Israel Rules

Israel Rules By Paul Craig Roberts

"In the second decade of the 21st century, America’s Zionist wars against Islam will expand. America’s wars in behalf of Israel’s territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America. The Treasury’s bonds to finance the US government’s enormous deficits will lack for buyers. Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. The result will be rising rates of inflation. The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports. Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and “Superpower America” will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts.

America has been brought low, both morally and economically, by its obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Even Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States and Governor of Georgia recently had to apologize to the Israel Lobby for his honest criticisms of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the occupied Palestinians in order for his grandson to be able to run for a seat in the Georgia state senate.

This should tell the macho super-power American tough guys who really runs “their” country."

Bill

Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much?

Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much? By Gary G. Kohls

"I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.

Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.

...

Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars."

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

The more I think about it the more I think that Thomas Paine had it right in the Age of Reason where he says he believes in God, but not organized religion. I've never seen a better argument about religion, and observing current events only adds weight to his arguments.


Bill

How we were lied into Iraq, Part XXXIV

How we were lied into Iraq, Part XXXIV by Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo talks about the British inquiry into the Iraq invasion.

"Footnotes were the only way honest analysts inside the British government could record their dissent, and this method was also employed by their American counterparts, who vainly tried to derail our march to war and were outmaneuvered – and effectively silenced – by the neocons. In the US, as Bob Woodward pointed out in his book Plan of Attack, the neocons – who controlled the policymaking apparatus – in effect set up a "separate government," and did an end run around the US intelligence community, establishing what Mother Jones magazine rightly called a "lie factory" to churn out "talking points" based on raw intelligence – such as the ruminations of an anonymous Iraqi taxi driver, whose unverifiable claims were utilized to justify a war that wound up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

The Af-Pak Train Wreck by Conn Hallinan

"One is retired Gen. Igor Rodionov, commander of the Soviet’s 120,000-man 40th Army that fought for 10 years to defeat the Afghan insurgents. In a recent interview with Charles Clover of the Financial Times, he made an observation that exactly sums up the president’s deeply flawed strategy: “Everything has already been tried.”

...

The military aspect of the surge simply makes no sense. According to U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones, al-Qaeda has fewer than 100 operatives in Afghanistan, so “defeating” it means trying to find a few needles in a 250,000 square-mile haystack.

...

As for the Taliban, Gen. Rodionov has a good deal of experience with how fighting them is likely to turn out: “The war, all 10 years of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the insurgents] would leave. Then we would leave, and they would return.”

Nobody expects to win in Afghanistan! It was never about winning, it's about diversion, about taking the looking glass off the criminal invasion of Iraq, which it very effectively did. And you don't even have to think a lot about it - it's right there in our face, every day, as we trip, stumble and spiral towards a future far worse then any of us imagined a few short years ago.

Dupe me once, dupe me twice ...

It really pains me to see America being destroyed by this gang - this "conspiracy so vast". But the most startling part is that a lot of people must know something is rotten at the core in Washington, but nobody is doing anything about it. Isn't this what happened in Germany in the 30's, where people gave in to "groupthink" and followed warmongering lunatics?


Bill

Medical Marijuana Apartheid

Medical Marijuana Apartheid: Different Rules Apply for Rich and Poor Pot Smokers By Joshua Holland

As more and better information becomes available for people interested in history and world events, it doesn't much effort to figure out that the fabric of our society has been and continues to be distorted by Big Lies. If you're not aware of the history of this Big Lie, click here.

What's happened with pot is just one more in a litany of Big Lies that have caused so much agony for so many people. Today, there's something like a half million people in jail for pot. Their lives are effectively ruined, or at the least will now fall short of what they could have been.

I'm not advocating for or against pot. It's the Big Lies and hypocrisy that really get me going.


Bill Moyers: We Have a Nobel Peace President Who Won't Ban Land Mines By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship,

This is yet another excellent analysis from Bill Moyers.

No comment on the article. It speaks for itself, but this mention comes to mind:

I was just talking about Big Lies, and here's another: the so-called brand new IED threat. It's been jammed into our unconscious minds that the IED is a new type of weapon that caught us off guard in Iraq. The truth is that this type of weapon had a name all along: the mine. But using an old word doesn't feed the imagery the war propagandists wanted to convey, so they invented a new, much more threatening, word for the same old thing that is mine. If you want to know what's really bad about war, it's war itself, not something that blows up, regardless of what it's called.

Think about it: how much extra mileage did the war machine get out of using the shiny, brand new word "IED" instead of the old "mine" word?


Bill

Obama's Big Sellout

Obama's Big Sellout by Matt Taibbi

" ... Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

Like many Americans who voted him into office, I've wanted to give Obama time to adjust to the job, and the benefit of the doubt.

