Town Hall Meeting

Many of you probably know these things already, but now “The Daily Show” has summed up some of the worst policies Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton have retained. This includes kidnapping and keeping people in jail without charging them with a crime indefinitely. Some of this has been posted before, most recently here and also days after Obama won the Presidency here. Anyone who has read Howard Zinn’s great book “A Peoples History of the US” will know that throughout American history, Democrats and Republicans have almost always had bipartisan agreement on foreign policy. For recent examples of bipartisan foreign policy, check out the chapter “Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus.” But the examples go all the way back to America’s beginning, including both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, Kennedy, etc. It seems scary foreigners can unite Washington, just like in Orwell’s “1984.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Panel today that intelligence agencies have the authority to kill Americans if they are considered a terrorist threat. Blair is infamously known for giving aid to Indonesian military officers who led the 1999 Liquica Church Massacre, while commander of U.S. Pacific Command.

We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community, if … we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.

Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has — is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.” Blair explained. “We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.

From the Inauguration, to Newspapers crumbling, to the Peace Prize, to Democrats. 2010 really is the Year of the Tiger!

Goodbye to 2009, Hello to 2010: Year of the Tiger

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN of Counter Punch

Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list.

The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book on the affair.

Personally, I’m not at all dismayed at evidence that intelligence gathering networks are flawed, that bureaucrats pass the buck. Hyper-efficiency in these matters indicates we have arrived at the perfect police state.

Of course there is room for common sense and elementary vigilance. In the case of the Virginia Tech killer there was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

And then was there was proof positive that the time bomb had exploded and the mass murder session began in the engineering building, the police state proved all too human in actual performance. The police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

Read the rest here

I hope the US news companies all air this speech in its entirety today. If you don’t painfully remember, the basic theme of the speech: give money to me so I can keep the powerful from losing all their money, otherwise we are taking you all down with us. Quotes below, in chronological order, are doozies:

“Most importantly, my administration is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets”

“democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised” (Did anyone ever get to vote for/against capitalism?!?! If not, how is it democratic exactly?)

“good luck losers, I’m retiring in two months!” (Okay, this last one was added by me)

Larry Lessig is an honest, very intelligent person who sees what is going on in America and is fighting to fix the major problems. He has started a project called Change Congress which wants to have public financing of elections. His point is that public financing must be addressed first because all other problems are a symptom of money ruining our democracy – whether its terrible environmental law, health care law, or regulations of Wall Street. Check out this excellent video and get started!

This video from ABC’s 20/20 shows a glaring example of racism in America today. Sorry people, your job isn’t done – racism is far from over. Part 1 is an experiment where 3 white teenagers vandalize a car in public. Part 2 is 3 black teens doing the same thing. Just check out the reactions from the members of the mostly white, suburban community where the experiments took place.

For those who like to use the simplistic “But Obama is President” argument, doesn’t that mean by definition that the 46% who voted for McCain are racist? And the 100,000,000 people who did not vote at all, are they also racist? (voter turnout in 2008 was only 56.8%).

Part 1:

Part 2:

Call me what you will, but I draw the line at habeas corpus. This can’t stand, it is so disappointing. Obama was a Professor of Constitutional Law too!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html

I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s my summary…The story is about how Obama is continuing Bush’s policy of NOT providing Habeas Corpus to detainees in Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And these prisoners are not just from the battlefield there, they are flown to this base from all over the world because they can be sent there forever. The Supreme Court said in June 2008 that prisoners in Guantanamo have a right to have a hearing to determine their guilt and challenge their detention (habeas corpus), so Bush just started sending guys to Bagram instead. Obama then in February filed a brief in federal court stating that he embraced this plan. Then a conservative federal judge, in March 2009, rejected Obama’s petition and said the Supreme Court ruling from 2008 applies to Bagram in addition to Guantanamo because the prisoners were foreign citizens caught elsewhere and just brought to Bagram to be detained. At the time of the June 2008 ruling, it was the height of the Presidential campaign, and you may recall that was when candidate-McCain called it one of the worst ruling in the history of the Supreme Court (this was laughable, try Plessy v Ferguson!). At the same time, candidate-Obama did the right thing and said the decision was great, and that it shows we can try and convict alleged terrorists using our tried and true justice system.

The most sickening part to me is how by doing this, all the lives lost fighting to get the right of habeas corpus over the centuries for all citizens are now looking like they were wasted by these actions. I highly recommend reading the “update” at the bottom of Greenwald’s report too…we can’t start saying things like: “I’m sure Obama has a good reason for it” which is exactly what Bush’s fan’s were saying all along.

