilization outlined for us to learn from and study, to absorb fully into our existence. For it is indeed true that those who fail to learn history are utterly, and faithfully, condemned to repeat it, which is what has happened in the American disaster in Iraq, as well as in the brewing failure in Afghanistan. Had the history of the region been taken seriously, had it been studied and learned from, Iraq would have never become the inferno it is today. Quite simply, Iraq should have never been invaded and occupied. Yet wisdom and intelligence are almost always mutually exclusive from politicians, elites and their legions of yes-men and women.

By throwing away the readily available history of Mesopotamia, with its plethora of lessons and warnings for arrogant yet ignorant imperial seekers saturated with the honey of hubristic honey, America and her so-called leaders embarked on a course towards debacle from the very beginning, preferring to believe those whose minds dwell in fantasy, delusion and theory espoused in books over those whose decisions are based on history, experience, wisdom and reality. America’s so-called leaders chose to smell the sweet yet delusional aroma of being greeted as liberators, believing they would be welcomed with flowers, candy thrown at their feet. Instead, they were greeted with AK-47s, rocket propelled grenades and IED’s, along with the collective and growing anger of the Iraqi people. Because of this gross incompetence, because of complete negligence and disregard for reality, American soldiers were sent into a hornet’s nest, straight into a pit of quicksand designed to meticulous tear apart one soldier at a time, trapping citizen soldiers in a guerilla war that was never going to be won and was always going to end in disaster.

Because of the complete ignorance festering at the top of America’s pyramid of hierarchy and inside the decrepit neocon nest of vultures, in three years 655,000 Iraqis have died, more than a million Iraqis have become refugees, countless more have suffered maiming of both body and mind, and an entire society has been decimated, raped of its vibrancy and usurped of its peace and unity. With years yet to go before the madness is halted, with America unable and unwilling to extricate itself from the pit it has nosedived into, the genocide now taking place will only grow, easily surpassing the present evil in the Darfur, the past wickedness in Rwanda and the Congo, and threatening to reach levels of genocide America created and furthered in both Vietnam and Cambodia, which resulted in millions of deaths.

If this is the case, the time honored American tradition of waging invasion and occupation against a concocted enemy nation will continue, as always biting off more than it can chew, refusing to change the course, through guerilla war waged by resistance forces being forced to retreat, in the process engendering and furthering genocide, creating a bloodbath in the process, and eventually leaving the nation it originally invaded a wasteland of destruction, suffering and death. Its time honored tradition of killing millions through invasion, occupation and through a barrage of state sponsored terrorism every two or three decades will thus continue. Which country, which people, we should all wonder, will be next to become the blood needed by the Pax Americana to gorge on? Which nation will be next to suffer the wrath of American genocide that invariably helps sustain the comfortable standard of living of those residing inside the belly of the beast?

For those residing in the reality based community and not the fantasy based bubble of delusion, the Iraq debacle has become even greater than originally thought, becoming, in the span of three years, a disaster of monumental proportions, a comma of history that will be studied and analyzed as the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States. It will become the comma of history that is used, along with that other comma called Vietnam, as a case study of how not to hand incompetent greed addicts and war mongers the reigns of military power, becoming, as all disaster usually is, a harsh lesson taught future generations so that they do not repeat the mistakes and disasters of their forefathers. Unfortunately, the same was once said of the Vietnam experience.

Forever Remembered, Never Forgotten

The Iraq genocide from 1991 through the Bush Crusade will forever be remembered in history books, just as the president wanted, though not for the reasons those who concocted and furthered it thought. It will be remembered not for triumph or grandeur or to memorialize America or its leaders but rather for the crimes against humanity, for the war crimes, the horrible suffering and the genocide perpetuated by America along with the shameful indifference, acquiescence and silence of an American people that have lost all sense of shame, or decency, preferring to bask under the glow of purposeful ignorance than have their lives of comfort and materialism interrupted by the destruction and genocide their country is committing in the Middle East.

The Iraq/Bush Crusade will be remembered for the greed and lust for oil of the American people, of millions upon millions driving gas-guzzling SUVs while Iraqis were forced to spend entire days in line to fill up their cars. It will be remembered for a housing bubble that granted Americans inflated and borrowed comfort, allowing them the opportunity to purchase enormous cookie cutter homes and a myriad number of toys, wants and luxuries, even as our war machine destroyed the lives of 655,000 human beings, even as our beautiful minds placed the entire decimation of another nation by our government out of sight and out of mind.

The Bush Crusade will be seen for what it has become: the utter failure of the American people to act during our most loathsome hour. At a time when America hit the nadir of morality and virtue, the American people of the first decade of the 21st century will be judged guilty of complicity in the first mass genocide of the new millennium. Our callous complicity in supporting criminals and murderers, while living lives of gluttony and apathy, have made us all guilty in what has certainly become a crime of the highest order. But for our terrible passivity in the face of an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, obvious war crimes, and the decadence of American virtue and principles, perhaps the Iraq genocide might have been avoided, saving the lives of millions of human beings, both Iraqi and American, and perhaps saving our honor and reputation as well.

As a result of this most incompetent of administrations, Iraq and its valiant resistance has disemboweled the grand American military machine, gutting its power, re-opening the large scab that refuses to heal, bringing the American imperial project to its knees and proving to humanity, yet again, that asymmetric guerilla warfare cannot be defeated by a conventional military, no matter how arrogant or powerful it claims itself to be. In the streets of Iraq battles are waged according to the dictates of the resistance, a fragmented amalgam of native mujahadeen whose knowledge of Iraq, patience in attacking, discipline in retreating and noble cause in fighting off a brutal occupation, have allowed it to bruise and make bloody the American military on a daily basis, slowly, yet surely, tiring out the powerful giant.

With 95 percent of the resistance born and bred in Iraq, fighting for the independence of their nation and not for an al-Qaeda ideology, with 90 percent of the civilian population supporting them, America will never defeat the insurgency, no matter how hard it tries to divide and conquer, no matter how many times it tries to foment sectarian violence and civil war, no matter how many billions it spends on a monthly basis, no matter how many permanent bases it decides to build. Shiite and Sunni may be fighting each other, yet their common enemy remains America.

A culture of vengeance and of honor, a society brimming with anger and a people thirsting for freedom from America cannot be defeated, no matter how many times the occupier decides to stay the course on a most defective ship. Iraqis fight for freedom and independence; they fight to prevent their oil from being stolen; they fight for family and honor, for the death of loved ones and against the dehumanization by the occupier. They have reason to fight, possessing passion knowing they are in the right, which cannot be said of American soldiers. What does America fight for? What cause guides it forward? What passion drives its momentum? How is America in the right? This war is all about control of oil, all about greed and engorging the bank accounts of the military-energy industrial complex. The Bush Crusade is about pillage of resources, plundering of the treasury and securing for tomorrow the oil fiefdoms that will further enrich and empower the American elite and its corporations. How do you get American soldiers to believe in a cause and fight for a war based on lies, deceit, manipulations and for the greed and power of a tiny minority that have sent them to become the cannon fodder of the wealthy?

The Shame of America

Make no mistake, America will prefer to stay the course, for to its alpha male leaders it can never “cut and run.” Her so-called leaders will always choose to sacrifice thousands of sons and daughters of poverty so leaders’ and their reputations and legacies survive intact. It is not their sons and daughters bleeding to death, it is not their relatives being maimed in body and mind. No, America never loses a war, it never suffers defeat, for in the national narrative, in the fables and myths told the masses, America is blessed by the Christian god, she is good and everything else evil, she is right and all else wrong, her soldiers fight only for freedom and democracy, not for corporate and elite power. In the national fiction a war on terror exists and Iraq is the central front, the place where evil must be confronted because it hates us for our freedoms, not our foreign policy.

Sure, the appearance of withdrawal of forces will be concocted to appease the grumbling masses, enough to satisfy their beautiful minds, yet tens of thousands of troops will remain, protecting pipelines, refineries, permanent bases and the oil fields that now fly the great red, white and blue. You do not think the American state would spend a trillion dollars in the Bush Crusade simply to expel a despot from power, right? You do not think a trillion dollars will in the end be spent to bring freedom and democracy to a partitioned tri- state, do you? Because of oil and its strategic location in the Middle East and near Central Asia, Iraq will remain an American colony for decades to come or until that time that Iraq’s oil fields run dry. It will be infested with American troops protecting America’s corporate interests until the day arrives when America and her military are forced out of the nation by a resistance that continues to gain momentum, strength and support. Only by force, and with her tail between her feet, will America stubbornly relent and retreat in the face of a perpetual bloodbath.

To her leaders, as well as to most of her citizens, the Iraqi genocide is of no more significance than last week’s episode of Survivor. Out of sight and out of mind, hundreds of millions of Americans could care less about Iraqis and their plight. To America’s so-called leaders, genocide is part of doing business, part of war profiteering and greasing the engine of perpetual war for perpetual profit. To most Americans, both leaders and civilians, Iraqis are subhuman dark skinned Arabs and the death of 655,00, or the displacement of one million, are of little importance or consequence, whether or not the American state perpetrated crimes against humanity in their name.

Why be bothered by the misery and suffering of Arabs in the Middle East when a pedophile was just forced to resign from the Congress? Why feel any ounce of sympathy for the plight of Iraqis when Democrats will only continue the massacre when they regain control of the legislative branch? Why feel extreme sadness and guilt and shame at what is done in our name when we have trouble even finding Iraq on a global map? Why feel indignation at the genocide taking place when more than 40 percent of Americans still think Iraq was involved in the inside job of 9/11?

As a result of what America has unleashed upon Iraq, given the silent passivity and blind acquiescence of the masses, given the loyal support granted Bush by 59 million voters in 2004 and the perpetual support of 30 percent of American sheeple, given the reprehensible indifference and racist xenophobia towards Iraqis by many Americans, given the astounding mortality figures rising out of Iraq in the last fifteen years as a result of American involvement, it is both a shame and an embarrassment to consider oneself American. In this day and age, to consider oneself proud to be an American is to be in serious need of psychological assistance, psychotropic medication, or both. It is to be so brainwashed and manipulated by the state and the corporate media that the labeling of someone as ignorant is a valid affirmative defense.

