Same old, same old

So Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is caving in due to pressure from the Obama White House and will vote for the health bill. Don't you just love it? For months, the Obama administration has been saying that the public option was off the table because there weren't enough votes. No consideration of any kind of pressure to be applied.

Yet there were those out there at the time saying that all Obama had to do was to threaten to not support democrats in their bid for reelection, and he could get public option in the mix of health care reform.

Of course, there are now accusations that Obama cut a deal with the Health Industry to not include the public option at all, even as he was publicly spouting that he was for it.

Suddenly, Obama can now exert tremendous pressure on House Democrats just to pass this watered down version of health care reform.

So the bottom line is that Obama used the single payer card to get the votes of progressives when he was running for President, once elected he immediately backed off that and into a “public option” mode, then cut a deal to not even include public option (“We don't have the votes”) in the final health care reform bill. And he is NOW putting major pressure to get a lackluster reform bill passed.

What a weak, ineffectual, smarmy DC player, “screw the people, increase the profits of the health industry,” president he's turned out to be...

Permanent War Out in the Open

I can’t believe what I just heard Senator Lindsay Graham say on the “Morning Report” on MSNBC this morning. Referring to the “War on Terrorism,” Sen. Graham said, “This war will never end.”

That is most disturbing to me. I’ve long been under the impression that the Washington power base, the multi-national defense contractors and the like in our country want a permanent war. It keeps the military/industrial complex fat with profits at the expense of our domestic woes.

I’ve always believed that this is the underlying objective of those in power, though I did think that it was a “covert operation” the Powers That Be in order to keep it from the general population.

But to have a Senator blatantly admitting on a national broadcast that we are in a permanent war just shows how comfortable those in power are with their agenda. That we, the people, will not object to forever being in a state of war, having our military personnel continually killed for the rest of our country’s existence, continual massive profiteering, never ending war strategy sessions on our cable news networks, etc.

The nebulous phrase “War on Terrorism” is absolutely ideal for a permanent state of war. It is a given that there will always be some person or persons hating the United States and constantly figuring out ways to hurt us. Just as I am sure there are persons who hate Great Britain, France or any other country who are trying to figure out ways to hurt them. Are those other countries in a permanent state of “war on terrorism”?

So now those in power have no problem with saying it out in the open, on national interviews, that we are now a country locked in warfare and will always be a country locked in warfare. By these permanent warfare advocates’ insistence on having war commissions, tribunals and such to deal with supposed “enemy combatants” (as opposed to treating them as the criminals they are) further implants the idea to the citizenry that this egregious mind set will never go away.

Thus, for the rest our lives and our descendants’ lives we’ll be forever ramping up the defense expenditures, cutting the domestic funds (“We don’t have the money because we have a forever war to fight and the military/industrial complex desperately needs their profits to fight the terrifying war on terrorism”). At least, until the people finally get what has tragically befallen on them.

Bad Posture

Glenn Greenwald had an article last Monday (Feb. 22) about the falsehoods of American war criminals.

It is a very well-written piece, but I want to particularly focus on what he says at the end of the post. Mr. Greenwald wrote what he perceives is "the current posture of the U.S. to the world..."

Yes, we implemented a worldwide torture regime that we justified with lawyers' memoranda that were false, wrong, shoddy, lawless, sloppy and extremist, but because those lawyers were such warped radicals, they probably believed what they were saying at the time, so we're going to declare that we had the right to do what we did and are shielded from all consequences, even though we've signed treaties agreeing to prosecute anyone who authorizes torture and constantly demand that other nations prosecute their own torturers. Besides, we have important things to do and so we want to Look Forward, not Backward.

This is a great statement and it couldn't be more right on! I hope this is quoted all over the Internet. I hope that it becomes a mantra that all of us can throw into the faces of those who perpetuate this warped viewpoint.

We need accountability for all those who brought this country to the nadir of its existence. I do not want our country to be thought of by civilized countries as some rogue nation torturing human beings and allowing those who authorized the torture to not be held accountable. I hope that within my lifetime, I can see those in the Bush Administration who initiated these horrible crimes be brought to justice somewhere.

Any presidential administration (current or future) who allows this behavior to get a free pass should be scrutinized as well.

These are sick, twisted people who caused over 100 fellow human beings to be killed by torture and destroyed who knows how many lives. They are murderers (or accessories to murder at least) in my book and should be held accountable for their actions.

The Decade When Americans Lost Their Country

Well, I thought I'd put one more top ten for the decade here. It's a pretty good one. Robert Freeman has come out with The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade on Common Dreams.

They're all important stories, but I would hazard to guess that this particular one was the precursor to all the others. Had this not happened, the country would be in much better shape, and the other nine stories would not be as serious (or even nonexistent) as they are now:

The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election. This isn't even a historical controversy anymore. Al Gore won the national popular vote by 570,000. And we now know he would have won the Florida vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme Court. This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat, so it's understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right" kind of circles.

