America The Stupidful

	10:09 PM I Like to Watch: America the stupidful! As our nation falls to swine, two of our best comedies -- "South Park" and "Paradise Hotel 2" -- will chart our decline in laughter (through the tears)! from Salon by Heather Havrilesky This morning at the Coffee Bean, I spotted a bottle of water in the display case that had the words "Fat Free" written in a huge font on the label. Yes, there's no doubt about it now. We are truly a nation in decline. I remember when bottled water really started to take off, it worried me that water labels said things like "The Thirst Quencher!" or "Nature's Best Hydrator!" Now we know that our cultural downward slide is almost complete. Either the marketing departments have finally accepted the fact that they have to appeal to a country of Neanderthals, or the marketing departments themselves are staffed by half-wits and numbskulls and confused, slow children. "Hey, look, guys, let's not forget to remind people that there's no fat in water!" "Yes, because... there's only water in water." "Right. In fact, maybe we should put 'Low sodium' and 'No sugar!' and 'Wheat-free; and 'Lactose-free' on there, too." "Definitely! Consumers need to understand that water is the most robust, scalable solution to the ongoing challenge of thirst."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Warfare State Of Our Union

"Let's face it," says, Norm Solomon.

Face it, you say? Hell, we faced it a long time ago. Many of us have been fighting that dark state on and off for years.

My question is, what the hell do we do about it now?

It has to be stopped! It is killing us all and our planet.

We are reaching the end of the road, so to speak.

It's do or die, now.

There are some very sick tickets running quite a few countries around the world. Ours is one of those countries. There are some even sicker ones running the Multinational corporations that own the governments.

Can't anyone think of a way to make money off peace?

Published on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us

by Norman Solomon

The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.

While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes — and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative — such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.

The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able — and willing — to destroy all of humanity.

We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” — including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.

Maybe it’s too unpleasant to acknowledge that we’ve been living in a warfare state for so long. And maybe it’s even more unpleasant to acknowledge that the warfare state is not just “out there.” It’s also internalized; at least to the extent that we pass up countless opportunities to resist it.

Like millions of other young Americans, I grew into awakening as the Vietnam War escalated. Slogans like “make love, not war” — and, a bit later, “the personal is political” — really spoke to us. But over the decades we generally learned, or relearned, to compartmentalize: as if personal and national histories weren’t interwoven in our pasts, presents and futures.

One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the biggest military contractor in academia — and gave a speech. “Our government has become preoccupied with death,” he said, “with the business of killing and being killed.”

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war’s end, Wald pointed out: “We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled — decisions that have been made.”

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing — whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social safety-nets at home — thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of “national security” that brandishes the Pentagon’s weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.

As it happened, for reasons both “personal” and “political” — more accurately, for reasons indistinguishable between the two — my own life fell apart and began to reassemble itself during the same season of 1969 when George Wald gave his speech, which he called “A Generation in Search of a Future.”

Political and personal histories are usually kept separate — in how we’re taught, how we speak and even how we think. But I’ve become very skeptical of the categories. They may not be much more than illusions we’ve been conned into going through the motions of believing.

We actually live in concentric spheres, and “politics” suffuses households as well as what Martin Luther King Jr. called “The World House.” Under that heading, he wrote in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.”

While trying to understand the essence of what so many Americans have witnessed over the last half century, I worked on a book (titled “Made Love, Got War“) that sifts through the last 50 years of the warfare state… and, in the process, through my own life. I haven’t learned as much as I would have liked, but some patterns emerged — persistent and pervasive since the middle of the 20th century.

The warfare state doesn’t come and go. It can’t be defeated on Election Day. Like it or not, it’s at the core of the United States — and it has infiltrated our very being.

What we’ve tolerated has become part of us. What we accept, however reluctantly, seeps inward. In the long run, passivity can easily ratify even what we may condemn. And meanwhile, in the words of Thomas Merton, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.”

The triumph of the warfare state degrades and suppresses us all. Even before the weapons perform as guaranteed.

Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” will be published in early fall. The foreword is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

When Evil Comes To America...

It already has.

It's been creeping all around us over 40 years. If we don't find a way to stop it now, we are doomed, and we should be.

