Former Secretary Of State Colin Powell Issues New Book… Time To Recall The Iraq Lie

“It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership” by Colin Powell Begs Us To Evaluate Truth Of Iraq War

 

The Consequences

•  $3 trillion cost to the U.S. Treasury & Taxpayers, plus massive debt burden on future generations
• 4,487 U.S. service members dead
• 100,000 Innocent Iraqis killed
• 32,226 U.S. service members wounded
• 500,000 US citizens/service members toll from cumulative psychological and physiological damage

 

The Lie

• Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn’t wanna use force,” he said.

 

The Truth

• In his new book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides the most authoritative confirmation yet AND supports the well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point — or decision-making process — about going to war with Iraq during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation which had nothing to do with those attacks.
• In his own 2007 memoir, former CIA Director George Tenet admitted, “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” Nor “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
• Downing Street Memos, first published in 2005, document the conclusions of British officials after high-level talks in Washington in July 2002 that, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
• Indeed, history shows through documents and verified facts that W. Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.

 

The Traitors of Truth & Democracy

• George W. Bush
• Dick Cheney
• Condoleezza Rice
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Paul Wolfowitz
• Scooter Libby

 

The Truth Revealers

• Colin Powell
• George Tenet
• Valerie Plame
• Joe Wilson
• Col. Larry Wilkerson

Reactionary America 1951-2011 — Same As It Ever Was

Modern America History Lesson: When threatened, we revert to ingrained fears.

               1950′s                               2010′s

______________________________________________________________________

               2010′s                               1950′s

We can do better than this. We are better educated than this. We are better than this.

2011-20: Decade Of U.S. Economic Hell

More Bad News For America’s Worst Decade

Adapted From The Commentary By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Next decade? Toxic politics promises to make economic matters much worse than even today.

“The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams,” warned Columbia Prof. Robert Lieberman earlier this year in Foreign Affairs.

Now, over at Foreign Policy magazine, Josh Rogin warns: “This Fight Ain’t Over: Think the debt ceiling gridlock was ugly? Congress is just getting warmed up. Here are eight more foreign-policy battles right around the corner,” when they get back to sinking the economic recovery even deeper this fall.

All this was punctuated last week by the one-day 513-point market drop, S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Friday, as well as the 634-point drop in the stock market yesterday, Monday… and all the implications toward a double-dip recession.

Another Foreign Policy expert, James Taub, warns of what the “debt-ceiling deal tells us about the Tea Party’s grim vision of American power.”

There’s a disaster ahead, Taub writes: “All Guns, No Butter … depleting the national treasury to pay for the military … when many Americans want to reduce the role of government at home and especially abroad, the debt deal just concluded is likely to preserve the country’s hypertrophied defense budget, at least if congressional Republicans get their way.”

Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Darth Vader, is doing just that, doubling down on his vow to make certain Obama is a one-term president, intentionally ignoring the collateral damage, killing economic recovery.

How? Ol’ Mitch is already sabotaging the new congressional debt “super-committee,” vowing to appoint only Republicans who have signed Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge.

Expect more deadlocks as economists warn that recovery is impossible without new revenues.

Beyond toxic nondemocratic pledges on taxation, America really is “coming apart at the seams.”

Both parties are to blame:

• Dems for lack of strong leadership.
• The GOP and the Tea Party with their bizarre Schumpeterian conviction that destroying the economy is the only way to save America and pave the way for a revival of their anarchistic, free-market Reaganomics.

Politics sabotage economy

Yes folks, our politicians really are out of control, utterly unable to manage the economy. They’re irrational, and worse, clueless and myopic in economics.

No surprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI:DJIA) crashed 513 points in one day last week and by 634 points on Monday. Nor a surprise that pundits are pointing to high-tech multiples, warning of a new dot-com crash and double-dip recession, as well as a collapse in commodities, in emerging markets and endless debt problems for Europe.

The WARNING, in short, is that we’re headed into a perfect storm rivaling the disastrous political insanity of the 1930s that prolonged the depression, driving the economy into far reaching global problems that added fuel to an irrational zeitgeist and world war.

Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown and the short-lived 2009 rally, and now it seems quite clear that future historians will indeed look back on the 2011-20 decade as the “Worst Decade in American History.” Worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. Totally predictable, totally denied.

Early this year we made 10 predictions of a chain of events that would reach a critical mass and consume America in a torrent of “creative destruction,” finally crippling • our too-greedy-to-fail monetary/banking system, • our capitalism for the super-rich and • our corrupt political system.

