Water Color Painting “The Storming of the Bastille” by Jean-Pierre Houël (1789)

Here is a brain teaser: Why are there poor, or female, or black, or Hispanic conservatives? Are there actually poor or black or Hispanic or female people in this country that feel like we should “conserve” the status quo?  Are the people whose very livelihood and civil rights are under attack on a daily basis really okay with that?

Perhaps they think right wingers call themselves “conservatives” because they want to conserve some utopian idea that does not yet exist? But conservatives must have “the truth” because they are always promoting “true” things like capitalism and the inferiority of everything else.

Take the oft repeated phrase “capitalism works.”  This is usually shoveled out in contrast to the line: “communism does not work.”   Note that you could easily substitute “socialism” for “communism” since the speakers that use either soundbite seldom, if ever, understand the distinction between the two. 

For most of my life, I have heard the American party line: Capitalism good – Socialism bad.  If you are a billionaire and okay with the fact that your neighbors are homeless, sick and starving, that may be true for you.  After all, who has the right to “redistribute wealth” by taking some of your gourmet coffee money without your permission just to feed some hungry brat whose mom can’t find work since you moved her job overseas.  Unless you think there is something wrong with uninhibited greed, capitalists are not immoral.  They are simply amoral.  You did not terminate her job to hurt her.  As a true capitalist you had no choice but to maximize your profits by going elsewhere to use people without the pesky expensive baggage of thinking they have some “right” to a living wage, healthcare, and safe working conditions. 

Corporate mouthpieces often use the analogy of the three legged stool.  You have probably seen the slideshow presentations explaining that whatever concept they are marketing at the time is based on three equally important things.  If any one of the vital ingredients is missing, the stool cannot stand.  Let’s apply that analogy to capitalism. Imagine a three legged stool sitting in the middle of a cow pasture called the global economy. The philosophy of capitalism is supported by one deceptively simple idea.  But it is also propped up by two other legs that only exist in the minds of the true believers.  The first leg posits that people are basically greedy.  And if you give greed a safe nurturing environment in which to grow there is no limit to the amount of wealth the greediest people can accumulate. 

The second leg stands or falls on the premise that the more wealth greedy people accumulate, the better it will be for everyone else.  This philosophy was popularized by the patron saint of American capitalism, Ronald Reagan.  He called it “Trickle Down economics.”  This theory is often promoted by religious fanatics and is similar to the Biblical statement that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table.”  [For all of you Biblical purists, I am aware that this statement was not made in the context of economic theory.  I realize it was actually attributed to a Gentile woman who wanted Jesus to heal her in spite of the fact that she was not a Jew and therefore not within the scope of Jesus’ agenda.  But you get the idea.]  Greedy people don’t have a direct interest in benefiting the surfs.  But the peasants will reap bountiful treasures as an unintended side effect of their selfish activities. 

The third leg is related to the second.  The insatiable appetite for more, by its very nature requires investment and growth from the greedy folks at the top.  Therefore (we are supposed to believe), they will grow their good ol’ red, white and blue American businesses by employing more surfs.  Or to put it another way, as long as there is a rich old ass that needs wiping, there will be more and more jobs for the rest of us.  It’s win-win! 

But that first leg (the only one that isn’t total bullshit) also has an Achilles heel.  It is based on a pyramid scheme.  Unfortunately, there is a limit to the total amount of wealth and resources that can be sucked up by the selfish Pharaohs.  The first Amway distributors do great.  The guys at the next tier do pretty well.  But those that buy in after a while thinking they will someday reach the top, have a hard lesson ahead of them.  For everyone sitting at the top of the pyramid, there are ten thousand peasants with an upside down mortgage and a basement full of soap products no one really wants.  This vast majority of schmucks are scrambling for the crumbs of wealth that fall from the American corporate tables. I say American tables because so many of the crumbs have already been exported to the lands of child labor and sweatshops.

We know from the examples of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, and France under Louis the XVI, that unlimited greed eventually begins to devour the minimum level of resources necessary for everyone else’s survival.  When peasants get too hungry, the empire is in trouble.  So here we are with record unemployment and most of us sharing the crumbs of what (in spite of the lies we have been told) are clearly finite resources.  That what we share are the crumbs is no weak analogy.  From 2002 to 2007, the income of the top one percent of households grew ten times faster than that of the bottom ninety percent.  That is the largest disparity in American income since 1928.  Yet, as the following rant by Bill Maher points out, the conservatives go berserk and imply you are unpatriotic if you dare complain about it.