To show no remorse against the myriad number of crimes against humanity and the war crimes perpetrated by the American government and its president is to lack the basic tenets of what it is to be human. It is to dwell in the land of sheeple and lemmings, immersed in a population of pathological sadists more concerned for the health of fictional television characters than in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of real human beings. To salute the red, white and blue today is to give comfort to terrorists and blind loyalty to criminals. It is to support the destruction of the Constitution, of democracy, international law and human decency. In short, saluting the American flag today is to declare war and commit treason against all the United States has ever stood for, all it has ever fought to preserve. It is to appease the real terrorists, aiding war criminals and granting blind loyalty and faith to the United Corporations of America, a nation of, by and for the corporate world and the elite that control it.

How sad that in the worst cluster of years in our history the American people decided to do nothing, preferring to sit on our ever expanding buttocks hypnotized by the corporate media, failing to act at the most important moment of our lives, our only contribution being remaining silent to the avalanche of war crimes and crimes against humanity that have laid waste to Iraq. How sad and pathetic Americans have become, in the first decade of the 21st century, becoming the ignorant, fearful, xenophobic, acquiescent and indifferent army of good Americans. A once virtuous and honorable people, at one time possessed of intelligence and free thinking minds have, in the span of a few decades, been transformed into the epitome of cattle, sheep and any other unthinking creatures of group mentality, today lacking the cognitive qualities used to reason and use logic to think independently of what the state and the corporate world inculcate.

Ignorance has prevailed over knowledge, eroding the very foundation of democracy, for an unthinking populace cannot possibly question its leaders, their motives, or be given the vital responsibility of electing representatives to act in their interest. With a population bred over decades for ignorance, incurious about the world, unaware of other cultures or lands, conditioned to fear what is not known, the state can act without accountability or restraint, for the blind masses have become too numb minded to even care or be concerned. This is the reality in America today, and the reason genocide goes silent, why it goes unquestioned or why it remains relatively unknown, much like that mass murder that took place in Vietnam. The truth is that Americans would rather not know what their government does in their name, fearing their comfortable lives would become upset with the knowledge of what is transpiring in Iraq at the hands of the American military machine.

Unthinking and easily manipulated, those residing inside the belly of the beast are mere clay in the hands of the powerful, easily molded into the cookie cutter drones of the corporatist state. Combined with the xenophobia, patriotism and nationalism spawned by 9/11, a dumbed down populace thus cares nothing for genocide committed in their name, regressing down a few steps down the evolutionary ladder, devolving into a knuckle dragging proto-primate only a nose hair separated from our chimp cousins. To the average American citizen, better a dead Iraqi than a night without the comfortable glare of the omnipresent television monitor. Better 655,000 dead subhuman Arabs than a day living without a gas-guzzling SUV tank.

To the 25 million Iraqis whose lives have been condemned to hell on Earth, courtesy of the United States, please accept this man’s sincere apology for what this wicked nation has done to your land and people, to your daily lives, culture and society. I know I speak for many who live in the United States when I say that I lower my head in shame at what is done in my name. Today, more than ever, I am ashamed to be American. I am ashamed for what this nation has done, for what it will continue doing, for what it has become and for the continued and silent acquiescence of the American people.

As much as words can traverse entire oceans and deserts, as much as they can never replace lives lost or family members buried, as much as they can never make right what has been wronged, please accept this digital apology for a horror many of us detest and abhor. I am truly sorry, from the bottom of my heart, for the curse that has befallen your beautiful land and culture. I apologize for the 30 to 40 percent of Americans that are one-step away from complete mental retardation. I apologize for the lazy, gluttonous and complacent millions whose only experience with life is the nightly glow of television. I apologize for the tens of millions of so-called Christians that call themselves the culture of life even as they drool with glee at the genocide taking place in your nation. I apologize that the Bush Crusade has not been stopped, that the American people have not hung the neocon cabal from the rafters and that the war culture will only continue laying waste to the peoples of the world.

The Iraq Genocide is a curse upon us all, a shame for all humanity, a crime of the highest order that should bring those responsible to deserved justice. In a more perfect world, there would be confidence that criminals and murderers and malfeasant authoritarians would be brought to justice. In the real world, however, they are promoted, elected and made much more powerful. They are given bonuses and pats on the back, allowed to join the elite membership of privilege and power. Such is human civilization that the genocide of 1.5 million a few years ago, 655,000 Iraqis the last three years, perhaps that of millions tomorrow, will be glossed over and forgotten, becoming one comma of history, not unlike many others that have come before, not unlike many others that are sure to follow, becoming yet one more reality of this self-destructive species called humankind. Genocide comes in many shapes and sizes, monopolized by nobody, suffered by all. Upon red rivers of genocide is Iraq being flooded with, released by America through its spigots of human wickedness.

May we one day be forgiven for the madness that has contaminated us. May Iraqis one day offer us the humanity we seem to have lost. May we find our way, if not for us, then for our progeny. May our children learn from our ways, evolving a better culture than we are leaving behind. Shame on us all for what we have allowed our government to become. Shame on us all for what we have allowed it to do in our name. Shame on America. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

Pitch Black Void

Freefall

The towers fell upon their own imprints, floor after floor cascading down upon the next in an avalanche of concrete, glass, steel and flesh, in the process pulverizing everything, and everybody, between them, over 200 combined stories of human ingenuity flattened in the span of seconds, their reign over gravity and the skies eviscerated, falling down to the land of mortals not with the chaos of randomness and malevolent physics but with the unexpected order and perfection of orchestration and wicked pre-planned intentions.

One building was followed by another in a near perfect duplication of the first, almost as if déjà vu had supplanted itself on Manhattan island, after morbidly disturbing airplane crashes had sent the collective conscious of the world on freefall, their fires blazing yet their inferno not scorching enough to melt the reinforced steel of towers designed to withstand airline crashes. Soon after the strikes black and gray smoke billowed out of the crash sites, proof that what had once burned was now dissipating, unable to breathe the oxygen it needed to burn or unable to chemically alter steel skeletons or cause the structural integrity of two separate skyscrapers to be compromised.

Yet less than one hour after each building was struck the monoliths of New York came crashing down, almost in perfect synchronization, more than half an hour apart, one after the other in a display of destruction too perfect to qualify as randomness, a form of controlled chaos never to befall a burning steel skyscraper in the histories of modern civilization or architecture. Strangely, not one hour passed before we were led to believe fire and heat compromised and melted reinforced steel, not for one but two separate buildings, as if lightning had struck twice in the same spot, as if the impossible had become normal, as if black smoke could bend, in the course of an hour, what usually would take multiple hours to achieve.

In America, however, where citizens have the attention spans of gnats, tuning out after ten-second sound bites, one minute news reports and having the patience only to accept rapid video flashes, even orchestrated, criminal mass murder must be accomplished on fast-forward time. And so the destruction by controlled demolition of the WTC, brilliantly executed, monstrously planned, hidden behind the charade of hijacked airliner crashes, yet so easily deciphered by open minds and through the magic of video and the passage of time, became a reality, in a few seconds of malevolent decimation killing close to 3,000 innocent human beings and plunging a nation of 300 million into the freefall of madness, shock, fear, hatred, rage and the collective blindness needed by criminals, warmongers and greed addicts to steer a nation down the precipice of human emotion and into the realm of total control and obedience.

While the nation, indeed the world entire, recovered its collective breath, paralyzed shock and ever-increasing fear at what we had just witnessed – and repeatedly seen over and over again thanks to the corporate media – a rather peculiar, and unexpected, event occurred that hundreds of millions were unable to see, either because of shock, fear or the blindness spawned by the psychological trauma we had just experienced. A few hours after the towers had fallen, entombing thousands and forever altering the course of history, another skyscraper came tumbling down, clandestinely falling almost inconspicuously to the ground below. This building, the fifty story WTC 7, seemingly untouched and unaffected by the destruction of her much larger brothers, with no fires or smoke apparent, with no structural damage noticeable, with no airplane smashing into her, decided to fall to earth in much the same way, falling exactly the way multiple buildings have fallen over the years thanks to controlled demolitions, seemingly imploding from within, her top falling down as if her structural skeleton had been turned to butter. It would later be said by authorities that WTC 7 fell due to structural and fire damage, yet video and eyewitness testimony, as well as the open eyes of any rational human being, beg to differ. If no rational reason can be found to explain how WTC 7 fell in such a “controlled” demolition sort of way, in the absence of damage, what, then, can be deduced? What, then, are we to make of the fate that befell the Twin Towers, in direct contradiction to the laws of physics and those of logic?

Make no mistake, 9/11 was, and continues to be, a war upon the American people, a psychological operation directed at our minds and hearts that was, from the very start, nothing but the catalyst needed to launch Project Empire by the delusional criminals and miscreants in power. The events of 9/11, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, as well as the hit on the Pentagon, were designed by the architects of mass murder as the oil needed to fine-tune and start the engine of the American war machine as well as those sparkplugs of blind and unthinking support, the American people. The targets were largely symbolic, landmarks entrenched into the American psyche, easily recognizable as pillars of American strength, the strikes upon their infrastructure calculated not only to inflict mass murder, but to deeply affect the collective psychology of hundreds of millions of Americans. In 9/11 the enablers of terror would have the birth pangs of their new American Century.

The Throne Determined

The individuals who planned and executed 9/11 knew that with the ascension of George W. Bush to the throne of the American presidency their plans and projects, long since created and written yet for years lacking the keys to power, would have the green-light to commence wars upon the American people as well as those long-planned against the Arab world. Indeed, well before Bush became president the decision had already been made, deep in the dark closets of clandestine meetings and arrangements, where deal making and power decisions are made, to attack and invade Iraq, along with other nations deemed “important,” both for geopolitical and ideological reasons.