The recent debt-ceiling deal is a wild red flag, warning that it’ll be much worse for a long time.

Dead ahead…

• a protracted new civil war between special interests and the super-rich versus the middle class and disadvantaged,
• a wasteful internecine war that will further downgrade America as the world’s superpower, while enemies cheer loudly.
• So buckle your seat belts folks, it will get uglier and uglier for years.

10 Annual Predictions — a year-by-year look at a decade of economic battles between the haves and have-nots

So here’s an update of my 10 annual predictions, a year-by-year look at a decade of economic battles between the haves and have-nots, with no room for compromise between the three ideologies destroying our nation from within. The “wealth gap,” the greed, the entitlements, the hostilities are now so entrenched, compromise is impossible.

Only a catastrophic 1929-style collapse of capitalism, democracy and a descent into economic hell will force America to restructure.

Here’s how it will unfold in the coming 10 years:

2011: Wall Street’s super-rich control Washington

Thanks to the conservative takeover of America’s so-called democracy over the past three decades, from Reagan to Obama, our activist Supreme Court delivered the coup de grace into America’s psyche last year, overturning long-established precedent giving rich owners of zombie corporations the same rights as live citizens. That decision would have gotten a failing grade in my constitutional-law class back at the University of Virginia.

2012: Super-rich solidify absolute power over our political system

That bizarre Supreme Court decision legalized political bribery. Now, billions pass through lobbyists to politicians with one goal: a promise that every politician vote in line with their ideology. Wealth rules. America is no longer a democracy, not even a plutocracy. Today our middle class is in a rapid trickle down into Third World status, while the rich get richer and the “gap” between the super-rich and the rest steadily widens. It is now irrelevant who wins the 2012 race, because money corrupts and Obama is already a puppet of this system favoring lobbyists and wealthy donors.

2013: Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate

During the Bush presidency, Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national-security issues.” Billions of new people spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts turn farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” Most disconcerting, from the Pentagon report, “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” Trapped in denial, political leaders will chose war over cooperation.

2014: Global population exploding, rapidly wasting resources

America’s “conspiracy of the super-rich” drains trillions from middle-class taxpayers. The invested super-rich see global population growth exploding by 100 million annually not as a drain on scarce commodities, but as tool to get richer through free-market globalization, ignoring the tragedies triggered as the population climbs to 10 billion — all demanding more of the world’s limited, nonrenewable resources. In the end, all will be demanding payback for our failures to heed warnings of environmentalists like Bill McKibben: “It might be too late. The science is settled, the damage has already begun.” We can’t save the planet.

2015: ‘Gilded Age’ explodes America’s ‘Global Empire’

Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth and Democracy” that around the time of the Pentagon’s prediction of WWIII in 2020: “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt and ultimately burning themselves out.”

Similarly, financial historian Niall Ferguson, author of “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” warned that we deceive ourselves, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”

2016: Reaganomics self-destructs; crashes come

“But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” asks Ferguson. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time? The new GOP president ignores the lessons of history, like Jared Diamond’s warnings in “Collapse”: “One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak in population, wealth and power.”

2017. Middle-class revolution: Buffett’s ‘rich class’ loses

The seeds were planted years ago. Warren Buffett saw the revolution coming: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” After the 2016 presidential election, political rage explodes into a new civil war. The income “gap” pops a bubble, there’s economic collapse and riots spread against another bailout of our “too-greedy-to-fail” banks. New depression ignites class rebellion.

2018. The Fed and Wall Street collapse, Glass-Steagall reinstated

Diamond says he’s a “cautious optimist:” Leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.” They delay, fail to act boldly. This crisis triggers a cultural revolution. History tells us most leaders act by short-term self-interest, not long-term public interests, especially politicians funded by billionaires who can’t see past quarterly earnings, year-end bonuses, the next election.

2019: Global commodity wars spread, killing millions, wasting trillions

More than half our federal budget goes to the Pentagon’s war machine, limiting America’s fiscal and monetary policies. In this context, new commodity wars are ignited by an accelerating global population against a decline in the world’s scarce resources. That also forces a total rethinking of the balance between spending to protect against external enemies and a rapid deterioration of domestic programs: employment, education, health care, retirement.

2020. America’s first woman president, patriarchal dominance ends

It is clear that patriarchy — male dominance of world culture, politics and economics throughout history — has failed, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction.