If only the goal of the conservatives was to protect the equality and fairness for everyone that brave, progressive people wrested from them in 60s and 70s, their objectives would be worthy of support. Instead, we are watching the dismantling of those triumphs and their rapid replacement with a hypocritical socio-economic cast system that conserves the wealth and power of a select few at everyone else’s expense.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD

International Military Tribunal Trial of War Criminals at Nuremberg

It cost the Dixie Chicks a lot of money to proclaim that they were ashamed to have come from the same state as George W. Bush.  Fans called radio stations demanding a boycot of the Dixie Chick’s records.  But that was 2003.  And there was a lot the rest of us did not yet know. Those of us that were paying attention already knew Bush and his cowardly cohorts Cheney and Rumsfeld (all three of whom had found their own ways to evade service in a previous unnecessary and unconscionable war), were directly responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands of human beings for their own economic and political reasons. We knew they were liars. And we knew they were sending brave soldiers to be killed and mutilated without the necessary equipment to protect their selves because as Rumsfeld glibly stated “you go to war with the army you have.”  Apparently that includes an unnecessary war against a country that never attacked us in the first place.

Of course, these three musketeers were not exactly suffering. In 2008, Bush proudly exclaimed that “Laura and I are having the time of our lives.” Yes. While our government was sponsoring war crimes in various secret concentration camps around the world, life was pretty good for our President. His biggest problem was how to get through his remaining term, then get out there and “replenish the ol’ coffers.”

Because we had so many congressmen pretending to be too stupid to realize or who were too crooked to admit that drowning people constitutes torture; and because he got his own lawyers to say it was okay, all of his wildest fantasies of completely dominating people that could not fight back were within his grasp. The secret meetings must have closely resembled this scene from the movie Yellowbeard.

Things went smoothly for a while. Bush was replaced by a new Democratic President that did not have the backbone, the resolve, or the depth of human decency necessary to hold the former President and his administration accountable for their actions. Given this perfect storm of complacency, it looked like he just may have gotten away with it.

Meanwhile, Julien Assange made the news again this week because the systematic plan to extradite him for crimes they have not had time to fully invent has hit a snag. No one has been able to come up with an actual crime Assange has committed in any country, not to mention the U.S. other than to embarass its top brass. But getting him is still a top priority. His lawyers fear he will wind up at Guantanamo or worse yet, one of the secret concentration camps we have yet to close down around the world.

Oh yea, and one other small thing - so small in fact that it barely made the news at all this week. It seems that our former President had to cancel his trip to Geneva because if he leaves this country other governments less timid than our own will place him on trial for war crimes against their citizens.

Now isn’t that embarrassing? Thanks largely to his insistence on going around bragging about how he was above our laws and international law, our former leader cannot leave the country for fear of being arrested and held accountable for his crimes. It looks like Bush will have to replenish the ol’ coffers with money from his right-wing groupies here in the States. If he wanders too far from home he could wind up finally having to answer for what he did to his own people and the rest of the world. And it doesn’t look like he could handle that.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD

Raoul Wallenberg Passport Photo from WikiMedia Commons Used with Permission

In 1912, three months after the death of his father, a little boy was born with what should have been a silver spoon in his mouth near Stockholm Sweden. He grew up in a wealthy home with his mother (who remarried six years later), stepfather, one brother and one sister. His family was well-connected. His grandfather was a Swedish diplomat and envoy to Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sofia. He was educated in America and became fluent in at least four languages.

It was in 1944, after the Hungarian government undertook a massive deportation of Jews to almost certain death in Auschwitz that the young man, Raoul Wallenberg, secured his place as one of the great heroes of recorded history. Ultimately, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported. Most of them were killed on arrival. But tens of thousands of people (some estimate as high as 100,000) were saved by a small group of volunteers led by Wallenberg.

After creating a phony Swedish Embassy encompassing 32 buildings in Budapest, Wallenberg began disseminating “protective passports” to Hungarian Jews. He had the implicit – but not the official support of the Swedish government which had denied him any assistance beyond looking the other way while he forged official looking documents. The “embassy” was a front. The “passports” were created by Wallenberg himself and were not issued by the authority of the Swedish government. For all practical purposes, he was on his own.

