SueEgypt by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

SueEgypt by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

In honor of Don Van Vliet, "Captain Beefheart", my musical hero, who died today at the age of 69.

"Isolationism"

"Isolationism" is a misnomer.  It should be correctly spoken of as "Non-interventionism".

As I've said before, "isolationism" as it is used in what passes for intelligent political discourse in this country, is a perjorative, propagandistic term that is almost universally misused.  Those of us who believe that a global empire based on hegemonic, naked aggression is bad for this country are in no way suggesting that we cut all ties with nations.  Of course we need to continue diplomatic and trade relations with other countries, but interventionism into their internal affairs and their disputes with other countries not only is morally wrong, but it is against our national interests.  One, it puts our citizens in danger of terrorist attacks from those who quite understandably and predictably will react against being bullied; two, it needlessly causes death and injury to our troops who have no business being deployed in wars of aggression; and three, because it is bankrupting our country economically.

As Major General Smedley Butler clearly shows in his famous essay, "War is a Racket" (which I suggest you read, it is available for free online) interventionism only benefits small, parasitic, welfare-gobbling elites at the expense of the American people and the peoples of other nations who these policies victimize.  Our Founding Fathers recognized this.  Pity that rank-and-file members of the Tea Party are inconsistent in their professed admiration for these gentlemen.

Foreclosure

There is a special place in hell
For those who live in mansions
And drink 12-year old scotch
Who casually mention their Porsches and their yachts
While the widows and orphans
Who they cheat to get rich
Sleep in piss and vomit stained gutters
Get raped in the street
Starve

There is a special place in hell
For the country club scammers
The robots who sign
The shills who backdate, and recreate, who lie and steal and falsify
And the judges who enable them
With a wink of an eye

If Christ were in the courtroom
On the rocket docket
They would be tossed outside so fast
their heads would spin
Millstones breaking judges' limbs
Files and notes and pieces of femurs
Jutting from Brooks Brothers suits
At strange angles

May all these nice churchgoing souls
Who rubber-stamp mammon
shriek and writhe and burn in hell
With the rest of the scum like themselves
To keep them company.
May their mansions give way to prison cells
May they burn in the lowest realms of hell
May their skin be scorched till it rots from the bone
May the judges who legitimize this farce suffer a fate
That makes Auschwitz look like a Sunday school picnic.