Why do male leaders fail? Jeremy Grantham’s firm GMO manages $108 billion. He predicted the 2008 meltdown and now warns: Male leaders are emotional, “impatient … management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” Leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.” Yet “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers,” which guarantees that “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it,” as in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and in 2020.

In the coming post-capitalism America…

Grantham’s research suggests that women leaders will naturally emerge not just because the male brain is a short-term saboteur. The bigger reason is that women’s brains have evolved naturally as superior long-term thinkers. Brain researchers tell us 75% of men are short-term left-brain thinkers, while 75% of women tend to have strong right-brain traits as forward-thinkers, more aware of the future, the big picture, with a sense of future consequences, peacemakers rather than gamer-players.

Bottom line: These 10 predictions deserve serious consideration, so invest wisely, defensively and never listen to the happy talk from males across Wall Street, Washington or from the super-rich.

– Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Dresden Military History Museum — Architect Daniel Libeskind Invades Germany

A revolutionary German military museum — designed by architect Daniel Libeskind — is about to open in Dresden. Although established by the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, the museum’s curators intend that the museum will cast new light on war and the suffering it causes.

Heretofore, most military museums — like the Imperial War Museum in London and the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — seemed as shrines to the glories of warfare rather than places for reflection. Most other war museums showcase weapons, polished machinery and pressed uniforms, celebrate great battles, and recall the heroic deeds of brave soldiers patriotically fighting against the odds and sacrificing their lives for their country.

Dresden: the bombers of the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force rained destruction on the Saxon capital, reducing most of the city to piles of rubble, and killing tens of thousands of women and children in the process. One of the few buildings to survive the cataclysmic and morally questioned bombing campaign was the old garrison arsenal, which after the war was turned into a military museum.

Provocative and controversial architect Daniel Libeskind has driven a 30-meter (100-foot) steel-and-glass wedge through the arsenal’s late classicist facade. As a result, the museum looks like the bow of a ship breaking though an iceberg, pointing in the direction from which the British and American bombers came to attack the city.

“It is something like a lantern, a signal, a beacon that evokes the city itself,” Libeskind told the press. “It creates a question mark about the continuity of history and what it means. It gives people a point of reflection.”

The exhibitions are still in the process of being set up.

Part of the museum will try to dissect the relationship between the military and everyday life as reflected in art, fashion, language and photography.

Many of the objects on display are surprising, simply because you’d never expect to find them in a military museum — for instance, models of abused animals that served as the subjects of military experiments, including elephants, cows and dogs.

Just like the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Military History Museum in Dresden will lead visitors from top to bottom.

Gorch Pieken, the museum’s scientific director, thinks the Military History Museum could help Dresden overcome decades of noted self-denial about its darker past and recognize the evil of the war as well as the evil that led to the war. “The people of Dresden tend to forget who actually started the war,” he says.

In August 1943, German soldiers attacked the village of Kommeno in western Greece. They burnt down homes and drove the villagers’ cattle away. They raped the women and tortured the men. They stuffed gasoline-soaked cotton wool into babies’ mouths and lit it. At dawn, a priest with a Bible under his arm confronted the soldiers. He died in a hail of bullets. The Bible fell to the ground.

Historian Gorch Pieken says he tells this story whenever people ask him why he is opening a war museum, and in Dresden of all places. He tells it again as he wanders through the as yet unfinished exhibition, through dark, empty rooms and past oppressive, angular walls designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.

Pieken, 49, reconstructed the attack on Kommeno for the museum. He discovered that the brave priest’s Bible was kept in the village church. Pieken now wants to display the yellowed and bloodstained Bible alongside the other 7,000 objects at the Bundeswehr’s Military History Museum in Dresden, the first war museum of the reunited Germany.

They want to tell the history of war — of all wars — from an entirely new perspective. “We expect to trigger a heated debate,” Pieken says.

Many Dresdeners are appalled by the new architecture, but Libeskind’s uncompromising style has rarely seemed more appropriate than in Dresden.

Dresden had become known for its commendable/reprehensible “progress” in rebuilding the historic structures destroyed during the war and left as rubble during the Communist period. The completion of the Frauenkirche (above, the Lutheran Church of Our Lady) has been particularly applauded almost universally, even while the balance of the historic city center rebuild is duly mocked as a Disney-like romanticized reconstruction in pursuit of forgetting history as bad memory.

Libeskind attacks this faux progress, claiming that “sentimentality is not a foundation on which you can build a new city.”