If you ever get the chance to visit the Yad VaShem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, take some time to view the archived video interviews with some of the survivors. One of them describes an instance in which Wallenberg came into a warehouse filled with families that were trying to evade deportation. The eye witness account says Wallenberg was crying when he entered the building. He said “I wish I could save all of you.” “But I can only take your children.” “Please let them come with me.” This story was told by one of the surviving children.

Wallenberg’s driver describes another account that illustrates how determined and how persistent he was in saving a trainload of people that were about to be shipped to Auschwitz.

Then he climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colours. I don’t remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it!

Today, January 27^th, is recognized around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Even Iran of all places will mark the occasion. International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be honored in Israel in addition to the better known national holiday, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), which is (with a few exceptions) observed on the 27^th of Nissan on the Jewish calendar and occurs in the spring on Western calendars. The Jewish holiday is also known as “Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah” (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism).

About 63 years ago (conflicting accounts place his death between 1945 and 1947), Raoul Wallenberg, one of the greatest human beings who ever lived, is believed after having been imprisoned and tortured to have died in a Soviet prison camp. It was not the Nazis, but the Soviet Union that finally got him.

More than 30 years later (1979), one of the world’s sorriest excuses for a human being, Joseph Mengele, died while swimming in Brazil having enjoyed a comfortable, mostly secure and prosperous life. He never had to face responsibility for his actions. With the exception of having been born into privilege, the only thing these two men seem to have shared is the amazing lack of justification for how each of their lives turned out.

Let’s recap. A successful business man, with a perfectly peaceful, safe and secure livelihood, left Sweden and put everything on the line to save innocent people from one of the greatest human tragedies in history. His life, his future and any dreams he may have had were utterly and completely destroyed.

Meanwhile, a subhuman dirt bag that made a career out of injecting dye into the eyes of children, amputating their limbs and mutilating them for no better reason than to get his name on the books for medical experiments; a cold, hateful asshole that calmly sent innocent people to gas chambers on a daily basis, went on after the war to enjoy the life he stole from so many others for the total amount of time Raoul Wallenberg lived on this planet.

Many years ago, I ran across a calendar that was designed to help the uninitiated understand the meaning of the Jewish holy days. For each holiday, a brief description of its historical purpose was included. Under the holiday “Yom Kippur” (Day of Atonement) was the traditional description “Man is judged by God.” This made sense because I understood the concept that this was a day on which the books of accounting were opened and God would decide the fate of every Jew based on the kind of person he had been in the preceding year. But the description for Yom HaShoah really floored me. Under the name of that holiday was the description “God is judged my Man.” I struggled to understand how the Jewish people could make such an audacious statement!

I would later learn that the Holocaust was a turning point for many Jewish people. There were some that would dig in their heels and view the whole thing as a test of their faith – as evidence that there are things in the universe that people just cannot understand. But others saw this as evidence that if there ever was a covenant between God and the Jewish People, God had utterly failed to keep his end of the bargain. The Holocaust was an equal opportunity atrocity. The best of people and the worst of people having been identified as Jews (or Communists, or homosexuals, or Jehovah’s Witnesses) were captured, tortured and killed. It made no difference if you were an Atheist, a Christian or a fanatically observant Jew. If you were one of the targets or perceived as sympathetic to one of the targets, you were next. And there was no God to save you.

I know the Conservatives tend to panic when anyone dares to compare their world view and policies to those of the Nazis. That is an exercise of free speech reserved for their guys, Beck and Limbaugh. But if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. . . you know the rest.

For all of the things the Holocaust may be, ancient history is not one of them. Some of the survivors are still with us. They will tell you that most of the victims did not see it coming until it was too late to escape. When Hitler came to power the German people were suffering a terrible economy, massive unemployment, and a sense of national despair. Waging unnecessary and unprovoked war created a huge boost for the economy. Depriving the people of basic human rights such as fair trials, the right to face their accusers and confront the evidence against them, and the right to legal counsel made the despicable acts of a totalitarian government not only possible, but relatively easy.