These wars and invasions, which were to be the centerpiece of the miscreants’ master plans, creating the birth pangs of a New American Century, one based on unilateralism, resource domination, protection of Israel’s vital interests and unequaled imperial hegemony, would, it was thought, catapult America into the realm of Empire, a kingdom untouched and unrivaled, in control of the world’s energy resources, in full mastery of all potential rivals, possessed of vitally important lands and locations. All that was needed was a stolen election or two, a little luck and a new Pearl Harbor from which to spawn their dogma of controlled chaos upon the globe.

When seen in this light, the importance to the miscreants that George W. Bush become president after the 2000 election, by any means necessary, is more readily understood. To the corporatist and neoconservative cabal that has declared war on the American people, it was imperative that Bush be declared the winner versus Al Gore. Only with a Bush victory could their projects and sinister intentions be born and implemented, thereby creating the conditions needed to control the country and its citizens, and by extension the entire planet, for years and even decades into the future.

Indeed, they knew that to succeed, years and even decades would be needed to transform the world according to their ideology. The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, full of corporatists and neoconservatives, could only commence their blueprint with the selection, no matter how devious it became or how unscrupulous the methods chosen, of George W. Bush to the White House, and not just for one term. Thus, the stolen election of 2000, especially in the state of Florida, was but one more strategic maneuver designed specifically to set in place the mechanisms by which their ideology could, after years of frustration, finally be allowed to blossom. The ascension of George W. Bush to the American throne thus became an inevitable conclusion well before the first vote was cast. It was the individuals that counted the votes, and not those that cast them, who would decide the 2000 election.

The election of 2000 was orchestrated to perfection by the corporatists and neoconservatives who clandestinely or openly supported the Republican ticket. Using the television and the unrivaled power of the corporate media, with its images, sound bites, editing magic and legions of journalist lackeys, they set out to tarnish the reputation and achievements of Bill Clinton and by consequence, those of his vice-president and most likely Democratic candidate, Al Gore. Knowing how easy the buttons of manipulation can be pressed upon an unsuspecting and dumbed down American populace, they created Clinton fatigue and dislike among millions of potential voters, knowing full well that by destroying the president’s likeability they were at the same time decimating Al Gore’s potential votes among moderates and independents. Using the television to their advantage, they thereby eliminated the president from the election picture, knowing that Clinton, if allowed to campaign for Gore, and ever the political charmer and genius, could have delivered the election to the Democrats, or at the least made Gore a more marketable personality to the electorate.

With Clinton out of the picture, the smearing of Gore and the adulation of Bush commenced, with the corporate media using all tools at its disposal to turn Gore into an unlikable candidate, using clever editing of sound and video, combined with the negative comments of embedded lackey journalists, to turn Gore, a much worthier candidate than Bush could ever become, into a mediocre politician with no personality or popularity. He became the unlikable candidate, the elitist Washingtonian whose candidacy was imputed to Bill Clinton fatigue. The corporate media did everything in its power to sway the unsure voter that Gore was not the right man to be president. In the era of corporatism, it is the corporations that decide who will run and who will win. We the People can only vote for those deemed acceptable by the corporate establishment, those that have shown loyalty not to the People, but to the interests of the corporate world.

Meanwhile, with the complete backing of big business, the military industrial energy complex and the neoconservatives in and out of the media, Bush was transformed from east coast elitist into average Joe six-pack, with the tools of television propelling and marketing Bush as an average middle class American, with a recently purchased Texas ranch to prove it. The creation of the Bush persona was carefully orchestrated, following the results of research, polls and focus groups, trying to recreate or imitate, at least in some psychological way, shape or form, the qualities inherent in or sought by those groups needed for Bush and his still clandestine cabal to garner the most votes in the general election. Meanwhile, the corporate media gave the dimwit Bush a pass at every turn, forgiving his penchant for idiocy and his quite apparent lack of knowledge. His shady past was ignored; his repeated failures as a businessman were glossed over. The corporatist world had its man and the will of the People would not stand in their way.

As such, Bush’s persona is a fiction, in as much as he is made to represent the American middle-class, for deep inside, where genetics and environment and pathology meet on the superhighway of psychological fusion, Bush is a manifestation of the unthinking knuckle-dragger, a slight step above our primate cousins, incapable of deep thought, reasoned intelligence or logical decision making, preferring to dwell in the certainties of black and white thinking and the archaic beliefs of primitive theology. He remains a hollow poster child for elitist juniors, a pampered spoiled little boy given to temper tantrums when he does not get what he wants, a man who for too long nursed off the breast of superiority, apathy and greed, for decades living in a wealth-induced bubble devoid of discipline or suffering.

Deeply flawed mentally, never able to replicate the intelligence or the success of fathers and grandfathers, possessing a lack of empathy and a willingness to inflict suffering onto others, fully aware that everything he has achieved has been due to the laurels of his father and not the talents of his existence, Bush nonetheless exhibits many characteristics of a psychotic, with a penchant for incessant lying, for walking over anybody that gets in his way, for his appetite for destruction and murder, for his indifference for human life, in his ability to bully the world, in his love of greed and power, in his distaste for knowledge and intellectual stimulation, and in the unmistakable reality that whatever he has touched during his life has turned not to gold, but to pure, one-hundred percent fecal matter. This is the George W. Bush chosen by the cabal of corporatists and neoconservatives to help usher in a new era of American imperialism. With such a president at the helm of the most powerful state in the world, a man easily influenced and manipulated, lacking reason, logic and the wisdom of leaders, PNAC found itself the instrument of terror it so desperately needed.

Knowing for months the likely outcome of the 2000 election, after months of research, studies and historical analysis, and millions of dollars invested had shown them the direction, Bush’s handlers focused on the one state they knew would decide the outcome. And so, with months to go before the 2000 election, the Republican machine set out, with help from George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, to embed into the election system the mechanisms needed to steal Florida in favor of Bush, the Republicans, the neoconservatives and the corporatists.

They immediately set out to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, most of them African-American, through a myriad of illegal yet methodical ways. Felons were purged from the voting records, as were thousands of law-abiding citizens whose names were erased from registration lists. Outdated voting machines, those most likely to tabulate wrong vote counts, were introduced into poor areas for the sole purpose of disenfranchising voters, most of whom would likely vote for Gore. The irregularities were many; the votes purged were in the hundreds of thousands. The corporatist/Republican voter disenfranchisement machine, so adept at Jim Crow, had come calling again.

This election, after all, was of paramount importance, both for the corporatists from the military industrial energy complex, who were depending on Bush for hundreds of billions of dollars in future oil and war profiteering profits, as well as a complete dismantling of burdensome corporate taxes, laws and environmental regulations, not to mention untold billions of dollars in stolen Iraqi money and American taxes, and the neoconservatives, whose main interests were ideological and strategic, through imperial domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, control of oil/gas resources and mechanisms, toward complete American hegemony and eventual Empire building through domination of potential rivals, not to mention the always present protection of Israel and her interests, assuring her regional domination in the Middle East through the elimination of her rivals. By any means necessary, the 2000 election would have to be won, irrespective of the will of the People.

After the Supreme Court selected their man as the new president of the United States, a decision that was a foregone conclusion, the wheels were set in motion, and soon the project for the New American Century would have its new and improved Pearl Harbor, a 21st century Reichstag fire whose usefulness would never subside and whose demons could always, at the whim of expediency, be resurrected. The dreaded Arab terrorist was about to be born, entering the grand stage of American produced enemies, becoming the bogeyman striking fear at the heart of a cowardly majority.

A new America was soon to be born from the smoke, dust and debris of falling monoliths and demolished lives. An obedient populace would soon surface, wide eyed in allegiance to fascism, ready to hate and fear and kill for the sake of the red, white and blue, proud to march lockstep with the drums of war, eager to unleash weapons of destruction upon the lands of the barbarians. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Iran were only months away from being gobbled up, and the Bush cabal, assured by its delusions and its arrogance, could only salivate at the thoughts of what would surely soon arrive.

Enter the Darkness

If we ponder over the horizon of the last five years and ask ourselves who has benefited the most from the tragic events of 9/11 then surely the arrow would point to the Bush administration, along with the clandestine and known neoconservatives and corporatists controlling the military industrial energy complex. As a result of 9/11, these groups, the Bush cabal for short, have seemingly grown in absolute power and wealth, declaring wars, occupying nations, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings, manipulating the American populace, fleecing America’s treasury, making obscene profits from war and death, curtailing Americans’ civil liberties and rights, further instituting corporatist control over government and society, engendering fear and hatred into the people and ignoring the rule of law along with the Constitution of the United States.

The Bush cabal has succeeded in reaching many of the goals it had set for itself before taking office in 2000. In this war against the American people, the cabal has utterly defeated us, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We are quite impotent, it seems, to their manipulation of our fears and the conditioning of our hatreds. It has been 9/11, that catalyst to population control and manipulation, that has cemented the Bush cabal firmly in power, doing with the American people as they wish, leading us further down the road to corporatism. The cabal has systematically declawed us of our bravery, making us babies crying out for our mother. It has succeeded at manipulating us through the use of fear and terror, actually convincing us to throw away liberties and flush down freedoms for the sake of protection and security, even though the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

It was 9/11, a devastating conduit of brain wave alteration, more than anything else, that has completely and systematically transformed the American people into the sheeple and lemmings needed by authoritarian rulers everywhere to govern and impose their tyrannical policies. The 9/11 psychological war upon the citizenry, or, in the words of the PNAC, the “new Pearl Harbor,” was designed to nurture perpetual fear and hatred in hundreds of millions of minds, in the process harvesting loyal and obedient citizen soldiers. The attack, taking place on a few city blocks of the largest metropolis in the country, devastated two giant buildings but left the rest of the country, besides the Pentagon, physically unscathed.

What September 11, 2001, did, however, more than anything else, was destroy not the physical infrastructure of America, but the mental energy of the nation and its citizens. It was both a mental manipulation dirty bomb and a weapon of mass deception rolled into one, a direct hit against the very foundation of America’s citizenry, creating the most fragile, and by extension subservient, populace since Nazi Germany. September 11th’s tragedy, its morbid violence, its sinister evils were played and replayed countless times, from every possible angle, sending shockwaves into our pores, fear running through our veins, with every replay our mind succumbing further inside our fragile psyches, searching for answers, and vengeance. The thirst for Arab blood was what the cabal wanted, and it was what it got.