Libeskind’s aim was to smash through the original imperial structure, convinced that only a radical break with the existing architecture could fulfill the museum’s stated goal of providing a new perspective on war.

The museum addresses the big questions in human history: From where does violence stem? Is humanity evil? Is there such a thing as a just war?

These are the kinds of questions that are being asked in Germany right now as German soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, NATO is bombarding Libya, and a dictator in Syria is having his own people shot and killed.

As the saying goes, the first casualty of war is truth. Certain events are deliberately not talked about, and the negative aspects of narratives are glossed over. Anyone who, like the curators in Dresden, claims to provide the true picture of war, risks sounding presumptuous and at worst naïve.

The only presumptuous and naïve are those who deny the evils of war and seek to avoid truth. The museum aims to stimulate thought so that we may properly balance decisions before going to war again… perhaps then we may have created new solutions to the wars of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya…

Thanks to the thinkers, the creators, the architects, the artists, the historians, the poets, the playwrights who help us to review and rethink with new perspective.

 

Notes On The Debt Ceiling & The Debt Solution

Notes On The Debt Ceiling

• Failure to raise the ceiling does not mean the government defaults on its debt bonds
• The “Public Debt Clause” of the 14th Amendment mandates that all federal government debt be honored and payments to be paid on schedule — always and under all circumstances
• Reaching the debt ceiling requires the government to first pay all debt payments due, with any remaining revenue available for other budgeted expenses
• To fund the “other budget expenses” which the Administration is required by law to spend as directed by Congress, the Treasury will continue to issue Treasury bonds, as these are not issued by Congress and not within their constitutional competencies
• The new bond issues will be paid on schedule: refer to above point, “The 14th Amendment requires all federal government debt payments to be paid on schedule — always and under all circumstances”

———————————————-

Further Notes On The Debt Ceiling: The President Is A Poor Negotiator

• Last December, Mr. Obama agreed to extend the irresponsible Bush-era tax cuts — a concession of weakness to Republican blackmail — and the deal pointedly did not include an increase in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation.
• The President seemed clueless then, as now. He asserted that, “Nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his, “responsibilities to govern.” Well, how’s that worked out for ya, Mr. President?

———————————————-

More Notes On A Proper Debt Solution

I like this statement about Obama’s absurd concession on Social Security and Medicare to Republican intransigence:

“driving toward a landmark debt deal that could not pass a bitterly divided Congress”

Clearly, the choice now is to recognize and accept our new world reality of a diminished United States capacity: a need to cut government at every level that does not directly secure the prosperity and safety of the American people: 

• End the senseless wars on all fronts (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya… including the 40 year failed prohibition of drugs)
• Bring our troops home and cut defense that met the needs and capacity of an America that no longer exists: +cut 146 security forces and 16 intel agencies/departments in half or more; +close three-quarters of our 700+ foreign military bases; +cancel ships, planes and weapons that exceed our need and capacity
• Focus on what is mandated in the US Constitution: “common defense,” i.e. NOT policing the world and its oceans (and where in our interests, do so in partnership with our allies, sharing resources and expenses)
• Saving from above: approximately $800 BILLION A YEAR (FY2011 these cost us upwards of $1.5+ TRILLION)… 

The deficit is approx. $1.4 TRILLION a year, so… additional cuts and enhanced revenue need to be approx. $600 Billion a year:

• Start with the Vice-President’s bi-partisan committee’s agreed-to-cuts of around $200 Billion per year
• Include the military savings above of about $800 Billion per year
• Add approx. $400-500 Billion in increased taxes on the wealthy (from the top 5% but the top 1% particularly)
• THE BUDGET IS BALANCED!… and “directly secure[s] the prosperity and safety of the American people

——————————————-

PROBLEMS SOLVED:

• Debt Ceiling Issue Neutered Appropriately
• Yearly Budgets Balanced Without Undue Hardships

Govt Debt: Not A Big Deal — CBO: If Politicians Do Nothing, The Debt Problem Goes Away

Today the Congressional Budget Office released its latest forecast for the government debt, and yes, it shows a large debt. We all get that fact.

What we don’t get is that… it’s not a big deal!

The following chart graphs two lines: The Extended Baseline Scenario and the Alternative Fiscal Scenario.

In the baseline scenario, politicians literally do nothing about the debt: let the Bush tax cuts expire; keep indexing the Alternative Minimum Tax higher; don’t raise Medicare payments. All of this will take place automatically if politicians do nothing… absolutely nothing!