August 15, 2007

Bush and Rove: Collaborators in the Theater of the Moral Lie

By Andrew Bard Schmookler

This essay first appeared here in late 2005. It is, I believe, my best analysis of the nature and impact of Karl Rove. And so I post it here again in the wake of this week's announcement that this man --perhaps the most pernicious figure in the political history of the United States-- would be leaving his position in the White House.

***********************

If evil were to take over America, it would have to do it with a smiling face and postures of righteousness.

Most of the evil rulers in history made no pretense to moral virtue. Maintaining their power through terror, they simply intimidated people into submission.

But in a democracy, evil can rise to power only with the people’s consent—at least in the first stage. And this means that deception replaces brute force as evil’s route to the throne.

Evil has thus ascended to power in America disguised as the good.

This is why the partnership between George W. Bush and Karl Rove has proved so fatefully dangerous for America, for the two men bring profoundly complementary talents to the theater of moral deception.

Rove As Dramatist of the Moral Lie

From the beginning, Karl Rove has been drawn to the staging of morally deceptive theater to gain political power.

Twenty years ago, according to James Moore, et al., the authors of Bush’s Brain, he faked the wiretapping of his own office—a gesture that made his candidate appear the victim of dirty tricks from the other side.
And he’s apparently orchestrated the smearing of George W. Bush’s opponents in one campaign after another—from a whisper campaign in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race to insinuate that Gov. Ann Richards was a lesbian, to the behind-the-scenes injection into the South Carolina primary in 2000 that Sen. John McCain had fathered a black child, to the character assassination employed against both Gore and Kerry in Bush’s two presidential campaigns.

Rove’s now significant role in American history thus rests on his genius in dramatizing lies to persuade people to see his political enemies as morally worse than they really are. These moral lies are the democratic equivalent of assassination in regimes where swords rather than votes lead to power.
But Rove’s strategy of dramatizing moral lies to slander his enemies becomes really powerful when combined with its other half: the lie that presents his side as morally better than it is.

So the great dramatist of the moral lie also needed a talent for casting. And it should thus come as no surprise that the partnership with George W. Bush was formed at the initiation of Karl Rove.

In Bush, he recognized that he’d found an actor who was not only heir to great power but also adept at pretending to a righteousness really quite foreign to his true nature.

Bush as the Great Pretender

However George W. Bush became adept at pretending to be a better man than he is, we know that putting himself together in an effective way took him a very long time—a time marked by many failures covered over by bravado and anaesthetized by alcohol.

And we can see still in his body –in his posturing like some sort of gunslinger, arms out from his side; in his swagger and strut; in the unnatural puffing out of the chest—powerful signs that this is a man who really does not know who he is. He seems constantly seeking the pose of the man in the white hat, an imitation of the heroes of movie westerns.

His infamous call to the insurgents to “Bring it on!” early in the conflict, as if it were he and not the soldiers he’d sent into battle who would carry the brunt of the fight, is one indication of this President’s deep lack of self-awareness.

This same profound estrangement from the reality of his role in his falsely righteous dramas was displayed back when the hunt for Osama bin Ladin was still on. On this occasion, the President stood before microphones on the White House lawn mocking bin Ladin for cowardice in sending other men off to face death while he remained protected in some hidden cave. This from the most protected man in the world, who’d just sent his countrymen’s sons and daughters to fight his war!

How many of the lies this president enacts before the world are lies he tells himself?

The best liars are those who believe their own lies.

With Bush, as in human affairs generally, it is hard to know where to draw the line between “really doesn’t know” and “doesn’t want to know.” Bush’s Brain author James Moore says about the Bush-Rove partnership:
“The President is oblivious, and chooses to stay oblivious, to the things that Karl does, and the contradictions about morality that Karl does. The whole concept, and it works in all of his campaigns, is the candidate or the officeholder takes the high road -- talks policy, talks moral clarity, and honor, and principle -- while the operative does all the dirty work down in the ditch, and splashes the mud, and spreads the scurrilous smears and rumors and whisper campaigns that have the desired political effect to keep the candidate elected.”

Right now in America the buck stops with a man who talks about restoring integrity to the Oval Office while the “architect” he hires is a specialist in perpetrating moral fraud.

He’s someone who talks about how we’re fighting for “Freedom,” but arranges political events from which people wearing T-shirts favoring his opponent are excluded, and has his Pentagon use the “Patriot Act” to treat peaceful protesters against his policies as a “threat.“

He parades his devotion to a culture of life, but sows the seeds of death at home, around the world, and in the biosphere.