A direct hit upon the American psyche did more damage to the nation than two hits on colossal skyscrapers ever could, yet slowly but methodically, our mind became the dominion of the cabal. We became, over the course of a few days, possessed by the demons of fear and hatred, like zombies sleep-walking through our daily lives, not knowing what to do, experiencing emotions we had never felt, remembering tragedy we had just recently seen, searching in darkness for light, needing to place blind trust in the nation’s authorities, needing to trust our security and freedom and democracy upon the leaders of the country.

We became putty in the hands of the cabal, and they knew it. Everything they wanted we would gladly give them for we had become, in the span of a few days, corralled sheep and caged lemmings, robbed of free thought, our bravery supplanted by the fear hovering throughout the land, our reason destroyed by the hate in our hearts. We wanted security, safety and most of all, vengeance. We failed to think logically about the mess the cabal was immersing us in. We failed to understand the ramifications of entering a hornet’s nest and murdering tens of thousands of people. We failed to comprehend the vicious cycle of violence our acquiescence would soon spawn, nor the disaster that was to unfold. Standing behind the flag and our patriotism blind we became to the view of reality. We wanted revenge for 9/11; we wanted to unleash carnage upon Arab lands, whether they were a threat or not. We fell right into the cabal’s master plans.

The tragic events of 9/11 became an instant myth in our collective consciousness, its story firmly entrenched in our minds, its official narrative becoming both national tragedy and inspiration, its fable unable to be altered, its façade unbending, its reality hidden by blind rage and closed minds. We were conditioned never to question the official narrative, or the obvious 9/11 Commission white wash. To question and even seek truth was to delve in realities we could not bare or wish to understand. The implications would be unfathomable, and deeply disturbing. For if our protectors had committed mass murder in New York and Washington, if our leaders were responsible for 9/11, then who and what was running the nation? If they could kill 3,000 citizens, what was stopping them from murdering many more? It was better to be brainwashed with the official story than to question the uncomfortable. It was easier to never question than to seek the truth. In the end, it was easier to drink the Kool-Aid than enter the rabbit hole.

In the end, it was simple to believe that we had been attacked by what we did not know or understand, by entities that wished to destroy our freedom and our democracy, by brown-skinned bogey men lurking in every corner and underneath every bed, waiting to come out of closets, ready to murder and rape, pillage and devastate. We were made to fear, and with fear we lost reason. We were made to hate, and with hate born free thought died. The Arab and the Muslim had become our enemy; almost overnight more than a billion humans were condemned by a barrage of corporate media propaganda and government manipulation, seemingly too conveniently, too prepared and scripted, as if the enemy had been concocted months and years before, its fault carefully planned and orchestrated, marketed for all its faults and none of its virtues, transforming a group of people into the monsters of our imaginations and the madmen of our corporate media indoctrination.

The Bush cabal had succeeded in concocting an enemy from the same lands and region where it wanted to wage war and occupation. Geopolitics, geostrategy, oil, gas and pipelines, imperial hegemony and absolute power, how lucky for the cabal that America’s new bogeymen hailed from the same nations scheduled for invasion. The cabal’s actions, or inaction, depending on how one looks at 9/11, embedded the lust for vengeance, and thus for war, on the American population. The Bush cabal, fully aware that the American people would never consent or give approval to multiple wars of choice upon lands and peoples that had not done us harm, thus needed a catalyst, a new Pearl Harbor, a 9/11-like event from which to alter the minds of 300 million Americans, making warmongers out of pacifists, vengeance-seekers out of peaceful citizens. Without the trauma and the shock and the fear and the hatred and the blind rage spawned by 9/11, the Bush cabal would never have been able to embark on their warmongering and profiteering ways. The anger and hatred and blind trust engendered thanks to 9/11 made sure that the cabal could proceed with long-held plans and ideologies.

Thus we were fed the lies and the deceits and the manipulations that exist in the lands of authoritarianism, where the citizenry is too dumbed down and unable, or unwilling, to question its own government. We followed the fable and the bull manure, believing, still to this day, a government that has lied about every single issue to ever arise in five years since usurping power. In a world where war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is knowledge, let it also be said that lies are truth in these new days of “new normals” and “birth pangs” and “bringing democracy to the Middle East.” Let it be said we have entered the darkness, from which light dare not enter.

Terrorist Cabal

The cabal, it must be understood, is comprised of pure blooded authoritarians, corporatist (fascists) tyrants that care not one ounce for the well-being of the population. To them we are but mere peasants, nothing but peons and pawns and patsies relegated to playing the grand game of geopolitical and greed-mongering chess, doing our part to advance the neocon Machiavelli wet dream of imperial hegemony. The death of 3,000 citizens means nothing to these monsters, much like the murder of 250,000 Iraqis or the death of 2,600 American soldiers. The Bush cabal is made up of madmen and monsters, incapable of living in reality or of understanding truth, yet tyrannical enough to create a new Pearl Harbor through the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers (not to mention WTC 7 and a strike on the Pentagon). They dwell in an infallible bubble of make believe and of unrealistic theories, a land of Kool-Aid drinkers and dependents of delusional cocktails.

The Bush cabal has no morals or scruples, preferring lies to truth, secrecy to transparency, life in a pitch black void over that in translucent light. They have no trouble murdering their own citizens to pursue and achieve their goals and ideology. They are authoritarians, tyrants more comfortable living in a police state than in an open society, inside their pores hating every facet of true democracy, for to them the will of the people should never be heeded. Democracy is a hindrance of governance, an uncomfortable principle that works to destroy their vision, though now made a charade for the masses to believe the system is as it has always been. The death of democracy and of the Constitution would send tears of joy running down their cheeks.

In their view citizens are incapable of making the right decision and should therefore be told what to think, how to act and who to follow and obey. The majority needs to be conditioned as to what to do and how to do it. To them the corporate media is but a tool of control and manipulation, a way to make good sheep and lemmings out of the citizenry, a loudspeaker to proclaim that the state is the only entity capable of protecting the nation, a disseminator of lies and half truths, a gatekeeper telling the people only what the cabal wants us to know.

The Bush cabal cares only about absolute power, hegemony, greed and wealth. They care nothing for American soldiers, all of whom are considered cannon fodder for the military industrial energy complex. Wars are fought not for defending “freedom and democracy,” which to them is nothing more than a catchy focus group catchphrase, rather to expand and defend the interests of American corporations, as well as to enrich the military industrial energy complex. After all, instability in the Middle East is great for energy corporations; the more instability the higher the price of a barrel of crude will be and the higher will thus be a gallon at the American pump. The cabal thinks in black and white, not in shades of grey; it makes policy based on ideology, not reality. It operates under the theory of controlled chaos, unleashing hell to get to an eventual heaven.

The cabal makes enormous profits at our expense, helping shrink our wallets while fattening theirs. The cabal supplies billions of dollars in military arms to the Middle East, and to the world, only to see nations declare war on each other, killing and murdering with our weapons. Human life and human rights, along with international law are but bumps in the road to total hegemony, to be sidestepped on the road to Empire. Civil rights and freedoms in America are contrary to the authoritarian dream; if it was up to them America would be under martial law and under severe police powers, our civil liberties curtailed severely, our freedoms eroded. In time they will inevitably get their wish; each year the threat to our liberties and freedoms is exacerbated, not by terrorists but by the Bush cabal.

For five years we have been told to look far and wide for so-called terrorists, across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, given a magnifying glass into the Middle East. It is here, we are made to believe, where they hate us for our freedoms and our democracy, for our “grand” way of life, though certainly not for our occupations, undying support for Israel and brutal foreign policy. It is said they hate us for our democracy, yet we refuse to grant them the same freedoms. It is said they strike us for our open society, yet we exploit their lands, rape their women and subjugate their daily lives. For five years our minds have been distracted with the threats posed by Arabs and Muslims, most of which happen to live below the last remaining fields of oil. If the French or the Germans lived in the Middle East, they too would today be America’s enemy, our terrorist barbarians.

For five long years we alone have been responsible for sacrificing our civil liberties and our freedoms, not to mention our democracy, which in essence is today nothing but a charade, a banana republic façade exported to a first world nation. Our fear and cowardice has resulted in the loss of liberty at home and in warmongering escapades abroad, creating in Iraq the worst strategic disaster in the history of the nation. Our almost absurd over-reactions to bull manure infested terror warnings, nothing but control mechanisms implemented to remind us who is protecting us and who deserves our loyalty and our vote, make us the laughing stock of the world. Terror warnings laced in lies and manipulation should be questioned, not religiously followed. They should be understood for what they are, not feared like the end of the world. Terror warnings about dark-skinned Arabs and Muslims are but a ploy to control your thoughts and your lives, designed for you to place allegiance to the cabal, to distract you from the erosion of liberties or the disasters in the Middle East. They are, like 9/11, a figment of our imaginations, nightmares of our conditioned minds, stories meant to frighten us into giving away more of our freedoms and liberties. Sadly, however, these mechanisms seem to be working brilliantly.

All this time we have been looking to the Middle East for the dreaded terrorist, yet since 9/11 we should have been looking for terrorists within our own shores. It is the Bush corporatist and neocon cabal that is the real terrorist organization. It is they, a bunch of miscreants of the highest order, criminal minds addicted to power, wealth and greed, arrogant and monstrous in behavior, that are the cause of terror worldwide. It is they that have made our nation less safe, not more. It is they who are guilty of committing mass murder upon our shores and it is they who will not hesitate to murder many more if it suits their needs.

It is because of them that the so-called war on terror paralyzes and controls us. It is they that spawned it and continue nurturing it, carefully rearing it like a mother does a child, ever so proud of what it has become, looking forward to the greatness it can one day turn into. The war on terror is their brainchild, a creation designed to replicate its malevolent energy over and over, growing and expanding through the vicious cycle of hatred born and murder committed, repeated until a clash of cultures, civilizations and religions sustains and engorges it, creating the controlled chaos needed to satisfy the delusion of the Project for the New American Century.