As a result the debt burden stabilizes, period.

Unfortunately from a debt perspective, it’s the alternative scenario that’s more likely… because politicians will attempt to mollify an unduly alarmed public (whom the politicians have, themselves, worked into a tizzy) over an issue they do not understand.

Thus, the Bush tax cuts probably won’t be killed, and Medicare payments to doctors will be raised.

Still, THE POINT is: if there were no legislative changes whatsoever, the chart delineates what would be our debt future.

If there must be a discussion about long-term budget adjustments, the chart above is where all debt discussions should start.

The Deficit: What’s It All About Alfie?

Still, people will huff and puff about the deficit… as if the federal government’s budget is like a family budget: NOT!

But, let’s look at it.

And, I say… so what?

It’s a big “so what” because we’re not going to allow ourselves to run the same deficits that have been necessary for the last several years… and we simply need to address the matter calmly and SLOWLY.

Check out the graph below:

Hummm… well, let’s see… looks like the deficit situation (not total federal debt [the sum of our outstanding borrowed money owed back to lenders] but the yearly amount spent over revenues received) is about on par with major cataclysmic historic US events such as the Civil War, WWI, and the Depression and WWII.

Is that right? I mean, is that ok?

Let’s see… In this point in time, we are enduring:

• continuing hostilities on three fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya
• the longest running conflict/war in US history
• the greatest economic crash in 80 years
• the greatest contraction in wealth in history

Yet, look at the chart. We’ve never encountered such budgetary stressors and yet, comparatively, it looks like we’re fairly moderate in our deficit burdens.

In fact, had it not been for Bush’s unduly lightening the wealthy-class tax burden, we’d have still been in Clinton’s budget surplus zone when the wars and crash hit us (mumbling “irresponsible Republicans under his breath”).

Now, today, we have an advantage and a tool with which to address some of this deficit spending… we can monetize a great deal of it (which is partially what the Fed’s Quarterly Easing [Fed purchases of long-term government debt bonds] is all about) without significant worry of igniting inflation. Thus, the impact of the deficits becomes one largely of a “paper” matter.

So, let’s chill out, citizens.

And politicians… just “say no” to doing anything. Just do nothing.

And we’ll be just fine, thank you very much.

Now… let’s do another round of stimulus, get a real national health insurance program, and reduce defense spending to… oh, I don’t know… let’s say just twice as much as the rest of the top five industrialized nations combined.

That’ll about do it.

We Interrupt This Broadcast (China’s Urban Boom) With An Important News Development — Bin Laden’s Death & America’s Lost Decade

President Barack Obama smiled announcing Osama bin Laden’s demise. Obama’s was a satisfied smile at a moment during which America was once again confident of our power… a historic image, just like the photos of flag-waving Americans in front of the White House.

Columnist Howard Fineman said it well,

“By calmly and meticulously overseeing the successful targeting of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama just proved himself — vividly, in almost Biblical terms — to be an effective commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.”

True enough, with the death of bin Laden, as written in Die Welt, “America has once again powerfully demonstrated that no one can attack and humiliate the US and go unpunished. America has shown that it does not forget, and that it has the resources, technology, courage and skills to go after its enemies with perseverance and a long reach.”

6,000+ Dead US Soldiers

Indeed, it seems like America truly has finally won the war on terror, ten years on — and nearly a decade after the photo op for the Warlord George W. Bush wearing his bomber jacket in front of the sign, “Mission Accomplished.”

The mission was not accomplished, though, and even the death of Osama bin Laden will not provide a happy ending for America’s continuing tale of woe.

America is no longer the country it was before 9/11.

“We are a beleaguered America,” the columnist Howard Fineman summed up in the Huffington Post after the operation in Abbottabad.

As proof, one needs simply to “review the numbers.” At least 3,000 people died at the direction of mass-murderer bin Laden, and an all-efforts-justified program to find him started. The U.S. didn’t initiate a search for a criminal thug, though.

Instead, we launched the world’s historically largest War Of Retribution. Evolving tally: U.S. and Allies inflicted 100,000+ Innocent Civilian Deaths and Victims.

100,000+ Innocent Civilian Deaths & Victims

On the international side, the US War On Terror / War Of Retribution has created many terrorists, probably more than it eliminated through:

• Guantanamo detentions
• military tribunals
• Abu Ghraib
• torture and prisoner abuse, and
• more than 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens’ deaths.