He talks about “compassion” but can mock the pleas for mercy he rejected from the woman –born again, like himself—whom he’d put to death in Texas.

He promised to be a uniter, not a divider, but has used divisiveness as his primary political tactic.

He arranges photo ops with his friendly arm around some black child or another, but fights hardest for policies that further weaken the disadvantaged.

He campaigned saying that the United States should be a “humble” nation, but is now reviled around the world as an arrogant bully.

In this dangerous period of the moral lie, regrettably, this list of discrepancy between the saying and the doing could be expanded almost indefinitely.

The Need to Spread the Moral Truth

It is through such moral hypocrisy that evil could gain a foothold in a democratic society like America. These rulers could not shoot their way into the White House. They had to sell themselves to a willing public.
And so it is that the takeover of America by evil forces has been achieved by such outstanding dramatists of the moral lie as these two. But unless the false righteousness of these moral liars can be exposed, this can be but the first stage.

For when evil is combined with power, it can spread its ways, destroying the structures of good order that stand in its way. So we see these forces now tearing apart the foundations of our democracy—degrading the discourse on which democratic deliberation depends, dismantling the protections against the abuse of power, polarizing Americans into warring groups.

So if evil can advance far enough through the moral lie it can gradually remove the mask. Behind this presidency, there are forces with no ingratiating smiles, forces ready to show their true faces should the time come when power has no need for such pretense.

The stakes could not be higher.

At present, we in America can talk about these things without worrying about the jackboots at the door. But unless we can awaken our deceived countrymen to the truth about these rulers –unless this country is moved to repudiate fully not only these present leaders, but also the ruthless forces for whom they are the phony public face—that may not always be true.



Authors Website: http://nonesoblind.org/

Authors Bio: Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

American Fictional Narrative

When Will America Awaken from "The Bush Ultimatum"?

Submitted by mark karlin
on Sat, 08/11/2007 - 7:49am. Editorials

If you don’t like a thinking-person’s action film or don’t want to know some of the details of the just-released "The Bourne Ultimatum," then stop reading here.

Of course, being BuzzFlash, this is not a movie review of a hot box office seller, but rather a reflection on its political "message" – and its larger symbolism as representing the difference between a fictional narrative and reality.

If you are out of the loop with Hollywood box-office hits, the third sequel in the red-hot "Bourne" series, starring Matt Damon, is drawing in record crowds to the theaters this past week.

But there may be more at work than the pulsating "James Bond in search of his real identity" quality to Matt Damon’s rapid-paced survival skills that is attracting viewers.

According to a Chicago Tribune cultural writer, Julia Keller:

People may be drawn to the film by the promise of thrilling chase scenes, but what makes it deeply satisfying are three words of dialogue. Admittedly, audiences haven't even had a chance to hear those words before they fork over the admission price. Yet good movie dialogue can be prescient; it can capture the zeitgeist so well that when you hear it for the first time, it already sounds like an echo -- an echo of what you, and millions of your fellow countrywomen and countrymen, have been thinking for a while.

The three words: "This isn't us."

They're spoken by CIA officer Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), when asked why she's helping the bamboozled fugitive known as Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). She means: Yes, covert action is crucial in a dangerous world, but there is a line. A line you don't cross. Because if you do, you've broken something more critical than a window. Something precious and irreplaceable.

The three words summarize the national discomfort over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, over the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. It's a discomfort that knows no party or ideology. It is part of being an American, of believing in the uniqueness of our ideals.

A movie is just a movie. Occasionally, though, in the midst of a fiction that's slicing through the streets on hyper-drive, something odd suddenly shows up in the rearview mirror: reality.

BuzzFlash won’t ruin the film, particularly if you aren’t familiar with the prior two Bourne films, but suffice it to say, the bad guys in "The Bourne Ultimatum" turn out to be a CIA head and Second-in-Command who are running a black-ops department that is basically the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture-rendition-illegal detention-murder program. The makers of the movie leave little doubt about that.

Damon, in the three Bourne films, has a been a vulnerable super-killer trying to find out his real identity and make amends for his actions. In "The Bourne Ultimatum," he is ultimately assisted, as the Tribune reviewer alludes to, by a hard-nosed but patriotic top-level CIA official, Pamela Landy (played with just the right amount of controlled nuance by Joan Allen).