The Proper Response to Wikileaks by Karen Kwiatkowski

The Proper Response to WikiLeaks by Karen Kwiatkowski Recently by Karen Kwiatkowski: Why Is Jonah Goldberg Still Here? President Obama is wrong, and Secretary Clinton is wrong. Those remoras of state at CNN, FOXNews, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and many Congressmen are all wet in their frantic response to Cablegate, and Wikileaks in general. I’ll admit the U.S. government should have been a bit angry about the Wikileaks release over the summer of the 2007 gunship video and narration of a bloody massacre of unarmed Iraqis and reporters. There was nothing redeeming there, no points of light or lessons to be learned. That release fundamentally explained to Americans and others who supported the Iraq invasion and occupation exactly what democracy at the point of a gun looks like. Perhaps the US government wasn’t as upset as it might have been because no one affected by this crime was surprised. Similar massacres, according to soldiers involved in Iraq, were routine and conducted as ordered. The Iraqis, of course, knew this from the beginning. The Wikileaked Afghanistan reports didn’t indicate much more than the antiwar and the pro-war crowds already knew, and as a result, again, there were no changes in the bleachers of American foreign policy. It’s likely that the Rolling Stone interview with General McCrystal around the same time was more embarrassing to Washington. One wonders why McChrystal has not yet been declared a domestic terrorist. He shared secrets and embarrassed the administration. A case could be made that his pussyfooting around the Afghans (a Special Forces nuance that our good Prussian Petraeus was quick to eliminate) was intentionally designed to help "lose the war" in Afghanistan. Well, give it time. But Cablegate is different, and the reaction of the ruling class so far ranges from simply demanding Assange’s head on a platter to demanding the Internet be declared a terrorist entity, and destroyed. Government propagandists proclaim that people will die from this latest release. Unless they mean die laughing, this is quite an overstatement. Government goons, soldiers and bureaucrats in foreign countries will not face a greater threat to their lives, most especially from these cables. What they will face is snickers, chuckles, and outright laughter. And truly, this is as it should be. When one declares that his robes are the most beautiful, made of the finest silk, so glorious that they compete with the sun – sometimes a little blond-haired boy with a most serious look about him declares that it seems to him that the Emperor has no clothes! And we see, slowly at first, then an unstoppable surge of laughter and finger-pointing by the common people who, for all their ignorance and all their flaws, know enough to put on clothes before going out in public. The US government shrieks, tone-deaf, of global democracy – but disparages the populist language of Italian officials and declares the elected and popular prime minister there to be unqualified. Yet, this same democracy-loving government enjoys very much its dealings with the evilest of dictators. This hypocrisy has long been a staple of both libertarian and Marxist critiques of US foreign policy, for well over a century. Now it’s out in the open – and it’s kind of funny. Hillary Clinton approves a State Department-wide command to surreptitiously collect DNA and credit card numbers on UN representatives and other diplomats. This particular case is breathtakingly Nuremburgian. The order Hilary was transmitting was already government policy – the great Diplomat Herself was just following orders. And certainly, any of us common folk who watch enough CSI to be dangerous know that collection of DNA samples with chain of custody procedures that will stand up in court is not something we would automatically trust to a bunch of pinstripers at State. Beyond that, the rest of us who watch COPS know that taking people’s credit card numbers without their knowledge and permission is a crime. Now that we know what they are trying to do, the proper reaction is to giggle and glance at each other while we check our pockets, handbags, backpacks and satchels for our wallets and watches whenever we find ourselves near a government representative. Of course, air travelers in this country have been doing just that for some time. But the sweet lesson here is that a government goon is a government goon, just following orders, no matter where they buy their suits. Our ability to quickly recognize that government goon is increasingly unifying average Americans, and strengthening us. As our government goonar continues to develop, the game becomes more fun, and funnier. Cablegate improves everyone’s goonar! There is talk that the data released this week actually helps Israel’s case for a good old-fashioned pre-emptive attack on Iran. Why? Because Saudi Arabia supports it! Well, skyrocketing oil prices certainly would come in handy to the still dollar dependent House of Saud about now, but I digress. Now, if I were the little old US of A thinking about starting one more war with a country I didn’t like, especially given I was dead broke and already a military laughingstock based on past and present performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, listening to what the corrupt, US-dependent ruling class of Saudi Arabia had to say about it would be right up there on my go-to-war-decision-meter. Give the obvious and otherworldly stupidity of our politicians, generals, and diplomats, perhaps the Saudis do tell us what to do, and maybe Wikileaks hearts neocons. A better sense of where the US diplomatic head is at can be gained by reading reports of meetings in Tel Aviv, where the great US stumbles over itself to be inoffensive, seeking simultaneously to be both submissive and warlike when speaking to Israelis. Pathetic little weasels, the lot of them. But their pathetic weaselness cannot be blamed on Julian Assange, no matter how many neocons and other cons declare the problem to be facts in the open, rather than simply the facts. On a more serious note, beyond the debate on whether to assassinate Assange, blow up the Internet, conduct an unwarranted attack on an NPT signatory that is following the rules, or to continue to ally ourselves with the crazies in Pakistan and Israel, it is important to recognize that fascism of one kind or another is currently embraced by a majority in Congress, and by a large minority across the country. An alert and informed citizenry, valued by presidents from Washington to Eisenhower, is now deemed by D.C. to be a nascent domestic terrorism threat. As the American wholesale subsidy of banks, bullets and butter metastasizes, devouring freedom and wrecking the system, the desperation of the ruling class and those in its employ is palpable. Americans ought to gratefully smile as we review these latest Wikileaks, and we should savor the hilarity. Seeing our government as theatrical stooge, as incompetent popinjay, as naked and embarrassed Emperor, sets the stage well for what comes next. December 1, 2010 LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. Copyright © 2010 Karen Kwiatkowski The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Words of Wisdom from Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski

There is talk that the data released this week actually helps Israel’s case for a good old-fashioned pre-emptive attack on Iran. Why? Because Saudi Arabia supports it! Well, skyrocketing oil prices certainly would come in handy to the still dollar dependent House of Saud about now, but I digress. Now, if I were the little old US of A thinking about starting one more war with a country I didn’t like, especially given I was dead broke and already a military laughingstock based on past and present performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, listening to what the corrupt, US-dependent ruling class of Saudi Arabia had to say about it would be right up there on my go-to-war-decision-meter. Give the obvious and otherworldly stupidity of our politicians, generals, and diplomats, perhaps the Saudis do tell us what to do, and maybe Wikileaks hearts neocons. A better sense of where the US diplomatic head is at can be gained by reading reports of meetings in Tel Aviv, where the great US stumbles over itself to be inoffensive, seeking simultaneously to be both submissive and warlike when speaking to Israelis. Pathetic little weasels, the lot of them. But their pathetic weaselness cannot be blamed on Julian Assange, no matter how many neocons and other cons declare the problem to be facts in the open, rather than simply the facts. 