Guantanamo Bay "Detentions"

On the American side, we’ve seen:

• 6,000+ dead US soldiers
• more than $1.3 trillion in new federal debt attributed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
• the US accumulating a total debt burden of over $14 trillion, even as we ran budget surpluses 10 years ago
• the seemingly-most-powerful country in the world confronting the prospect of declaring insolvency
• and finally, America’s self-inflicted loss of freedom… think… USA PATRIOT ACT, aka, “The Patriot Act”

The German news source, Süddeutsche Zeitung, writes correctly:

“… America has not been liberated. The United States must engage in critical self-examination to answer the question of whether the fixation on terror and wars has not tended to paralyze the nation and restrict it in its development. In the 10 years (since 9/11), America has surrounded itself with both physical and mental barriers. The ‘Land of the Free’ paid the price for its supposedly increased security in the currency that is most important to it: openness and freedom.”

USA PATRIOT ACT

America is so mired in a culture of fear and anxiety that we spend more on defense than all other nations combined. We’re enmeshed in wars we cannot win and no longer want to fight — according to American opinion polls about the war in Afghanistan.

Of course, security is a country’s most inviolate right, but in searching for it, we have so far overshot the mark that our citizens now maintain a greater fear of debt than of terrorism — à la, the rise of the American Taliban… ah, I mean, the American Tea Party… funded by right-wing opportunist billionaires and oligarchic corporate interests.

And while America’s been busy crippling itself, China accumulated annual economic growth of nearly 10 percent.

According to the IMF, China will become the world’s biggest economy by 2016, much sooner than expected. Beijing has plenty of time to make strategic decisions, such as its new focus on investing in green technologies… while America continues ridiculously debating in Congress whether or not climate change is real or imagined.

During this lost decade of the War On Terror, this is what the US has been reduced to:

McDonalds reported that as part of its employment event to hire 62,000 minimum wage, (mostly) part-time workers, it received a whopping 1 million applications. Alas, the US economy is now so pathetic that the bulk of the population will settle for any job and anything to survive. Literally anything. The saddest part: over 938,000 applicants were turned away to wallow in despair. On an optimistic note, we can hope that Burger King needs a few million janitors in the immediate future, too!

$14 trillion U.S. Debt... Budget Surpluses 10 Years Prior

Yes, aside from reality, things in America are really recovering quite nicely, thank you.

Meanwhile, the US still leads the world for spending on election campaigns — the next US president will spend over $1 billion on advertising spots and smear campaigns against rivals: the 9/11 attacks did not unify the country, but rather further drove us apart.

Concurrently, the U.S. public is entertained by meaningless distraction and debate.

While finalizing the final details of the bin Laden operation, Obama was bullied by a financial Oligarch into publicly releasing his full birth certificate to dispel his detractors’ claims that he is not a real American. Could anyone seem more trivial now than The Donald?

Abu Ghraib-Torture & Abuse

Amid the joyful frenzy in the US, all of this reality will be temporarily forgotten. The president’s triumph will allow him short political respite. Truth is, though, Obama can’t undo our lost American decade.

Perhaps the decade would have gone a little differently if US soldiers had killed bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, but the prince of terror vanished for 10 years. With his escape, he probably caused America more damage through our own flailing about than through anything else since 9/11.

So go ahead, America, “Party Likes It’s 1999!”… as if it’s still the heyday prior to the 9/11 attacks… while reality screams it’s 2011 and beyond…

$1.3 Trillion Debt From Wars In Afghanistan & Iraq

Muslim Charity Fundraiser Brings Out America’s Tea Partying Hatred

Angry, Hateful Crowd Protests Muslim Fundraiser for Women’s Shelters (Video)

The Southern California chapter of a Muslim charity called Islamic Circle of North American Relief USA held an event in Orange County (Los Angeles) last month in hopes of raising about $350,000 for “women’s shelters, fighting hunger and homelessness in the area.” So, of course, hundreds of angry, mob-mentality citizens showed up to protest, chanting “go back home” and “Muhammad was a pervert.”

The video, below, shows all too clearly, an irrational, emotional danger percolating in America today.

The danger to such venting of American hatred — displayed here toward families of the islamic faith — is that it is subject to easily, emotionally, violently, suddenly redirecting toward new targets… to the new “them”… other human citizens being true to themselves, others with rights under our constitution… perhaps making you or me “them” and thus a new target.