Like our modern politicians, the Nazis had a “solution” to offer the public: eliminate the gays, the “communists”, and the Jews. But hate is nurtured by an abundance mentality. There is always room for more. Today it seems that the voices of rational, educated, compassionate human beings are drowned out by a sea of misfits with a flag in one hand, a bible in the other, and a hateful idiot in the middle. The gays, the communists/socialists, and the Jews are blamed for creating all of the problems with which they, as categories had nothing to do. But move over for the Mexicans, the Muslims, and the “Liberals.” If we could all understand how important it is to hate those people, all modern problems would be solved. Combine that thinking with the ignorant rhetoric about “Second Amendment Solutions” and the blind, stupid “faith” that we are unconditionally the best country on earth (even if we torture people and hold our leaders above the law); and that God just likes us better than everyone else, and we will surely repeat the atrocities of World War II before the end of this generation. Ignoring what happened before makes it easier to believe we have ‘the truth.” But it will not save us from ourselves – or the rest of the world from us.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD

Artist: Elihu Vedder (1836–1923). Photographed 2007 by Carol Highsmith Used with Permission

Our politicians may often look stupid.  And some of them surely are.  But their advisors and corporate handlers know exactly what they are doing.  And you can’t help but admire the way they have perfected the art of lying across the ages. 

We all know if you can see their lips beginning to open, a lie is just over the horizon.  In fact, because lying is about the only thing they consistently do, we can often get a fairly reliable handle on what is going on by assuming the opposite of anything they say. 

Prior to the end of World War II, this country’s military was headed by an outfit surprisingly called exactly what it was, the “Department of War.”  In 1947, the National Security Act joined the Department of War with the Department of the Navy to form the new entity known as the “Department of Defense.”  Since then, we have fervently “defended” ourselves against North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, poverty, drugs, and terrorism – not a single one of which ever actually attacked us. 

Remember the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” which was actually designed to turn over the remaining 4% of our nation’s forests to the logging companies for their short-term profits; or the same administration’s “Clear Skies Initiative” that actually increased the amount of air pollution corporations are allowed to spew into the air? 

But why stop with destroying the environment for fun and profit when the same techniques can be used to gut the Bill of Rights and do it right under the peasant’s noses?  How about legislation that creates an end-run around all of the most basic due process protections afforded to human beings by the Constitution?  Simply vest the power in the President to strip any American citizen of the right to know the charges against him, the right to confront his accusers, the right to the presumption of innocence, the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial (or any trial at all for that matter), and the right to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure, all by simply proclaiming that he is an “enemy combatant.”  Viewed in a traditional sense, this would be the most un-American of all possible legislation.  But what would we call such a draconian, dictatorial law?  Let’s call this one the “Patriot Act.” 

These folks are nothing if not tenacious.  With all of that bull waste flying around, they still found time to convert their original pretense that Iraq had nuclear weapons, into the ambiguous and conveniently easier to frame assertion that it had “weapons of mass destruction,” before lying us into a war.  Unfortunately, in its haste to start the war long before the thugs from Saudi Arabia attacked New York City, the Bush administration had already invented the euphemism for that invasion: “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”  So they decided to capitalize on the terrorist attack and pretend the reason for the invasion was all about the 9/11 attacks.  But they forgot to change the euphemism to something like “Operation Defending the Homeland.” 

As it turns out, we were so interested in “freeing” the Iraqi people that we really never intended to leave.  That is unless you really believe a foreign nation that intended to leave would have spent $592 million on the biggest embassy on this planet – a 104 acre community with its own movie theater, retail shops, restaurants, schools and fire station.  Of course an embassy of that magnitude will need a couple of branch offices with a price tag of $1.5 billion.  Our grandchildren picked up the tab for that one too. 

No matter.  Having gotten away with all these other steaming piles of insult to our intelligence, there was no reason to think the surfs would wonder why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” required permanently entrenching the U.S. presence there by building an embassy that is literally larger than the Vatican in Iraq (where the oil is) while millions of Americans were losing their jobs, their homes, their pensions, and their healthcare back home. 

I clearly recall back in 2000, arguing with my conservative friends that Bush was absolutely going to invade Iraq, regardless of what Saddam Hussein said or did.  Then in 2002, they actually argued with me that the invasion was all about 9/11.  When I pointed out that Bush and Cheney had been determined to invade Iraq since before 9/11, they persisted in asking me, “okay, what was the real reason for the invasion.”  I told them I wasn’t sure.  But that it most likely had to do with the massive corporate profits to be made by the pre-promised, no-bid contracts awarded to the life-long buddies of the three corporate stooges, Cheney, Bush and Blair. 