On the surface, of course, he's black. I, and it seems the majority of Americans, don't think badly of black people. We associate the word "soul" with blacks, and my take on things, especially nowadays, is that soul means "down deep" good people. After watching America devolve under the thumb of an opposite nature, we wanted to put someone into office who would take a stand against the "powerful special interests" that run Washington. We expected him to stop the war they launched, and to stand up for the "Spirit of America". We wanted to see him put those responsible for the criminal invasion of the Middle East on trial, and more thoughtful people wanted to see someone stand up to Zionist power in America.

I believed, because I wanted to, that despite some early major capitulations to the greedy, arrogant, belligerent gang that ran Washington while the scumbag Bush was in office, that Obama had tricks up his sleeve that he would pull out at just the right times to brilliantly put them in their place (and, for the leaders, that would be on trial).

Now, as time has passed and he's pulled no tricks out of his sleeve - because there were none there - we're seeing our worst nightmare come true, that he's nothing more then a wolf behind black-soul clothing. It may be an open question as to whether he's been this way all along or was compromised along the way, but, be that as it may, whatever hope we had for a transformation of Washington is all but gone by now.

With the escalation of war in Afghanistan, the dogs of war on their way to Pakistan and Iran, the fundamental instability in Iraq, the staggering debt we already face for many years to come - which will only grow as war expands, the blood on our hands already, the massive taxpayer money giveaways to banks. Even health care reform - a no-brainer - is being turned into yet another money tree for those at the top.

It is clear now that we've been scammed again. Once again history reminds us that there is no appeasing the appetite of the aggressor. The new lessons for America are that the aggressor can attack from within, and that editorial control of our information supply, the so-called "news", makes guns unnecessary.

I'm outraged. And if I were black I'd be double outraged.

Kucinich Plans to Force Vote on US Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Daniel Tencer

You want a leader? Here you go: Dennis Kucinich.


Bill

















Bill

The war selling machine

War, more war or morer war by Ted Rall

"The nation's two leading newspapers set the tone for the lack of debate in Washington.

"In the Washington Post," found a FAIR study of op-ed pages during the first ten months of 2009, "pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views."

"Of the New York Times' 43 columns on the Afghanistan War, 36 supported the war and only seven opposed it--five times as many columns to war supporters as to opponents. Of the paper's pro-war columns, 14 favored some form of escalation, while 22 argued for pursuing the war differently." "

Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails By Robert Scheer

"With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers."

Bill

This Sure Seems Like Vietnam

This Sure Seems Like Vietnam by Helen Thomas

"By choosing to deliver his historic address at West Point, Obama also evoked past memories of the times when both Johnson and Nixon could only travel to military bases and aircraft carriers without encountering loud crowds of protesters.

...

Obama omitted the single biggest difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan when he failed to mention that the military draft was roaring through every American town, suburb and city during the Vietnam War.

...

Obama won a mandate in 2008 to pull up Bush's war stakes. He should listen to the people, not the generals, not the neocons and certainly not former Vice President Dick Cheney."

The AfPak Train Wreck by Conn Hallinan

"As for the Taliban, General Rodionov has a good deal of experience with how fighting them is likely to turn out: "The war, all 10 years of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the insurgents] would leave. Then we would leave, and they would return." "

"Going in circles" ... funny, these are the same words that came to my mind after wasting a whole lot of time "debating" Neocon supporters. It's just one of the tactics in their huge bag of tricks.

"Instead of controlling "terrorism," the escalation will be the recruiting sergeant for such organizations, particularly in the Middle East, where the administration's show of "resolve" on Afghanistan is contrasted with its abandonment of any "resolve" to resist Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. "

Bill

The Afghan accomplishment

The forgotten war?

"The Korean War used to be known as "the forgotten war." More recently, during the hey-day of the Bush administration's adventure here in Iraq, Afghanistan was the forgotten war. No more, of course.

Now, it seems, Iraq is the forgotten war. I've been here nearly 5 weeks now, and I'm amazed at how far this conflict has fallen in the American consciousness, if I am judging it correctly from thousands of miles away. Iraq is off the front pages, off the television screens and, for the most part, off the main page of major news Web sites."

The author goes on to say this might not be a bad thing because news follows conflict and bloodshed, and he has a point, but he doesn't seem to be aware of something much bigger: that Iraq was buried by Afghanistan and other "sensational" stories (Tiger Woods), and how convenient that is for the criminals who should be on trial for the invasion of Iraq. If nobody is talking about Iraq, then it gets to be "old news".

So when you think about the Afghanistan pump-up, and you wonder why anyone would do something so pointless and outright stupid, here you have it.


Bill

Justice

Justice with Michael Sandel

I don't have to introduce this website. If you'll give it just a few minutes, it speaks very well for itself.

If the notion of justice matters to you, you'll find these videos interesting at the least, and compelling at the most.