When will America’s hatred come full force to the other “them?” The Fags, Dykes, Cripples, Diseased, Niggers, Spics, Heebs, Chinks, Ragheads, Artists, …

Whom do you hate America? Because these “identities” are all you.

Does America suffer from self-hatred? An ignorance of who an American is in reality?

Well, one thing is certain, group protests such as this should make us all feel embarrassment for America… feel that we have failed to properly educate our population in the basics of “Civics.” America feels as if it grows more and more ignorant every day… and more reactionary.

Is this the America for which our soldiers have placed their lives on the line? I certainly hope it is not.

Hate comes to Orange County

The Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) released a video of a rally organized by anti-Muslim bigots to protest a February 2010 fundraising event held by an American Muslim relief group for relief work and charity in the U.S.

A few hundred protesters showed up to the rally, which was sponsored by groups such as:

• “We Surround Them OC 912″ (a local Tea Party group),
• Rabbi David Eliezrie of Chabad – Yorba Linda,
• North Orange County Conservative Coalition,
• ACT! for America, and
• Pamela Geller (whose group “Stop the Islamization of America” has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center).
• Elected officials Congressmen Ed Royce and Gary Miller, and Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly also attended and spoke at the protest rally.

The event — held at Yorba Linda Community Center, a facility that has been frequented by Muslim families and businesses over the years — first became a target of anti-Muslim bigots over two of the fundraiser’s speakers, who were to speak on the importance of charity in Islam.

Initial attempts of some groups to have the Yorba Linda Community Center and the Yorba Linda City Council cancel the fundraising event failed… followed by the protest.

In a statement, CAIR-LA said:

We support the First Amendment right of protest\ors anywhere in America to voice their concerns, dissent, and even hatred. However, when our nation’s foundational values of inclusiveness, pluralism and equality are attacked by some in favor of calls for advocating hate and violence, then all Americans have a responsibility to challenge and expose such bigotry and those who enable it.

As the video shows, the rhetoric of the protesters became increasingly venomous toward the families and children who came to attend the ICNA Relief fundraising dinner. Protesters shouted invective statements such as “Go home terrorist,” “Muhammad is a pervert, Muhammad is a child molester,” “Go home and beat your wife, she needs a good beating” at the event-goers.

Even more disturbing was the participation and encouragement of elected officials in promoting the hateful protest rally. Villa Park Councilwoman, Deborah Pauly, while addressing the crowd at the rally, appeared to threaten Muslim event-goers. Congressman Ed Royce (R-40), in a troubling trend of disparaging Islam and its followers, added fuel to the fire by encouraging protesters to continue on with their hate-mongering. The attendance of Congressman Gary Miller (R-42) was a clear surprise, since he previously has engaged with all constituents, including Muslims, toward a better America.

We strongly urge all elected officials in attendance to distance themselves from such an exhibition of hate and bigotry. We further ask residents and elected officials of Yorba Linda, Orange County and other parts of our nation to speak out against such hateful rhetoric and the continued Islamophobia that plagues our nation.

Mass Deception For Mass Destruction

#SupportJulian – Mass Destruction

The war in Iraq was waged with heavy rhetoric. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ became an integral part of our vocabulary. The one thing that will emerge with some clarity, after activists and media have combed through WikiLeaks’ Iraq and Afghan War logs, is the number of people that have died on all sides. Civilians. Soldiers. Doctors. Journalists. Relief workers. Children. The mass destruction that’s been unleashed in the hope of preventing it.

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‘Curveball’: I lied about WMD to hasten Iraq war

Defector admits he fabricated information to try to bring down Saddam regime

Iraqi defector who went by the codename “Curveball” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Al-Janabi’s information was used in part by the U.S. as justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. More than 100,000 people, most of them Iraqi civilians, have died in the war. The U.S. began to withdraw its troops from Iraq last summer.

Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA in Europe, said Curveball’s admission made him feel better about himself.

Drumheller, who says he warned his superiors at the CIA before the 2003 invasion that Curveball might be a liar, said the confession would be a final wake-up call for those who continue to insist there had been weapons of mass destruction.

“The interesting part for me is that he has recanted what he said, which is fascinating in the sense that I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” Drumheller told the Guardian.

It’s 2011! Good Riddance to the ‘Oh-Oh’s': The New Millennium Wasn’t So New, Just Ugly

The “Oh-Oh’s” — “Zero” — years seemed to end almost in the manner they began.