In retrospect, I now realize that was part of a larger picture.  The key to understanding how things got so FUBAR is to stop thinking like a rational human being.  The people in charge of our lives simply don’t live in our world.  And for all of the pretence and red, white and blue rhetoric, they will never let us into theirs.  In their world, we are objects in a toolbox, nothing more and nothing less. 

In his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn proposed an approach to scientific inquiry that he called a “paradigm shift.”  As later applied to history, this concept (completely lost on today’s narrow-minded fundamentalists that want to burn, ban or modify classics such as the writings of Mark Twain), acknowledges the fact that events don’t happen in a vacuum.  In other words, you cannot truly understand a statement or an event unless you view it in its own historical context.  If we want to understand where a writer was coming from, we must first get into his skin and view his world from his perspective. 

The same holds true for making sense out of the seemingly illogical and blatantly foolish words and actions of our boss, our politicians, or of the corporations that own them.  Understanding their world view as opposed to the world view held by flesh and blood human beings helps explain why things are as we find them today. 

Political advisors and students of history understand the importance of catering to the aristocracy while keeping things just comfortable enough for the peasants to avoid threatening their universe.  As Machivelli observed, “All well-ordered states and all wise princes have been diligent in seeking to avoid exasperating the nobles and in keeping the common people satisfied.  For this is one of the most important duties that falls to a prince.” 

As you know, I often refer back to George Orwell’s classic 1984. As far as I can tell, no one has so accurately and so perfectly described what we now see going on before our eyes. Consider Orwell’s description of this basic historic principle:

If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. . . In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

The following video is meant as satire. But like all of the best satire, its underlying message is right on point. This principle is just as true in the corporate governance of nations as it is in the workplace. 

Essential to this mentality is the constant drum beat to keep the peasants afraid. Granted, money is a factor for as Chris Hedges points out, there really is no business like war business.

The corporations, no matter how badly the wars are going, make huge profits from the conflicts. They have no interest in turning off their money-making machine. Let Iraqis die. Let Afghans die. Let Pakistanis die. Let our own die. And the mandarins in Congress and the White House, along with their court jesters on the television news shows, cynically “feel our pain” and sell us out for bundles of corporate cash.

But the utility of war is deeper than that. War is in fact necessary to keep the riff-raff in their place. According to Machiavelli, it is indespensible to maintaining power. “A prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war. . .” Orwell understood the economic and the psychological importance of keeping the people in a state of war. Goods must be produced. But the state should never allow the peasants to derive too much benefit from them. For “if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.”

Clearly, the most efficient way to continue production while not lifting the people out of poverty is to expend it all toward the process of war:

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labor that would build several hundred cargo ships.

This it would seem is the missing piece of the puzzle. Why throw two billion dollars a week into a war experts agree we can never win? Why bail out the banks with government money instead of helping them by helping their customers? It’s the best way to keep surfs like you and me from getting comfortable enough to look behind the curtain.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD

We Will All Feel Better When This Guy is in Charge!

There are classes of people that grew up in this country with an understanding that they would always have to work to get ahead. Some of them would go to college, some to trade schools, and some would start at the bottom and learn everything in real time. Most of these folks felt privileged to have been born in a place and time that offered opportunities for individuals to succeed. They never resented having to work for a chance at a better life. 

Then there is another class of people that were born into money. Some of them are good people that understand and appreciate how lucky they were to come into a world all set up to accommodate their comfort. And then there are those that aren’t all that bright or conscious of the needs of their fellow human beings. 

Those who know me best know I am no water boy for the Democrats. I completely get it that the representatives of both major political parties work for the pimps that put them on the street. The one thing they both have in common is that they do not by any stretch of the imagination work for you and me. But I must confess that I can’t help liking some of the Democrats because they just sound better. At least they understand how to look like they care about real people. But we will be seeing a lot less of them over the next two years. Instead we will see a lot more of the pathetic aberrations of humanity that stand up for the cameras and ball their eyes out because they had to “work” in their dad’s tavern while he paid for everything else to get them through college.

Now that the politicians have worked out a “compromise” that screwed the working people one last time, the tax cuts are in place for millionaires. This has effectively taken their money off the table so they can get down to the serious business of figuring out how to be “fiscally responsible” with the crumbs that would otherwise have fallen from the table to the widows, the orphans, the elderly and the veterans. 