And that is where the issue of who is a true patriot comes to a head, as the Tribune critic identifies. For Pamela Landy the sanctioned killing of anyone who might expose the clandestine black-ops program is "not what she signed up for." The murder done in the name of America is now being conducted to protect those who launched the illegal initiative, not to protect the national security of the nation.

Individuals in the CIA have seized the power of who shall live and who shall die, and their decisions, in the case of "The Bourne Ultimatum," are subject to their own personal needs to keep the program secret in order to protect themselves.

The conversion of Landy from blindly loyal CIA official to patriotic whistleblower is, indeed, the route so many Americans have traveled since 9/11.

"The Bourne Ultimatum," of course, is Hollywood fast-paced fantasy, based on a series of fictional suspense novels by Robert Ludlum. When you leave the theater, you are eased back into the reality of everyday life in America: family problems, cellphone calls, people walking on the street, the lure of restaurants and stores.

And like "The Bourne Ultimatum," America has been held hostage to a fictional narrative since 9/11 that has virtually nothing to do with the reality at hand when it comes to America’s needs, including our national security. The continued acceptance of the Bush fictional narrative about Iraq is like being in a darkened movie theater, in which reality only seeps in when someone opens the rear door and a splash of light momentarily enters into the darkened room.

A majority of the members of Congress continues to pretend that America’s national security can only be protected by supporting the deeply and profoundly detached from reality fiction peddled daily by the Bush Administration. But that fiction is a destructive one, because it is so divorced from reality that it leaves us as a nation more vulnerable to terrorism with each passing day. It is a fiction created to hide other political and personal agendas.

But one day, Congress – should no patriots like Pamela Landy emerge (and let’s not forget the bionic Jason Bourne who seeks to restore his own purity of motive) – is going to have to leave the movie theater of politics showing "The Bush Ultimatum" and deal with the wreckage that has been left in the wake of running a nation’s foreign and domestic policy based on powerful speciously constructed narratives that steam roll over the pavement of reality.

When the credits for "The Bourne Ultimatum" roll, we have been temporarily given the hope that the evil "Masters of the Universe" (read Cheney, Bush, Gonzales and Rumsfeld) have been exposed and brought down.

But then you realize, as your eyes hit the first news stand and you read about Congress giving the discredited perjurer and "torture boy" Alberto Gonzales control over spying on Americans without a warrant -- and that generals are predicting an indefinite stay in Iraq -- that reality is far more harsh than fiction.

The Bush handlers – particularly Rove and Cheney – offer us a fiction of a noble, benevolent empire. "The Bourne Ultimatum" symbolically reveals the tarnished and betrayed integrity of our nation that has been compromised by the reality of what is being done in our name and disguised, with the help of the corporate media, by an endlessly unfolding "Scheherazade" White House narrative. It does it in an adrenaline-paced thriller that tells a symbolic story.

Isn’t it tragically ironic that in a Hollywood movie -- a fantasy -- reality and morality triumph over men of dastardly hubris, while when we leave the fictional film we enter a world not of political truth, but a world of another deadly fiction – one in which the cover-up continues?

In the real world we walk back into, the masters of war and diabolical schemes that cut the heart out of our Constitution are still casting a spell upon the nation.

Reality will, one day, hit America very hard, alas, very hard indeed.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Europeans and Japanese Do It Better

Which means they are better at living their Democratic principles than we are. Our so-called "bastion of freedom," built on certain inalienable civil rights is a cruel joke.

The French Connections
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 23 July 2007

There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow's 1992 book, "Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America," which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.

Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe's slow growth and Japan's decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac complained that the Internet was an "Anglo-Saxon network," and he had a point - France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.

What most Americans probably don't know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved - in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links - it's the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our "high speed" connections are painfully slow by other countries' standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we're lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn't even in the top 10.

What happened to America's Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot - or was persuaded by special interests to ignore - the reality that sometimes you can't have effective market competition without effective regulation.

You see, the world may look flat once you're in cyberspace - but to get there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.

America's Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators didn't let that happen - they forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to ensure that this open competition would continue - but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal's editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband - if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that's much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

It's too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it's interesting to learn that health care isn't the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.