Liberals Are Useless By Chris Hedges

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

...

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity. "

Bill

War Cries From a Defeated Man

War Cries From a Defeated Man By Alexander Cockburn

"Obama didn’t make the case and he pleased few. The liberals seethed as they heard him say that it is “in our vital national interest” to send 30,000 more troops to a mission they regard as doomed from the getgo. The cheers of the right at the news of the deployment died in their throats as they heard his next line, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

No mature American, seasoned in the ineradicable graft flourishing down the decades in every major American city, believes a pledge that corruption will be banished from Afghanistan in a year and a half, or that Karzai has any credibility as the wielder of the cleansing broom.

Each proposition of Obama’s rationale collapses at the first prod ..."

Here We Go Again By Robert Scheer

"It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose."

How about that it provided a diversion from the criminal invasion of Iraq and the murder of many thousands of innocent people?


The rise and fall of MySpace By Matthew Garrahan

Murdoch is Neocon goon. If these events are signaling his downfall, good riddance.

America's 'Surge' May Only Expand, Intensify and Prolong the Afghan Conflict by Eric Margolis

This article is so loaded with well articulated insight that I've quoted most of it here:

"Obama faced the choice between guns (Afghanistan) or butter (his national health plan). The Nobel Peace Prize winner chose guns.

The president insisted his objective remains destroying al-Qaida. But al-Qaida barely exists in Afghanistan. Only a handful remain in Pakistan. His real target may be Pakistan.

Anyone who understands Afghanistan's deep complexities knows that Obama's surge won't win the eight-year war. Afghanistan's Pashtun tribal majority will continue to resist western occupation.

At best, it will be an exercise in managing failure.

Americans are turning against the war. Congress is fretting over its mounting costs: $300 billion US for 2009 in a $1.4-trillion deficit year. This war is being waged on borrowed money.

It costs $1 million US to keep each American soldier in Afghanistan. Renting Pakistan's assistance will cost $3 billion per year. Thousands of U.S. troops will remain stuck in Iraq. Obama vowed to fight al-Qaida in Africa and Asia. No wonder many angry Democrats are calling him "George Bush's third term."

But things are not going well in Pakistan, without whose co-operation, bases and supply routes the U.S. cannot wage war in Afghanistan.

Most Pakistanis support the Taliban, see the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as driven by lust for oil and increasingly fear the U.S. intends to tear their unstable nation apart in order to seize its nuclear arsenal.

Obama's advisers have convinced him an early U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will provoke chaos in Pakistan. They don't understand that it is the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that is destabilizing Pakistan and creating ever more anti-western extremism.

What Obama should really have been concerned about was Osama bin Laden's vow to break America's domination of the Muslim world by luring it into a final battle in Pakistan, a nation of 175 million

The longer U.S. forces wage war in Afghanistan, the more the conflict will spread into Pakistan, where 15% of its people and 25% of its military are Pashtuns who sympathize with their beleaguered fellow Taliban Pashtuns in Afghanistan.

A grimmer view is that Obama has become a captive of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Washington's rabid neocons who seek permanent war against the Muslim world. Obama's "surge" may only expand, intensify and prolong the Afghan conflict.

In the end, there will be a negotiated peace that includes Taliban. But how many Americans, allies and Afghans must die before it comes?"

Thank the President for Waking the Sleeping Giant by Jodie Evans

"... Really, we are going to send 100,000 troops, over 100,000 contractors and 100 billion dollars to deal with 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? It reminds me of an Afghan woman's tirade to me when I was there, "You want me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is being held hostage by those skinny, lice covered, illiterate, dirty men in those craggy hills of this broken country?" "

Bill

Another valuable writer: Nicolas J S Davies

Obama with Blood on His Hands By Nicolas J S Davies

"Editor’s Note: For many Americans, the promise of the new Obama administration was that finally the United States would reject the neocon concept that America can ignore international law and use indiscriminate violence around the world to assert its interests.

That hope was largely snuffed out Tuesday when President Obama gave his hawkish generals and the neocon pundits most of what they wanted by expanding the eight-year-old Afghan War and guaranteeing more violations of the laws of war, as Nicolas J S Davies writes:"

Bill

The Secret US War in Pakistan

The Secret US War in Pakistan By Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill describes some of the workings of Blackwater's activities inside Pakistan.

As applies to this and the whole military adventure in the Middle East, try imagining that there are soldiers from another country in your town.

Really - stop for a minute and think about that. What would you do?


Bill

The Twin Frauds of Obama

The Twin Frauds of Obama By Paul Craig Roberts

"There was a time when Democratic presidents represented the little man, and Republicans represented business. Today both parties represent the moneyed interests."

The Democrats have become brownshirt Republicans.