On a more serious note, beyond the debate on whether to assassinate Assange, blow up the Internet, conduct an unwarranted attack on an NPT signatory that is following the rules, or to continue to ally ourselves with the crazies in Pakistan and Israel, it is important to recognize that fascism of one kind or another is currently embraced by a majority in Congress, and by a large minority across the country. An alert and informed citizenry, valued by presidents from Washington to Eisenhower, is now deemed by D.C. to be a nascent domestic terrorism threat. As the American wholesale subsidy of banks, bullets and butter metastasizes, devouring freedom and wrecking the system, the desperation of the ruling class and those in its employ is palpable. Americans ought to gratefully smile as we review these latest Wikileaks, and we should savor the hilarity. Seeing our government as theatrical stooge, as incompetent popinjay, as naked and embarrassed Emperor, sets the stage well for what comes next.

An Article I Had to Write

I’m used to pervasive disinformation in the US media, but in this past week, new heights of lies, deceptions, and outrageous propaganda have literally taken my breath away.  At least in the Soviet Union, the vast majority of people knew that their news was fake.  Not so in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Ignorant.

First, Korea.  Not one of our esteemed bastions of the Fourth Estate reported the truth that South Korea was the aggressor in last week’s incident.  While conducting war games near a contested island that could only be designed to provoke the North,  South Korean troops fired first and the North retaliated.

Second, the ridiculous FBI-fabricated bomb plot in Oregon.  Like all of the recent “terrorist plots” foiled by our brave protectors, this one also involved a mentally challenged individual relentlessly egged on and assisted by FBI agents until they got what they wanted – another phony incident they can use to scare our dumbed-down populace into relinquishing more of our rights and allowing the Gestapo of Perverts to grope us at the airport.

Which brings us to Wikileaks.  Our leaders are foaming at the mouth to condemn this heroic, patriotic organization which seems to be the lone voice of truth in a world of lies.  They will stop at nothing to smear Julian Assange and Bradley Manning with bogus charges which are in themselves criminal.  They have launched cyber attacks against the Wikileaks website.  Thank God that Wikileaks is light years ahead of the Feds’ bumbling efforts and is back up and running.

Political flacks, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and the odious Rep. Peter King have rushed to condemn these heroic individuals for bringing their ugly crimes into the light of day.  King has called Wikileaks a “terrorist organization.”  Never mind that he himself is a supporter of real terrorists – he has openly given his support of Mujahideen-e-Khalq and the “Real” IRA – bona fide terrorist organizations that kill innocent people, not expose crimes in high places.  No hypocrisy there. 

Huckabee has called for Manning’s immediate execution.  He has no problem with breaking laws to help his sociopathic, animal-torturing-and-murdering son evade justice, but a true patriot like Manning – can’t have that now, can we?  He must be murdered, of course!  It’s the only civilized and sensible thing to do! Law, morality, common sense, due process – what’s that?

It is King, Huckabee, Obama, Clinton and all their ilk – almost the entire political and corporate class – who should be  shot for treason – for their utter contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law, and basic human decency.

Our nation has become an utter moral cesspool run by criminals, murderers, thieves and hypocrites.  Politicians, bankers and corporations murder and rob people blind.  Judges enable them.  Those who expose their crimes are called traitors and terrorists.  The real traitors and terrorists sit in judgment of our patriots and of the few righteous among us. 

 

The silence in the face of these outrages is deafening. The majority of Americans couldn’t care less.  They wallow in the slumber of  bread and circuses - their American Idol, their football, their Dancing With the Stars – while our once-great nation becomes a little more like Nazi Germany with each passing day.

Can you say “Fall of Rome”?    

Why I No Longer Identify as a "Progressive"

Reading Gabriel Kolko's vastly underrated, groundbreaking book "The Triumph of Conservatism" is one reason I no longer identify as a progressive or a leftist. Kolko shows without a doubt how the so-called Progressive movement of the e...arly 20th century was hijacked and co-opted by big business from the very start. Big business wanted the FDA and other regulatory agencies in place so they could use them to drive out smaller competitors. They also knew that they could control the regulators so that they could violate the regulations with impunity while using them to bludgeon their competition. This is the huge blind spot of liberals/progressives. Government is not the answer, because government will always be nothing more than a tool and plaything of the elites.

 

The "good guys" of this era were the Populists.  The Progressives were  in favor of the emerging corporate state. The Populists were prescient in recognizing the evils of corporatism and fought against it tooth and nail.  It's a shame that they weren't successful.