The so-called war of terror is a figment of their imagination, now lingering in ours, a creation that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It was a war started by the cabal, a result of our foreign policy and our destruction of both people and land abroad, a vicious cycle that feeds itself more and more with each new death inflicted by our corporate controlled military. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, for every death or maiming the thirst for vengeance grows; for every brutal occupation calls for hatred and revenge arise. With every American made missile launched, artillery exploded, bullet released the war on terror is assured of new recruits, new reactions of opposite and intended consequences. This is the war on terror’s mantra, its slogan, the law created by the cabal so that it never ends, just as it never began. The war on terror is designed to last into perpetuity, for America always needs an enemy to quench its war culture thirst. It always needs war and enemies to cause fright among the populace, the easier to control millions. War means profit, wealth and the sustained viability of the economy. In America, war, and thus enemies, is good for business.

The war on terror is but an illusion, a concoction disseminated by the Bush cabal and its journalist hacks to control the population into submission, into forcing us to abandon the freedoms and democracy we once enjoyed. We are being frightened by the cabal of terrorists using the corporate media and government loudspeakers, our strength and courage evaporating with each new terror threat or warning, with each new sermon advocating still another war of choice. We are being used and abused, our lives transformed, slowly but surely, methodically creating a “new normal,” an American police state, an authoritarian system full of followers, full of yes-men and women, full of sheep and lemmings, unable to comprehend how we allowed our nation to become the reality of our nightmares.

We must open our eyes to the reality of the Bush cabal. They are the real terrorist organization. They are the murderers and the criminals, the destroyers of life and the butchers of the Middle East. They are preparing us for perpetual war, for a future devoid of security or freedom or democracy. The war on terror will not end; our troops will be in Iraq for decades to come; wars against Iran and Syria have been planned. There will be many more 9/11’s to come, some real and some concocted, yet the next one will undoubtedly open the doors to a perpetual police state, altering dramatically our way of life, making George Orwell roll in his grave. According to the cabal of terrorists, it is inevitable.

One more attack on our soil is all it will take for the bastion of democracy and freedom to turn into the cesspool of authoritarian rule. The cabal of terrorists is looking for an excuse, an opportunity. How many of us will die this time? How many of our children will be sent to the next war(s)? How many liberties will we have left? How many of our friends and neighbors will be made to disappear? Will we accept their rule, and continue fighting a charade, or will we finally put an end to this madness? Will we change our ways, or will we continue living like the sheep and lemmings we are being conditioned to become?

We must put a stop to the madness before the madness puts a stop to us. We must reclaim America from the claws of authoritarianism and corporatism. We must show we are not pawns or patsies in the games the neocons play. We must show we are brave and strong, not fearful and weak. They are few, we are many. Truth and fairness and justice are on our side; karma and malevolence on theirs. The time for indifference and passivity are over. Enough fear mongering and war making, enough terror threat manipulation. We must show that we do not hate, that we actually think for ourselves, that we seek peace and international harmony. Enough death and suffering has gone on in our name. America is being made the laughing stock of the world, hated like never before, stirring anger and boiling rage for all we allow to happen. Only this time, the peoples of the world no longer differentiate between the government and the people. We are all hated now. The time to take a stand is now, for if not now, when? We were once loved and admired, respected and an inspiration. Let not five years of disarray become a lifetime of disaster. We know who the real terrorists are. It is up to us to show them that their America is not our America. It is time we show them the door out of the country.

Their America is not our America, for we are the People of the World; they but the Scourge of Humanity. We are Peace and they are War, they are few and we are many, many more.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

Militarism and the Corporate Welfare State

Right wing politicos and their conservative constituents are always bemoaning big government. Yet wealthy people of all political stripes constantly use big government to their own benefit. The rich widely assume, falsely, I think, that what is good for them is good for the country. By extension they also assume that what is good for the corporations is good for the people. But that has never been the case. No one should be allowed to make a living on the misery of others.

The latter seems odd, given that business people are always harping about getting the government out of our (their) lives; all the while they are using government to obtain no bid contracts, to write legislation in the corporate interest, stocking the judiciary with pro-corporate judges, redrawing political districts and using the military to invade and occupy sovereign nations in order to privatize them. Iraq provides a compelling case study.

Of course, what businessmen really mean by getting government off our backs is preventing government from regulating commerce, as if there were some connection between capital and democracy, democracy and freedom. In corporate speak democracy and free trade has nothing to do with human beings and their freedoms. What Bush and his kind are really talking about is absolute corporate rule and continued Plutocracy.

According to author Antonia Juhasz, “Prior to the first Gulf War in 1991 and even after eight years of war with Iran, Iraq was ranked 15 out of 130 countries on the 1990 United Nations Human Development Index. Before the first Bush invasion, Iraq had the highest percentage of college-educated citizens in the Middle East and above average overall literacy rates. According to the World Health Organization, prior to 1991 health care reached approximately 97 percent of the urban population and 78 percent of rural residents, while the infant mortality rate was well below average for developing countries. “

Constitutional government was established in Iraq in 1922. Prior to the 1991 U.S. invasion, Iraq was in essence a socialist government, since most of its political and economic infrastructure, including its burgeoning oil industry was nationalized. Despite Saddam Hussein’s abuse of the constitution (the U.S. is suffering similar abuses under Bush), the Iraqi people enjoyed a high standard of living and many freedoms. This allowed them benefits such as socialized health care and access to free higher education that Americans have never known.

All of those freedoms and the high standard of living were demolished with the U.S. invasion and permanent occupation of Iraq. A huge corporate fire sale was under way.

Under the imposed dictatorship of Paul Bremmer granted under the Coalition Provisional Authority during the first months of the occupation, all of Iraq’s 192 state-owned enterprises were privatized and divided among 150 U.S. corporations that have so far realized more than $50 billion in profits. Every aspect of the Iraqi economy was dismantled, privatized, and divided up among corporate America with no benefit to the Iraqi people.

With the U.S. occupation the Iraqi Constitution was torn asunder and replaced with a new charter that places Iraq under virtual corporate rule. Under the U.S. imposed Corporate Constitution, the Iraqis no longer have access to clean water, reliable electricity, medicine, health care, or higher education. Ownership of Iraq’s once prosperous economy, including her extensive oil fields, was transferred from the Iraqi people to U.S. corporations.

This is the democracy we have brought to Iraq, punctuated by suffering, misery, and death. When innocent blood flows so too does the money. See how the stocks of Halliburton and Bechtel rose with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The blueprint for the economic plunder of Iraq was orchestrated by Bearing Point, Inc. of Mclean, Virginia. The Bearing Point plan turns Iraq from a socialist state to a full bore capitalist entity over three years. For their services Bearing Point made the tidy sum of $250 million.

Not surprisingly, Bremmer has strong ties with corporate America and such luminaries of dementia as Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz that extend more than a quarter of a century. All of these men have economic ties with the same businesses that stole Iraq’s wealth. Each of them has realized great personal fortune by profiteering on the spoils of war and occupation: policies they helped to forge.

The government is studded with men like Paul Bremmer and Henry Kissinger, who migrate back and forth from corporate America into the halls of government, create policy that is favorable to their own business interests, then return to business to realize the wealth they have created for themselves and their shareholders. It is men like them who are responsible for America’s aggressive war posture, among them the quagmire in Iraq.

Consider the ties regarding officials in the Bush regime and the Halliburton- military-war profiteering connection, as documented by Antonia Juhasz in The Bush Agenda:

• Joe Lopez, a retired four star general and former aide to Cheney joined Halliburton in 1999.
• Dave Gribbon, Cheney’s former assistant in Congress was Halliburton’s Vice President and returned to the Whitehouse with Cheney when Bush stole the 2000 election.
• Ray Hunt, who provided money to both of the Bush presidencies joined Halliburton in 1998 and serves to this day.
• Lawrence Eagleberger, former president of Kissinger Associates and Bush, senior’s Secretary of State also served on Halliburton’s board of directors
• Charles Dominy, a retired three star general and former Halliburton executive currently serves as Halliburton’s chief lobbyist.

Halliburton is only one of many corporations profiting from the invasion and the permanent occupation of Iraq. Other corporations have people as favorably placed in the Bush regime as Halliburton. Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Electric—all the usual suspects—are well represented in the government; and all of them lobbied extensively for war and occupation. They have no intentions of stopping in Iraq either. The world is their oyster and the military can procure it for them.

It is worth noting that crony appointments are not peculiar to the Bush regime or to the Republican Party. They have a long and sordid history. That is how business is conducted and fortunes are made—through outright theft and conquest. None of this would be possible without the military. Our soldiers are the pawns of the rich but they think they are making the world safe for democracy. All they are doing in fact is opening the world up to capitalism and private ownership.

Since the occupation began in 2003 the Iraqi people have been forced to exist under conditions of extreme brutality and abject poverty. After the deliberate bombing of water sanitation facilities, hospitals, and electric generating sites there have been outbreaks of disease such as tuberculosis and dysentery, causing suffering and death. There has been no peace and no security for the innocent victims of unbridled greed.

There is also the matter of depleted uranium munitions used by U.S. forces that litters the country in aerosolized form that is easily taken up by the wind and remains radioactive forever. Depleted uranium is an indiscriminate killer whose effects linger for generations in the bodies of the occupiers and the occupied. Can you say Agent Orange? That is the great free market democracy that we have brought to the Middle East.

The war machine keeps turning like a sausage grinder, spewing its product into the coffers of the rich. Into the hopper go our sons and daughters and dark-skinned nations—out comes sausage and huge bank rolls for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and corporate America. Corporations, government, and militarism comprise the unholy trinity of capitalism. Together they form a corporate welfare state that boggles the mind.

The American military is not abroad defending freedom and sowing the seeds of democracy, as they seem to believe. One need only examine the history of this nation to recognize the familiar patterns of conquest and oppression. The occupation of Iraq is the continuation of the policies that created the institution of slavery, following the genocide of the Indians. The military, far from being a defender of peace and freedom, has evolved into an extension of the corporate welfare state.