Check out this clip from the film “The American Ruling Class” made in 1998. It’s one thing to have “full employment” as economists say, but if it includes jobs that pay less than people can live on, those jobs shouldn’t count. On some level, it is true that as long as people don’t accept a job for less than they can live on, then we will be A-OK! But desperate people do dumb things, that’s just the way life is. This is where unions come into play. They require their members to only work for so much money and for the businesses that want their members to only hire folks from their union – thus making sure nobody is able to do the desperate thing. DON’T BE FOOLED, AND DON’T BE NICKEL AND DIMED!!!

The dialogue is a little corny, but the best part of the clip is the song at the end, sing along!

I signed it. I think its important, I hope you do too. War crimes and illegal actions must be prosecuted. Obama is totally wrong on this…a truth commission does not “look backward,” and IT IS “looking ahead,” because it means we want to show future people that your ass will be thrown in jail for this shit!

http://ga3.org/campaign/btcpetition

Peace!

“Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
– Frederick Douglass

Thanks Daily Show for being honest. Remember, change only can come from below, not above!

Thanks G for the link!

A friend of the president’s daughter, Barbara, writes about his experiences eating at the white house, before 9/11, and after, and how his view of him changed over time. There are some amazing insights in this article, check it out.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/01/dubya-and-me200901

Don’t all these appointments kinda make you ill? Why don’t they pick someone new? Such as for treasury, someone who has won a nobel prize for economics, like Joseph Stiglitz, or how about James
Galbraith? Obama doesn’t even seem to be trying to make his administration look like change. All this talk of hope is for a good reason, its all we have left!

…
Sic Transit: The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.

Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.

I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.

It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up
with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent
advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?

The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year
old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry he new White House counsel will be Greg Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.

The young people who worked for Obama and who voted for him have been feeling wan this week, amid all the retro talk about the Clintons. And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who had hands-on time grappling with health insurance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair’s account of the pardons for Holder’s central role in the affair.)

Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere down the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.

The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the
usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective. He’d better get this one right. A conventional appointee could doom his administration right from the start.

In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?

The Golden Age of Eating was….

But first a quotation from Paul Craig Roberts:

The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.

Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.

A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.

But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.

It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.

The guy leading Obama’s intelligence transition team is apparently John Brennan. He says that rendition (also known as kidnapping) is not only useful but okay. We gotta nip these things in the bud if we really get “change we need” rather than this same old crap.

Check out this excerpt from the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to excerpts from a December 2005 interview with John Brennan, the former CIA official now leading Obama’s intelligence transition. Brennan was interviewed by Margaret Warner on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about his views on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition.

MARGARET WARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now for the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in, and I can say, without a doubt, that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it—are you saying both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And US government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARET WARNER: Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHN BRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptians then have a longer history, in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I’ve talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services—and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia—that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.

John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right—and there were a few who tried to get it right—is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama’s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what
we’re learning now.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, NPR attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, then you have to wonder who he’s relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO, bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon’s procurement project, an item that we’ve spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is—again, this is not change; this is continuity.

UPDATE
Brennan is now “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.” Sigh.

From the beaten down regular US citizen…

I tend to pick emotionally unavailable governments…So even though America steals my money to pay off gambling debts, beats me senseless, kicks my cat through a window, then goes out on power-drunken binges, bombing people, poisoning the planet, and annihilating whole civilizations — I know that, deep down, America really loves me

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/day131008.html

From a 37 year old hedge fund manager….

The boss of a successful US hedge fund has quit the industry with an extraordinary farewell letter dismissing his rivals as over-privileged “idiots” and thanking “stupid” traders for making him rich….All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/18/banking-useconomy

Thanks G for the links!

I’m really disappointed that people think that a law meant to help poor people own their homes is the cause of this systemic financial crisis. I want to lay out why this is not only wrong according to all data out there, but is reprehensible to even bring up. And I know that this is a right wing talking point lately, so it must be addressed.

The Community Reinvestment Act (created in 1977 and updated in 1995) is not the problem here. Other than just being racist code for saying blacks can’t pay their bills, its flat out wrong. THE DATA IS VERY CLEAR ON THIS.

Here is one link that may just explain it all. It actually has data and links to data, so I’m not sure if people who believe this stuff will actually read it, but here it is: http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html

The main quote from this article: “Not surprisingly given the higher degree of supervision, loans made under the CRA program were made in a more responsible way than other subprime loans.”