The American people, except for the one percent of super-rich, have been abandoned.

This article is loaded with thoughts and words I would offer if I were a better writer. I marvel at some of our writers, and Mr. Roberts is certainly one great example. People like Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Roberts are our heroes, the people we SHOULD be listening to (which is precisely why I'm using this blog: to cull the good stuff from the garbage heap of propaganda flooding our information supply)


Bill

"Iraqi good enough"

Did you catch the propaganda machine's new catch phrase: "Iraqi good enough" yet?

From The Last Day of the Iraq War

"It's too late to fix Iraq before the pullout date. All U.S. troops can do now is keep trying to slow the killing and get out. They call it 'Iraqi good enough.'"

"The situation is summed up in a phrase you hear among American combat troops and trainers: "Iraqi good enough." The term expresses their resignation—realism, they'd call it—about the limits of what America can accomplish in Iraq."

"America's expectations have plunged. Officials on the ground now envision an Iraq roughly like other nondemocratic states in the Middle East. The government will no doubt be repressive—not as bad as when Saddam Hussein was in charge, but even now Iraq's jails hold thousands of prisoners who have been held for months without hearing the charges against them. Corruption is rampant, in part because the state isn't strong enough to haul the biggest wrongdoers into court without touching off a rebellion. Residents of Mahmudiyah sarcastically call their mayor's neighborhood Owja, after Saddam's hometown—the lights stay on there even when the power is out everywhere else. And Tehran already has far more influence in the new Iraq than it did under Saddam."

Bill

Kucinich: Prolonging Afghan war a ‘threat to our national security’

Kucinich: Prolonging Afghan war a ‘threat to our national security’ By Daniel Tencer

"Far from being a necessary part of the US's national security strategy, the Afghanistan war is actually a threat to it, says Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich."

“America is in the fight of its life and that fight is not in Afghanistan -- it's here," Kucinich declared. "We are deeply in debt. Our GDP is down. Our manufacturing is down. Our savings are down. The value of the dollar is down. Our trade deficit is up. Business failures are up. Bankruptcies are up.

“The war is a threat to our national security. We’ll spend over $100 billion next year to bomb a nation of poor people while we reenergize the Taliban, destabilize Pakistan, deplete our army and put more of our soldiers’ lives on the line. Meanwhile, back here in the USA, 15 million people are out of work. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. $13 trillion in bailouts for Wall Street, trillions for war; when are we going to start taking care of things here at home?”

“The people of Afghanistan don’t want to be saved by us," Kucinich said on the House floor Wednesday. "They want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents, creating more US enemies and destabilizing Pakistan."

Dennis Kucinich is one of a very few people in Washington who isn't corrupt and has the guts to speak the truth. The fact that he isn't more popular is clear and convincing testimony to the power of the propaganda machine that has been playing America for the fool for a long time now.

"Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards" -Diogenes


Bill

Obama’s War Speech

Obama’s War Speech:An Unconvincing Flop by Justin Raimondo

As usual, Justin Raimondo articulates feelings most Americans, certainly I, have on this subject.

A few points I'd add to Justin's:


1. Did you notice what Obaba didn't do? He didn't turn to the West Point audience and say "some of you are going to die or become crippled for life as a direct result of my decision to escalate rather then withdraw. Other Americans are going to suffer too, and because this decision for more war will likely not end with Afghanistan, even more of you will suffer then any of us realizes today. But you have absolutely nothing to worry about, because my speech-writers will craft just the right words to make you forget all that pain"

2. Doesn't anyone realize that the entire notion of geography, as in seizing and retaining land anywhere, has nothing whatsoever to do with America's problem with Muslim terrorism being directed our way? Our next attackers could as easily come from the Philippines, South America, Asia, etc., and a clever strategist would pick one from each country. We do understand that there are over one billion Muslims spread across the globe, in addition to untold others who have built up a hatred for America's foreign policies? Can they recruit some Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese?

3. Clearly the neocon gang still runs Washington and is behind these speeches and talking points. This is why Obama spoke like Bush: it's the same handlers, think tanks, financiers and speech-writers.

4. This whole Afghanistan thing is essentially a giant diversion from the monumental debacle of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Nobody thinks Afghanistan can be won in any sense of the word, but it's custom form fit as the right size to replace headlines about Iraq. It's not a coincidence.

5. When is someone going to point out that, as we sink deeper and deeper into the morass of war that this planet is brimming with horrible weapons we must be ridding ourselves of - rather then playing with fire and edging closer and closer to seeing them used?


Please see:

The Long-War Trifecta by Jeff Huber

Kucinich on Obama’s Escalation: Great Speech, Bad Policy

Here We Go Again By Robert Scheer

Obama Has Spoken; Now, Let's Have a Debate by John Nichols

Obama's War by Jim Hightower


Bill