• The great powers, who thought they somehow ruled something, encountered unforeseen players capable of reshuffling all the cards.
• At the dawn of the decade, the transnational terrorist network loudly declared itself, striking at the heart of the contemporary West in the fall of 2001.
• In 2010, an enigmatic computer genius “wiki-ed” out of nowhere to rearrange the global deck of cards.

The damage both of these mysterious forces inflicted, though, was smaller than that imposed from the reaction by nation-states.

• The “crusade against terrorism” declared by the United States after September 11 disarranged international politics, distressed the global system, and delegitimized the pretensions to global leadership of the sole superpower.
• Later, the campaign that followed WikiLeaks’ disclosures exacerbated international frustration, transformed diplomacy into an object of tabloid journalism, and now threatens to undermine America’s moral authority more than the leaks themselves.

“The oh-ohs” were a time of lost illusions.

• The euphoria enveloping the developed portion of humanity at the end of the Cold War and the Nineties quickly evaporated. The world of the 21st century is no more secure or stable than in the previous century — with its…
• wars (both justified and illegally preemptive),
• acts of genocide (in formerly soviet european states as well as in brutish third-world nations), and
• nuclear confrontation (involving new and less stable actor states of Korea, Pakistan, and Iran).

In fact, now things are even less predictable.

• Accepted rules are being erased,
• previously productive institutions are eroding, and
• substantive policy is being replaced by political technicalities.

The atmosphere around the world is like a gigantic magnifying glass through which everything appears larger, and where accepted laws of interaction are distorted under the influence of unforeseen circumstances.

• Intergovernmental relations shed their motivating ideals, returning to more traditional motivating principles — the struggle for influence and prestige. The vacuum of lost ideals has been filled by the growth of nationalist and religious feeling, first of all in the third world, but as a reaction, in the “first” world as well.
• The vaunted Free Market, which seemed like an axiom in the late 90s, retreated by the end of the “Oh-Oh’s” under pressure of failure and blight and then from the corrective growth of state intervention in the economy and a revival of protectionist instincts.
• Surprisingly, though, the ideals of democracy have not only been discredited through their “promotion” by force during the middle of the decade, even while having also been placed in doubt by the spectacular rise of a very undemocratic China, which — it seems — came out of the global financial crisis the winner.
• Oddly, then, Capitalism had its teeth kicked in throughout liberal democratized capitalist states only to succeed most abundantly in totalitarian and undemocratic China, to whom the rest of the world’s smoldering national debt payments shall now be made.

• The North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) undertook a massive expansion after the iron curtain collapsed of its own weight, but then lost its aim and mission.
• The great experiment called the European Union reached its zenith, having made a breakthrough in expansion with eager new members while simultaneously deepening integration.
• The result, though, seems to be increasing developmental imbalance and the weakening of its global role in direct proportion to immersion in its own internal problems.
• Russia zealously enforced tighter domestic controls to ensure centralized, top-down management — consisting of an ineffective apparatus that fails to carry out its proper role and leaves the mighty Russia dependent on others’ dependance on its raw oil and gas resources.

“The Oh-Oh’s” were a time of victories that soon turned pyrrhic — won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor:

• The easy occupation of Iraq (“Mission Accomplished”) was followed by years of chaos, the results of which are uncertain.
• Tehran has already been declared the winner in Iraq, having rid itself of its arch enemy through the force of American arms.
• The quick toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan turned into a hopeless, multi-year quagmire for America and NATO.
• It would be difficult to prove the impotence of force more convincingly: The mightiest military power in history is incapable of conquering one of the most backward nations.

• Military victories in Chechnya, where Russia defended its integrity, led to the emergence of a territory practically ungovernable for Moscow, and which is having a growing impact on the rest of the country.
• Russia’s success in defending its compatriots in South Ossetia (Georgia) has led to a long chain of foreign policy difficulties and a gaping drain through which money floods out, all for the sake of a permanent “restoration” of a newly-created artificial state.
• While the Russian government is ready to fight to keep autonomous Georgia’s “South Ossetia” under its influence, Russia’s citizens are prepared to keep these “aliens” from becoming fellow countrymen.

At the end of the Nineties, no one could foresee what is occurring today. And so it is meaningless to attempt to predict what things will be like ten years hence. The world continues its motion from the irrevocable past to the indeterminate future.

The new “Tens” are covered in fog. They are fraught with new conflicts and will be a time of great decision-making that will determine the development of the nation and globe for the first half of the 21st century. As time continues its relentless march, the cost of error is rapidly multiplying in a technologically interconnected world.