Here is a quote from an interview on Bill Moyers show that dealt with this right wing talking point…

[Using sub-prime borrowers and minorities] as a wedge issue to make people who pay their mortgages believe that the people who are getting the benefit of the 700 billion dollars, that we’re being asked to pay, are poor, minority people who caused the crisis.

This is unconscionable. This problem is not a problem that was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act. The data is very clear that the Community Reinvestment Act loans were being offered in a way to people that were much more responsible and had none of the characteristics of
default that are being attributed in this discussion. And what this does is to say, this problem is a problem that was caused by black people.

And it means that it gives an opportunity to bring up that old wedge. But I think the people in the country are smarter today. I just don’t think it’s going to fly. I think that people understand that the enemy is not a person who got a home loan and was tricked into getting that loan by a fast-talking broker who originated the loan but that the problem was the securitization process, the high leveraging that Wall Street was doing, the lack of regulation.

Watch the whole interview here. The discussion on the Community Reinvestment Act starts 8 minutes in.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, passed in 1999, was a huge part of this whole crisis. It is the main reason that banks are failing, because it allowed real banks, subject to regulation, to combine with unregulated investment banks. The problem with that is the investment bank side of the business can become so toxic that it can take down the normal bank part of the conglomerate. The risky, unregulated companies are the ones going down: Lehman, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, etc. The regulated ones that are still mainly just banks: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, are still standing, for now. The deal, made in the Glass-Steagall Act passed in 1933, was that if you are a bank and want to be FDIC insured, you must follow regulations. One of which is you must maintain a minimum amount of capital in order to be able to pay back your customers. The ratio was 8 to 1, I think. Gramm of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, is the Phil Gramm who was chief economic advisor to McCain until he made his “whiners” and “mental recession” comments. He ran UBS bank which is now going down in flames. He was McCain’s front runner for Sec. of Treasury and may still have been until this whole financial crisis blew up.

Some of what they say about the Democrats is true. Obama does have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problems. Bill Moyers (once again did the leg work on this) shows how both our beloved Presidential saviors have their hands dirty…

Obama is second among members of Congress in donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s employees and political action committees, even though he’s only been in the Senate since 2005. The former chairman of Fannie Mae originally led Obama’s vice presidential search committee but had to step down in a controversy over favorable loans he received, while at Fannie, from a company doing business with Fannie. Among Obama’s contributors are three directors and one senior vice president of the two companies. Furthermore, Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress have long been enablers of both corporations.

And what about John McCain? His entire campaign team stepped right out of a predator’s ball. His confidante and top adviser lobbied several years for Freddie Mac. His deputy fundraiser lobbied Fannie Mae, and his campaign manager (Rick Davis) lobbied for both of them, leading a coalition of beltway insiders whose goal was to “stave off regulations” that might have short circuited this nightmare. One wealthy member of Freddie Mac’s board has contributed more than $70,000 to McCain and Republican Party members working for McCain’s election. Even the guy who vetted John McCain’s vice presidential options is a former lobbyist for Fannie Mae.

Obama also has Robert Rubin and Larry Summers on his team, and they supported Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Clinton signed that terrible bill at their request. Republican Alan Greenspan also pushed hard for that bill. Democrats are not guilt free in this. Dodd was a part of it too, and so is Barney Frank. But I would say 40-50% of Democrats are complicit, while 90% of Republicans are complicit.

THE REAL PROBLEM: “A housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble, a hedge funds bubble are all now bursting at once in the biggest real sector and financial sector de-leveraging since the Great Depression” (quote from NYU professor Roubini). In housing, greedy companies gave out all these crappy loans so they could make their $2000 commission (called closing costs). Note that the higher the price of the house, the higher the commission, so high prices were in their favor too. They also didn’t care if the loan was even paid back because Wall Street had created a new thing in the 80’s where home loans could be bought from the primary lenders and sold as securities in bundles. The bundles sounded great because when you pool all these loans together, the risk is spread. So lots of folks bought these things on the promise they were “safe,” such as the School Boards in Kansas and pension funds in Iceland. Wall Street in the meantime made billions on commissions for selling these stupid things, again, whether or not anyone defaulted on their loan. So the problem is a lack of regulation, it is so blatantly clear. Go research the funding of US regulatory bodies, such as the SEC. Their budgets are amazingly small, even after the debacle of Enron and others just 7 years ago. THESE ASSHOLES JUST WANT TO BLAME POOR BLACK PEOPLE.