We will never know what state we would be in now with Gore at the helm, but I believe it certainly would not have been bad as we currently are. Sadly, after listing the stories, Mr. Freeman's summation is bleak, but so true,

History paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country. It was the decade when all the institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

What might have been...

Had I But Known...

Dave Sirota over at Common Dreams has posted his A Decade's Top Ten Quotations. They are great ones. My favorite is number 6:

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they're some things we do not know. But there're also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

It is very disheartening, to say the least, how egregious these quotes are. Mr. Sirota sums it all up with,

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad -- but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade's folly or learning from it.

I'm guessing that the majority of Americans have absolutely no clue that these were actually stated. Perhaps the key to the whole thing is to make quotes like these as ubiquitous as possible, so that the majority of Americans can see how much contempt there is for them from the powerful and elite.

Chalmers Johnson on American Empiricism

I just bought the first two books of Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback" trilogy. The third book was sold out. I first came upon Mr. Johnson on the "Speaking Freely" series. I've been wanting to read these books for about six months now.

For those unaware of Mr. Johnson's trilogy, the titles are, "Blowback - the Costs and Consequences of American Empire," "The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic," and "Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic."

What finally tipped it for me to read these books was Bill Moyers' recommendation on his December 18, 2009 PBS program,

Every year at this time we begin to see lists of "the best of." Best television shows of the year. Best movies. Best books. I pay attention, to these lists and see what I've missed and to test my sensibilities against others. You can find my own list of "Best Books of 2009" on our website at pbs.org. A word of caution: they're "best" by a very subjective standard, my own. Each held me from the first to the last page, and I learned something from all of them.

There's one book in particular I would put in everybody's stocking if I could. It's not new - it was actually published three years ago. But I read it again this month, and found its message more relevant than ever. This is it: NEMESIS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, by Chalmers Johnson.

A long-time authority on Asia, a prodigious researcher, Johnson has produced a trilogy on America's role in the world and the consequences for us at home. His first bestseller, BLOWBACK, revealed how the CIA's clandestine efforts abroad came back to explode in our face. "The Sorrows of Empire" analyzed how our determination to police the world compromises our own safety. NEMESIS picks up on the subject of empire and how it poisons our politics and economy.

Now, I know many people bridle at the word "Empire" -- "America's a Republic, not an Empire," they say. I once used the word in a speech and afterward a man came up to me and said in a very nice way, "Friend, there's only one American empire-and if you haven't tasted it, you've missed out on the best apple in the world." I didn't get his name and address, or else I would send him a copy of NEMESIS.

Read it for yourself and see why. I won't give away the ending - the story's not really over - but I will tease you with the frontispiece, where Chalmers Johnson explains the namesake of the title. "In Greek mythology," Nemesis was "the goddess of retribution, who punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it." The Greeks, you see, were big on divine, or cosmic justice - nature's way of declaring, "this far and no further." Just a myth? Maybe, maybe not. Check out Chalmers Johnson.

I immediately bought the books as a gift to my cousin for Christmas and today I got my copies. I highly recommend these books, and I'll be commenting on them in the coming days or weeks.

I am so looking forward to reading these. In addition, I hope to inspire the reader of this post into sampling these books.

Happy New Year to one and all!

Renewed Energy

Well, the new year is drawing to a close, and I have a couple of New Year's resolutions. One pertains to this blog. I resolve to write at least one post per week. We'll have to see how that flies.

When I first started this blog, my intent was to be one more voice decrying the path our country has taken in the last few decades. My main regret is that it wasn't until about two years ago that I really got into what this country is all about...and what it should be.

A friend turned me on to Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now." I immediately gave up on relying on mainstream media as a decent news source. From there, I discovered Noam Chomsky. Free Speech TV ran his biography, Noam Chomsky, Rebel Without a Pause. One of the greatest minds in any generation, known worldwide, and, yet, hardly known here in the United States.

I've discovered some great people who understand the inner meaning of how this country is being run. One of my goals this year is to write about those who, I believe, are giants in trying to right our ship of state. They are greater minds than I, but I want to write about them. I want to get to know them so well that I can rattle off their talking points and concepts without hesitation. I need to thoroughly understand what exactly is being done to us.

Currently, I'm posting twice a week (on Saturdays) to the "Bill of Rights Defense Committee" web site. I enjoy this responsibility. The commitment forces me to research the independent media, which, in turn, increases my knowledge. The editors of the blog tend to want a more objective type of writing, and (if you have read some of my posts here) I tend towards being a bit snarky. I'll complement those posts with amplification here.

So I wish everyone a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. Maybe I'll be the only one reading this, but that's OK. I'll be part of the "hits" on Google, adding a tick to those who see our country slowly drifting away from its citizens and catering only to those who have money and power.

We need to get back to having this country helping our citizens, not the elite.