The world will know no peace until enough citizens are sufficiently aroused to dismantle the military apparatus. Furthermore, we must recognize the link between militarism, war, and capital and build a better system—a form of government that serves the people rather than capital. Code Pink and other groups that maintain a constant presence in Washington are on the right track. They deserve our full support.

Charles Sullivan is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and freelance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at .

Ignorance by Content and Omission

As a nation and as a people we have come to where we are as a direct result of the information we receive through the commercial media. In terms of democracy creation the news is useless if its intent is to inform and to educate. It is effective if its intent is to purvey propaganda and to deceive the masses. So many well intentioned people fall in line behind the president because they fail to understand his policies. They lack historical perspective. Having the ability to understand current events from an historical perspective brings them into clear focus. Certain unmistakable patterns emerge to explain things.

No thinking person should take any government at its word, especially this one. Governments lie in part because they represent special interest groups rather than the ordinary citizens that comprise the great majority. Most governments fear and loath its citizens because they are clandestinely betraying them. The less transparent the government, the more it has to hide. Lying is the only recourse that undemocratic governments have to make the citizens support and implement their hidden agendas. This explains why the Bush cabal is incapable of speaking truth. It also explains why it is the least transparent government ever to occupy the oval office, bar none.

The Bush cabal and its enablers in Congress are thus forced to call into service noble sounding euphemisms to hide the selfish motives behind their policies. Who but a fool or a madman would volunteer to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people for the sake of increasing the already obscene profits of defense contractors and oil companies? It is precisely because the agenda of those in power conflicts with the interest of the people that governments lie and distort. Those who carry out the agenda of Plutocratic Empire must be made to believe that they are serving noble purposes rather than feeding the insatiable hunger of corporate greed. They must be convinced to betray their own class by acting against its best interest. It would be impossible to accomplish such a monumental task of behavior modification without the aid of the commercial media.

Know that the consumption of commercial media content, whether news or entertainment (they are really one and the same these days), is hazardous to your health. Owned by only five major corporations the world over, the content is sweet to the taste but devoid of nutriment. It consists of addictive substances and empty calories—the kind that leads to mental and spiritual obesity typified by an array of serious health problems that may result in permanent blindness. The sole beneficiaries of this content are the corporations who manufacture and sell them and their servants in government. As always, the consumers are the victims.

At a time when only the most venal would argue that America is not in the midst of serious decline, it is amazing that so little formal opposition has managed to organize itself into action. Even staunch conservatives are distancing themselves from George Bush, whose approval ratings have fallen to thirty-four percent and probably have yet to bottom out. There has been much talk but so little meaningful action. Talk is safe and easy but action requires commitment and sacrifice. In the end it is thoughtful action that gets things done. Propaganda is a powerful wedge that keeps us apart and renders us ineffective.

The illegitimate cabal at the head of government obtained power with the complicity of the commercial media. Despite the virtual ownership of the corporate media and hence its content, the cabal’s hold on power is nevertheless tenuous. Imagine what Bush’s approval rating would be if the people were actually informed. Can you imagine an approval rating of say, minus four hundred? Without the aide of the worlds most prolific and effective propaganda machine the neocons could never have come into power. The fact that they are losing favor with the people despite the useful lies purveyed in the corporate media indicates just how badly they are behaving. Despite the monopoly they enjoy their approval ratings continue to plummet. This is clear evidence that the special interest agenda is not America’s agenda.

No thinking person should assume that the corporate media is neutral or objective. They are not; however, they try to give the impression that they are. All for profit institutions have an agenda—the accumulation of private wealth. Credibility is important to them, facts are not. Like their brethren in the defense and oil industries, the corporate media is amassing fortunes by supporting an agenda of war and world domination. In a capitalist society the role of the media is not to inform and to educate—it is to make money by any and all available means. Capitalism does not care how its fortunes are made. Its modus operandi is Machiavellian: ends justify the means. Capitalism is unbridled greed unleashed upon the world for the privatization of wealth. It allows a small group of business owners and investors to get rich by exploiting the under class of all nations.

Relatively few Americans are aware of the extent to which the corporate media played in putting George Bush in power, or the pandering of propaganda and outright lies that keep him there. They are unaware that under the guidance of ultra conservative Grover Norquist, a group of eighty of the nation’s wealthiest people gathers in the nation’s capital every week. This gathering, as one might expect, is not innocuous or benign. Its purpose is to create the talking points that will be purveyed each week in the commercial media to further their agenda. In essence, this group defines the news for the week and the manner in which it will be presented for public consumption. Their reach is enormous and their sole motivation is profit and power for the elite. Not only does Norquist’s group literally write the scripts followed by Rush Limbaugh and his robotic drones, it provides the content that defines the evening news and the daily newspapers. Every mainstream televised and audio program should be preceded by a Surgeon General’s Warning: Use of this product may be hazardous to your health!

Thus every television and radio network incessantly preaches the same propaganda from the individual pulpits of class privilege. The key talking points are the same whether on Fox, CNN, CBS or ABC; or the nation’s newspapers. Likewise, conservative talk radio receives its marching orders directly from Norquist’s intimate group of billionaires. This is not benign advocacy for a particular point of view—it is blatant propaganda and outright lies packaged and sold as news. Without the aide of the corporate media and Norquist’s billionaires, we would not have invaded Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people would still be alive. We might even have taken global warming seriously and done something about it before it was too late. Truth and integrity might still mean something.

Little by little the minds of the people have been poisoned by propaganda and it is called nourishment. As a result the more noble traits of our culture are incrementally dying. Through the judicious use of lies and distortions the people are deceived into supporting the atrocities of war and conquest that are committed in their name. Historical context reveals the unmistakable patterns that make these behaviors readily visible and renders them understandable to the present moment. The lack of historical perspective leaves one vulnerable to the lies and distortions that have always characterized our government. Of course, this historical context is not taught in our schools for reasons that should be obvious.

By shamelessly touting the transparent lies of the Bush cabal as fact the corporate media is generating enormous wealth for the upper echelon, while our sons and daughters make the blood sacrifice. Encouraging patriotism (really jingoism), keeps the uninformed masses in a frenzy and in mortal fear of phantom enemies. It keeps them from recognizing the real enemies of peace and democracy that misuse government for the creation of privatized wealth for the privileged. By content and by omission the corporate media decides what Americans will be told and thus how they will behave.

The purveyance of such powerful propaganda is keeping the coffers of the nation’s defense contractors and the oil companies running over, while also keeping the people dumbed down. Like bloated ticks fed on blood sucked from the public teat, the Carlyle Group and Halliburton are raking in billions. Such obscene wealth is generated at the expense of working class people who have no health insurance because their tax dollars support war profiteering and welfare for the rich.

The champions of Plutocracy including the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, are masquerading as people concerned with the welfare of political conservatives of modest income, even as they lead them to the slaughter with the rest of us. The millions of angry white supremacists that comprise their audience should ask themselves who Limbaugh and the others are working for. What do they have in common with their listeners? Are they living high off the hog? What motivates them? Are they profiting? Or are they in fact shameless opportunists who are preying upon their follower’s emotional vulnerabilities and intellectual vacancies? We have witnessed this same predatory behavior time and again in the persons of television evangelists who regularly fleece their flock of their hard earned income. Every false idol needs its fools, and they are not in short supply.

The effects of this pervasive propaganda are visible all around us. We see it in the flag-draped coffins that arrive home every week from Iraq. We see it in the faces of the Iraqi children whose families were decimated by those whose sole concern is privatized wealth. We witness it in our dilapidated schools and national infrastructure. It is visible in the elderly without health care, the millions of nameless poor that are forced to live in abject poverty so that Bush could execute his war. The flies are buzzing around the dung heap. This is nothing new. People have always been deceived by their governments, regardless of which party is in power. You see, the underlying cause is capitalism and privatized wealth. So be careful about what you admit into your mind. It may be hazardous to your health.

Charles Sullivan is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and freelance writer residing in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at .

Corporate Welfare

How come Lockheed gets food stamps and we don’t?

How come General Electric gets a place in The Projects and we have to sleep on the streets? How come Monsanto gets government handouts? Where’s MY government cheese?

Walmart gets Medicaid. Lockheed-Martin gets food stamps. Everyone knows that Halliburton is on the dole. And what’s up with those welfare queens on Wall Street? How come we have to work and pay taxes and they don’t? My income is called “income” and I pay through the nose but their income is called “capital gains” and doesn’t count. How come they get a free ride?

The pharmaceutical industry gets Medicaid too. According to NewsTarget, “79 drug companies are now being accused of defrauding state Medicaid programs by artificially inflating the prices of drugs.” But are WE eligible for Medicaid? Taxpayers need not apply.

It is against HUD regulations to allow people with drug abuse records and bad credit to receive housing subsidies but HUD makes an exception for George Bush. With his seven trillion dollar deficit and history of drug use, why does HE get to live in subsidized housing? If I were to go that far into debt, would the government start to pay me too?

Bush’s new tax law has been nicknamed “welfare for the rich” for a very good reason. According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, “More than half of the benefits from this backdoor tax cut would go to people with incomes of more than a million dollars….” Wow!

And guess who else is on the corporate welfare roles? ES&S and Diebold. 80% of America’s votes are counted on jankity voting machines that NOBODY would buy if they weren’t government-subsidized. Even slot machines are a lot more reliable than these. When California’s Secretary of State Kevin Shelley blew the whistle on Diebold in 2004, it was he, not the head of Diebold, who lost his job — just another fabulous demonstration of Welfare Economics.

How come all those “public utilities” that make billions in profits each year are being guaranteed AFDC? (For the uninitiated, AFDC stands for Aid to Families with Dependent CEOs — and Enron executives.) California rate-payers now have to pay $1,300 EACH to make up for Pacific Gas & Electric’s bankruptcy — and having our new governor meet secretly with Enron executives before his election has only made us Californians wonder if Arnie too is on the dole.

And Congress is on welfare too. According to Carol Wolman, “Last week, eighteen Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to vote for limitations on class action suits, a measure that protects corporations from consumers seeking redress from harm caused them by corporate products, such as cigarettes or defective tires.” It’s a very safe bet that, on Capitol Hill, those monthly checks arrive in the mail.