If you want the whole housing thing explained in cartoon form, see this.

If you have some time, check this speech out, I think she represents the best of the future for the Left. She was asked by faculty to speak at the University of Chicago last week to counter the proposed $200 million “Milton Friedman Institute.” The speech is excellent, and directly relates the Milton Friedman ideas with what is happening to the economy today. You may have run across her before. Here are some really good excerpts:

His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.

…what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology.

Read the transcript here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein#
Or watch the video here. Her speech starts about 11 minutes into the program.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/stream

One of my biggest worries about Obama is that his economic policies will be as right wing as Bill Clintons. And the fact that Obama taught at the University of Chicago and has some “chicago boys” on his economic team is scary. But of course Obama is miles ahead of McCain on most issues, even economic ones, so what can we do?

Even our little blog has had 3 entries on the giant red alarms leading us up to this point, post 1, post 2, and post 3, dating back to early July. So ANYONE who says they had no way of seeing this coming is completely full of it. I repeat, this financial meltdown was expected.

To stay a little ahead of the game, check out one of our recommended blogs by NYU professor Nouriel Roubini. He has been sounding the alarm on this since at least early 2007. Oh, and for those who say where was Congress to sound the alarm? the guy who wrote this article is Michael Hudson, Dennis Kucinich’s chief economic adviser. People have been sounding the alarm, it’s just that the national media has completely dropped the ball, (think WMD). They are only interested in one thing: profit, and therefore ratings, NOT NEWS. Speaking of not in the news, the proposed defense budget for 2009 is over $600 billion. That is more than the defense budget of all other nations combined! You’ll have to learn about this from the Asia Times. If you don’t believe them, check it out on the white house website. We the people have got to stop reckless privatization and an insane war budget, let’s start now!

Have you heard of Bikini Island? Apparently it’s this small set of islands in the Pacific where the inhabitants lived for centuries, and in 1946 the US decided they wanted it to test nuclear bombs. Some of the Bikinians decided to stay. Peter Gabriel wrote a song about it, super heavy when you know this story. Listen to it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0CJE9zGEJc&feature=related

Here is some more info:

“An American came to Bikini. He said he was the most powerful man in the world. He said he wanted to drop a bomb on Bikini. He said America wanted to use Bikini and that we would have to leave.”

–Kilon Bauno, Chief of the Bikinians

http://highschoolbioethics.georgetown.edu/units/cases/unit3_3.html
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/cushing2.htm

It’s unbelievable this type of history just gets swept under the rug. When I read about things like this I think of how ridiculous it is to say things like “lets get America back to doing good.” As a good friend of mine said, “when I read or hear someone say ‘lets get the US back on track,’ I turn off immediately because it’s pure nationalist propaganda that’s very carefully packaged and consumed primarily by the (disappearing) middle class.”

To add insult to injury, that two piece bathing suit we all know about was named after this island and the detonations were used as a marketing gimmick on the reasoning that the suit would cause a burst of excitement. I can’t make this stuff up, believe me.

I think that our representatives in Washington campaign 100% of the time now. They don’t represent we the people, they represent anyone who can come up with the most dough. And we all know the ones with the dough are about 1% of us. I think that’s why we have seen Obama move to the right since he won the Democratic nomination. The ones with the money don’t want anything to change substantially, they are fat and happy. I don’t mean to rag on Obama specifically, but I’m worried people will stop fighting for their cause, believing he will solve it for us. I think that is a huge mistake, and a very common one. The news media’s constant election coverage is a huge reason why this is. Remember that most of the campaign contributions go straight into the pockets of these giant media companies via those campaign advertisements, so they have all the reason to keep you watching. One would think that with all the coverage we would get more informed, but they focus on trivialities and the horse race…how many points is Obama up this week?!!…how could Obama throw one gutter ball on camera?!! Who gives a crap!

Here’s a cartoon that shows just how looney this campaign is.

More on Obama and where he gets his money…

“Who Owns Obama?”:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pham150708.html

Obama Reality Check:
http://counterpunch.org/whitney07212008.html

Bush’s 3rd Term, even WSJ gushing over Obama:
http://www.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121495450490321133.html

There may be one presidential candidate that actually will fight for you, even after an electoral victory, and that’s Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party.

Thanks Laura and G for the links!

PS: Did you notice 2 more banks quietly failed again late last Friday? I see a pattern here.

I am going to miss his insights a ton, we all lost a very important comedian yesterday. Check out this routine analyzing the first Bush, first Iraq War…We Like War