Who else is sponging off our tax dollars? Time-Warner, Disney, Clear Channel, Viacom — those are OUR airwaves that the FCC, like good social workers, are handing out for free.

Every day you and I try to grind out our 9-to-5 living while American corporations use our tax money to sit around on their fat butts eating bonbons and watching the soaps.

Without corporate welfare to shore them up, corporate giants would fail because they are inefficient, ineffective and shoddy. Capitalism is when you build a better mousetrap and people come to buy it. Corporate welfare is when we taxpayers pay a billion dollars for ONE mousetrap. If checks from us didn’t arrive in corporate mailboxes at the first of each month, we would immediately see what a joke American “capitalism” is. Without corporate welfare, those Queens would all be standing down at the corner waiting for us to drive by and offer them jobs. “Lord, I just broke a nail and soiled my Armani!”

Let me repeat. “America is NOT a capitalistic society. America is a corporate welfare state.”

Under the law in America, corporations are considered as “persons,” persons with individual rights — like the right to go on the dole.

The very next law that America needs to pass is this: A “person” is a person. And a corporation is NOT.

After that, let’s do away with corporate subsidies. While Bush et al. are happily taking away “subsidies” like education, baseball fields, home heating, clean water and Social Security from us little people — from farmers, families, small businesses, cops, seniors, veterans, firefighters and what my aunt used to call “the salt of the earth” — and making us sink or swim alone, IT IS ONLY FAIR that fat subsidies to corporate giants — including tax breaks, offshore manipulations and war profiteering — be jerked out from under the corporate red carpet too. Let’s see how well these corporate welfare queens do when they too have to swim with the sharks.

Let’s stop handing over our paychecks to welfare cheats.

****

From CorpWatch: “Pratap Chatterjee takes us into the fast-spinning revolving door between the government officials who attacked Iraq and the corporations who have profited so handsomely from the war. A powerful combination of investigative research and on-the-ground reporting, Iraq, Inc. is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has really gone wrong in Iraq.” –Naomi Klein, author No Logo, columnist The Guardian, UK

Jane Stillwater is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at

Murder By A Better Name

Blood Roses

As President George W. Bush once again revealed to us in his debates with the other warmonger from the left Senator Kerry, that the forces of freedom and democracy are on the march but we still face a determined enemy with “hatred in their hearts;” we are also presented with the contradictory images of a Iraq in complete chaos where the “ripped apart” bodies of men, women, and children are left in the streets of Iraq in a pool of blood, bones and brain fragments. Saddam’s Iraq is gone, replaced by the Bush clan’s maximized state of torture and mass murder. But, for the Bush clan, Iraq is well on its way too democracy, there is only but a few malcontents ruining the Bush preventive policy in democracy by force. According to the Bush clan, only the flowering of freedom permeates the liberated Afghanistan and Iraq with free elections coming up in January for Iraq, the same nefarious electoral reproduction as in Afghanistan. We also must not forget that we are much safer now because the bearded one with the glassy eyes and no WMD is behind bars.

The new Iraq is now in the hands of the Bush clans’ indispensable man found in the mad doctor and strongman ex-Baathist “enfant terrible” Iyad Allawi. Allawi the executioner, who once roamed the streets of Europe for the evil incarnate Saddam murdering anti-Saddam dissidents before turning on his master like a dog turning on his own vomit for a complimentary meal. As a CIA operative, Allawi, true to form, began his career directing bombing attacks in Iraq indiscriminately killing whoever got in the way of this particular terror-master. The American marionette Allawi is the Bush clan’s prodigy; a man for democracy and freedom, and the cold-blooded assassin thing, well, that is all in the past he is America’s man now. We should not be surprised, imperial proclivities always requires the replacement of a disloyal dictator with one’s own new pliable tyrant.

Dr. Iyad Allawi, the unelected interim Prime Minister of Iraq had recently spoken to a special joint meeting of Congress in Washington D.C. He received standing ovations from the house of crooked weasels, and even received a couple of kisses from girly-man Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. What a wonderful achievement that Allawi and the Bush clan have accomplished for Iraq in contrast to Saddam’s secular despotism, the Iraqis are now free to be ridden with bullets on their way too the grocery store. They are free to watch their homes destroyed by smart bombs and tanks, free to witness the Bush clan’s whole sale slaughter of Iraqi sacrificial lambs on the Bush alter of psychosis, free to be rounded up and hooded for interrogations under the Bush policy of torture and murder, free to witness American corporate mercenaries set up Gulags of rape and affliction across their country, accountable to no one, not even to Bush’s god.

This is now the Bush clan’s Iraq, a circumstance of civilian carnage by the crusaders and by the résistance, a place of death and destruction, a fetid atmosphere of murder and vengeance. Violent chaos, it is exactly what these men and women in Washington D.C. planned for. The bloodthirsty gnomes in the District of Criminals knew that the rape of Iraq was going to create a murderous reality, that it would destabilize the region for many years, that it would create more terrorists and terrorism, and create more threats to the security of the United States. They knew that this would create the potential for more war in the future, for a war with Iran and Syria, for a war with Saudi Arabia and Egypt; this was their plan all along, to knock off Israel’s enemies, to use young American men and women as cannon fodder for the cynical machinations of Israel’s cohorts within the American plutocracy.

You have to hand it to the Bush clan, they are relentless in their dogma and altruism, the terrorists have “hatred in their hearts,” and America stands for freedom and democracy with “kindness in our hearts,” and the sacrifice by the naïve serfs is praiseworthy and honored, the chickenhawks never miss the opportunity on screen to salute the uniform, and behind the great illusion that they have manufactured they salute the dead and vanquished by way of their war profiteering virtue. Anyone that contradicts the establishment are unpatriotic defeatists say the purveyors of pious enlightenment, never mind that all the reasons leading up to the invasion of a country that never attacked the United States was nothing more than the ramblings of fanatical warmongers who create their own nightmares then use their corporate propaganda machine to subvert the regressed minds of the masses. The Bush clan marketed a fantasy; they call this violent hallucination the “war on terror,” with color-coded terror alerts, infecting the American psyche with fear and trepidation, conditioning them for contrived wars in order to substantially increase the “circle of violence and profit.”

Of course, the torture and mass murder of the sand niggers in Iraq and Afghanistan does not produce a single instance of remorse to the conscious dead in American society, it narcissistically is explained away as a necessary fragment in the “war on terror,” for our security, for our allies, for our oil, for our whores on the screen, to preserve our way of living. Mass murder disguised as warfare can always be justified with egotistical arrogance in fighting a “patriotic war for freedom and democracy,” and of course for your own safety. Killing rag heads does not matter; killing tens of thousands of them is of no consequence because the ungrateful sand niggers do not know how to act when they have been liberated by the compassionate United States. America had lost more than 3000 lives on September 11th, that matters, the senseless deaths of over 30,000 Iraqis who had nothing to do with Sept 11th, again, is irrelevant and not to be considered as evil. And many Americans continue to question why the Iraqis want to drive their liberators out, and why the world now detests the United States.

Contradictions set aside, Americans continue to try to convince themselves with the help of their government that the daily car bombs, résistance, and suicide bombers in Iraq have nothing to do with them. Americans are quick to grasp at any excuse available, accepting government deceit as fact so they can effortlessly alleviate any remnants of conscious and morality. Americans will continue to play the ignorant disciple, until one day the violence that their government needlessly creates comes knocking on their door.

The oligarchy has Americans believing that the illegitimate political process called “national elections” is actually a democratic process, an act in privileged freedom. Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik recently experienced the naked reality in how truly democratic the two party monopolies in the United States really are. The oligarchy has the American political process stacked against anyone opposed to their criminal enterprise. A vote for Bush or Kerry will guarantee a long protracted war in the Middle East, with a general military draft in the coming year.

Then there are Americans who believe that Iraq is a “colossal mistake,” the “wrong war at the wrong time” like presidential hopeful Senator John Kerry, but he has a better plan to win in Iraq. Is this guy for real? According to the neocon posing as a liberal, Senator Bush Light still wants to fight a losing war, and try to win it as he did in Vietnam, with no vital interests for the average American. What bluster and stupidity, at least President Bush believes in his war on evil, Kerry does not believe in it and still wants Americans to kill and die for it, this man is quite possibly more dangerous than Bush. Does anyone really believe other than liberal whack jobs, that John Kerry as President would make a difference, and that he will not use that power for the oligarchies interests alone, autonomous of the citizens welfare?

In the Bush/Kerry world of altruistic values, they wage war against terror masters that they created; for the same turf; for the same fanatical idealism; for the same bank accounts; it is a fight among thieves and murderers; a blood libel, each feeding off each other for their “Raison D’etre.” This fictional war on terror by the American plutocracy has created itself the conditions where the government in Washington D.C. can presently function as the “de facto” world enforcer where the State can act without any restraints; outside the parameters of international law; outside of the parameters of morality and the Geneva conventions; outside the Nuremberg laws and protocols.

Here at home they have circumvented constitutional law, and constructed the “state of affairs” where they can do too America what they are now doing in the Middle East. Do not believe for a second that these sadistic men and women of virtue will not turn on you if given the chance. The State exists not to protect you as you are led to believe; it exists to dominate you; to thieve from you; and will not tolerate any form of rebellion to its power. It is only a matter of time when the State in D.C. turns America into one big glorious Waco, and when it does, it will make sure that you believe that you are being killed for your safety and well-being, you might want to call that murder, but it will only be murder by a better name; just ask the Iraqis.

Gnostic Warriors

The Song Remains The Same

It’s not fun when da wabbit have a gun, said the prodigal neophyte. The modern day contemporary Elmer Fudds’ have sounded a similar bally hoot in their recent pugnacious sirens of apprehension and fear concerning the fast approaching dangers to our complimentary civilization by the evil incarnate Iranians and the equally offensive Syrians.

Zion is in mortal danger because the evil Islamite’s in Iran are working to acquire a nuclear capability say the cocottes of truth, the same capability that is already in the hands of the holy wonders of Zion, and this possibility is just to excruciating for the neocons to contemplate let alone to live with, the other guy having the same gun is just to much to handle and not fare at all, just plain evil in fact.

So the Gnostic slanderers of reality and fallacious defenders of contemporary western virtuosity have blown the sirens of anxiety this past few weeks and their treasonous acts in relation to leakgate has been successfully veiled for the time being. Their strategy is simple, when under siege threaten to increase the violence wherever possible and if that does not ease the tension then create the conditions to increase the violence by initiating another illegitimate war.

Their targets are Iran and Syria and as it was with Iraq, the song remains the same, no semblance in reality as far as legitimate concerns to United States interests, nothing more than misinformation and propaganda.

The occupation of Iraq is going very badly for the war party, attention by the public to this fact must be diverted to something else, and the natural inclination for the neocon constitution is to create more violence and chaos. It seems there is much more terrorist activity in post invaded Iraq than before, and al-Qaida ranks have swelled since the Bush clan initiated their ignominious war on an ideology. And one of the leading war puppies found in one Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is not so furtively questioning their progress in their war on something.

In the hidden corridors of power the dark prince stalks, to surface only when it is time to rattle the saber and sound the cry for battle and shedding of blood. Pentagon adviser Richard Perle recently spoke at a Jerusalem conference of socialists and Zionists who call themselves conservative from the United States and Israel. He raised the specter of a possible U.S. attack on Syria and gleefully applauded Israel’s recent attack in Syria near Damascus.

In concurrence to the dark prince’s threat, the United States has fired the against Syria when the House of Representatives voted 398-4 in favor of trade and diplomatic sanctions on Syria. In addition to the economic embargo by the United States, President Bush fully indorsed Israel’s raid deep within Syrian territory defining Israel’s attack on another sovereign nation as “essential.” Not to be outdone, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for his country to be prepared for a general war.

Clearly, Sharon’s own little war against the same ideology the Bush clan is at war with has been a complete failure thus far and his immediate inclination is to advance the level of violence by attacking other countries and risking a general regional war. And a general war is exactly what Sharon and his cohorts within the Bush administration want, and that is where the Mid East is headed. Syria is already in a state of military preparedness and has notified the world and Israel that the next attack on its territory will be responded too in like manner, with reference to the also being made.

The neoconservatives received a considerable boost to their crusade to reshape and plunder the Middle East with the addition to Vice President Cheney’s office of war profiteering in Perle protégé named David Wurmser, a leading war hawk against Syria and a co-author of a paper headed by Perle called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. It calls for rolling back Syrian influence in Lebanon and beyond.

Wurmser should feel right at home under Cheney’s national security director, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, both Libby and Cheney are leading war hawks who could be under possible investigation concerning leakgate and their frequent trips to the CIA to put pressure on the intelligence community to come up with favorable slants to collected intelligence about alleged Iraqi WMD and the dangers that it posed to the United States.

Like the war parties propaganda leading up to the Iraq invasion, the intelligence community is once again contradicting the neocons concerning the dangers posed by the Syrians to the United States and its supposed relationship with terrorist organizations which according to leading neocon war hogs, pose a direct threat to America. Former senior analyst in the CIA’s counterterrorism center Stanley Bedlington has said that Syria has long cooperated with the United States in intelligence sharing and that it has increased since September 11th.

And then there is Iran, John Bolton, deputy under secretary of state for arms control sounded the alarm that the potential threat by a nuclear-armed Iran must be “eliminated.” It is no coincidence that David Wurmser was working for Bolton before joining the war profiteers mansion in Dick Cheney’s office. The neocons have spread themselves into all facets and aspects in government and foreign policy. We will be hearing a lot more about Iran from them in the immediate future.

According to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, Israel is prepared to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites in order to prevent them from becoming operational as it did with Iraq’s two decades ago. According to the Spiegel report, Israeli officials fear Iran’s nuclear program has reached an advanced stage, and a special Mossad unit has been ordered to formulate an attack plan against the nuclear weapons program sites in Iran.

This news comes at the same time in the same Spiegel report that Israeli submarines have been armed with U.S. made Harpoon cruise missiles. Israel has modified nuclear warheads to fit these Harpoon missiles, and these missiles are modified so that they can hit land-based targets. Its one of those Elmer Fudd quandaries, where I can have a shiny new gun but it absolutely does not mean that you can have one too.

In bellicose fashion, Iran’s Rafsanjani warned Israel that it will be given a “slap it will never forget” if it dares attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel knows that if it attacks Iran or Syria again, it will initiate a probable general regional war with the United States stuck in the middle, unable to stay neutral in such a conflict the United States could be dragged into a war against Iran and Syria which it is ill prepared for. Not that it matters to the neocons, such a conflagration is most desirable to them. With the reserves and the National Guard already stretched to the limit, the only logical step would be to introduce a general draft in the United States and the militarization of American society.

The subversion of U.S. foreign policy by the Gnostic neocons who are fundamentally working for Israeli interests to the detriment of American prestige and security across the globe is easy to see and constitutes the most dangerous perversion in legitimate American foreign policy since the American civil war. Using the “war on terrorism” as a smoke screen, they find it easy to rationalize and explain away their subservience to a foreign nation within that context.

The neocons are essentially traitors and a pervasive malignancy to the American heritage once championed by George Washington – “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,… the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But the jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided …Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike for another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side… Real Patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.”

Collateral Damage and Kinetic Energy

Snuffed Lives

To win a guerrilla war one needs to win the hearts and minds of the natives you are occupying, and one sure way to see the hand writing on the wall is to see American forces killing so many civilians on their raids, which in Vietnam was called search and destroy missions. This mainly is a problem of poor intelligence and discipline but the effects are that you turn the natives against your presence. A classic Vietnam style guerilla war has developed in Iraq and like Vietnam the reasons for the war was contrived by the U.S. government.

Though the Iraqi resistance is sporadic and not highly coordinated at this point, it is achieving the desired effect on American troops; casualties are trickling in and bleeding the occupying forces. And the guerrilla activities are nation wide forcing American forces to stretch itself thin even further. It is bringing moral down to the gutter level and making American troops extremely trigger happy which results in unwanted civilian casualties which only serves to stiffen the resistance to the occupation. It’s a vicious cycle in which the Bush clan is determined to at least as long as the American people support this pernicious fiasco.

More than anything, killing unarmed civilians on a regular basis by tired nervous soldiers is what is really deteriorating moral more than their extended tour of duty. American troops are not there to kill innocent civilians but the Bush administration has put our troops into a position where they are sitting ducks in a war of attrition and one malicious result is many civilian homicides.

One example is the death of 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Kubaisa as reported by Vivienne Walt Baghdad — It was 10:30 p.m. on a sweltering night in late June when 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Kubaisa climbed the concrete steps leading to the roof of his family’s house.

The boy held two blankets, so he and his identical twin brother, Moustafa, could curl up together for the night, one of their favorite summer habits. Mohammed had just reached the top, when he turned to watch the military maneuvers on the street below: American soldiers patrolling with rifles. One soldier looked up in the darkness and saw a figure on the roof, watching him.

A single shot exploded into the air, slamming into Mohammed’s chest.

In the chaos that followed, Mohammed’s mother, Wafa Abdul Latif, recalls dragging her son inside and holding the screaming boy as his blood poured onto the floor. She says Mohammed was struggling to breathe when a group of American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division slammed through the front door and pushed her aside to search the house for hostile gunmen.

“There were two patrols walking from different directions,” Latif, 44, said in her living room as she clutched a large framed portrait of Mohammed. “One group thought the shot had come from inside the house.”

In another incident reported by Robert Fisk Baghdad — American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.

The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

At the scene of the killings, there was pandemonium. While US troops were loading the bullet-shattered cars on trucks – and trying to stop cameramen filming the carnage – crowds screamed abuse at them. One American soldier a few feet from me climbed into the seat of his Humvee threw his helmet on the floor of the vehicle and shouted: “Shit! Shit!”

This is the reality present in Iraq which the Bush administration expediently dismisses as collateral damage and kinetic energy. The problem is that it has nothing to do with collateral damage or kinetic energy and everything to do with bloody murder. We must not forget that the invasion of Iraq, an aggressive attack on another sovereign nation that never attacked the United States and never threatened to attack the United States was an illegal act conducted by the Bush government. In the context of this criminal conduct initiated by President Bush, thousands of innocent bystanders have been killed in other words murdered.

The Bush administration initiated an invasion based on their own propaganda which had very little to do with actual threats to the United States. And the Bush clan are coming out and saying just that in light of certain uncomfortable truths that are presently being revealed. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz finally admitted that there in fact was no link between Saddam’s regime in Iraq and al-Qaida in an interview he did with Nancy Collins for The Laura Ingraham Show posted on the DoD’s DefenseLINK website. This revelation of course contradicts many statements by the Bush administration prior to the invasion that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaida therefore an imminent danger to U.S. security.

That Wolfowitz is something else all together, first he let’s loose with the revelation that the WMD issue was something that everyone could agree on as an issue “bureaucratic reasons” that could sway public opinion in favor for naked aggression regardless that there was no such thing as Iraqi WMD. Then he let’s loose that most of the intelligence gathered in the case against Iraq was “murky” at best.

So, the Bush clan’s own protege for the liberation of Iraqi assets has admitted that there is no link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, no conclusive intelligence that portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States and all that talk about WMD was just that – talk. The questions must be asked why are American soldiers still in Iraq being exposed to unnecessary dangers and why are the Bush bandits still free to lie and murder?

Speaking of Iraqi assets and one of the real reasons for the rape, um, liberation of Iraq, as Sgt. 1st Class David Uthe, 45, of Augusta tells it: The main reason we’re still here is to support Brown and Root.” Of course Brown and Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton which just reported massive profits on Iraq deals which must have Vice President Dick Cheney who is still under “deferred compensation” with Halliburton in an epileptic lather at all that blood money coming in.

Also, his eminence President Bush signed an order granting oil companies full immunity in Iraq from lawsuits and criminal prosecution in connection with the sale of Iraqi oil. In other words they can do just about anything they please with absolutely no legal restraints to speak of. Once upon a time war profiteering like this would have been regarded as treasonous and criminal but as we know times have changed.