So here are some things we can be sure will not happen:

We all know where these desperately needed cuts must be made:

• Old people will pay more out of pocket for healthcare and will have to work until they drop dead or prove they never will before becoming eligible to draw social security;
• Children will get less for education and meals because the important children can work in their dad’s tavern and don’t depend on help from the government to survive or to get an education;
• Veterans will continue to pay more and receive less while the “support our troops” crowd votes against every attempt to take care of them;
• More and more of the unemployed will be forced into the growing U.S. sweatshop labor market as the safety nets and infrastructure maintenance that would make more American jobs possible continue to disappear.

Knowing he was about to add another trillion dollars to the deficit by cutting the taxes of millionaires, our President did commission a so-called bipartisan committee to make recommendations as to where we might take from the poor and the middle class to keep things purring along.  The members of the commission were chosen in the same fashion as was prohetically documented in the old Don Knotts classic:

Where do you suppose a normal person would look to address this out of control deficit? This site has an interesting breakdown of how the median tax paid by real people was allocated in 2009. Out of a total federal tax payment in the amount of $4,451, here is where the money went:

Military – $1,309
Health – $948
Non-Military Interest on Debt – $530
Military Interest on Debt – $352
Income Security & Labor – $320
Housing & Community – $169
Veterans Benefits – $169
Food – $160
Government – $138
Education – $134
Environment, Energy & Science – $125
International Affairs – $53
Transportation – $45

How can these guys have any pretence of credibility while we are waging a completely unwinnable and unnecessary war to prop up a backward doofus dictator at a cost of somewhere between two billion dollars a week and twelve billion dollars a month? Does anyone really believe that if we ever do leave, things will be any different in that country than they were the day we invaded? Mark my words: they will fight tooth and nail to cut from the $169 in veteran’s benefits, the $160 in food for starving families, and the $134 in education before anyone moves a finger to reduce the military spending.

Copyright © 2011, Rick D. Massey, JD.

As this piece from SNL reveals, the Iranians knew who was behind Salman Rushdie's novel and what MUST be done about it

We face a lot of serious problems in this country. The revelations of what our government would rather we did not know – now exposed courtesy of WikiLeaks are not among them. Indeed, these “secrets” must not be all that vital to our national security. Otherwise, why would our government have made them available to so many people in the first place?

According to Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, these email chains were on the distribution lists of literally hundreds of thousands of U.S. Government employees. Overnight, this renegade journalist has become a bigger threat to our democracy than a certain former Vice President that betrayed the identity of an undercover CIA agent for no other reason than to take personal revenge on her husband. But in all fairness, her husband had committed the unpardonable sin of ratting out the Vice President for lying us into a war. Whatever happened to the quaint little relic of American history called freedom of the press?

Unlike many of our modern politicians, Thomas Jefferson understood the function of the press in a free society. He said crazy things like, ”The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

As the lines between the corporate world and our government rapidly vanish, access to information about what is actually going on becomes increasingly hard to come by. Fortunately, we still have a few avenues of knowledge that are not crafted and packaged by the very entities that should be subject to unbiased reports. We have phony “news networks” whose taglines such as “we report, you decide” are a laughing stock to thinking people. But there are still a few honest reporters that try to hold the government accountable to the people. Imagine all of the interesting things we would not know without them.

It would not have been hard to predict that releasing a video of our own army helicopters murdering unarmed journalists; or of the Obama administrations role in protecting war criminals from the Bush administration against prosecution by the Spanish government would be met with some serious opposition. You can read more about that under-the-table bargaining here.

But there are obvious questions as to whether Julian Assange is really a threat to our national security; or simply a threat to the security of the criminals at the top of our government. Because he is not a U.S. citizen, he clearly cannot be a “traitor” by definition. He did not steal the documents he is publishing. And while the U.S. Government is frantically trying to invent some law he has broken, he has so far not been charged with any American crime. The situation was best summed up by Joe Bageant last week. “The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government’s response — which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China’s.”

Oops! Wrong book.

And yet, the very hoodlums these revelations threaten are stirring up the mob to bring about his lynching. It was not through WikiLeaks that we learned that President Bush and Vice President Cheney committed war crimes. The former President has actually written a book in which he brags about it. . .

While promoting his new book in Florida, Bush claimed his autobiography walks you through getting this “tool” (waterboarding) passed by Congress. But as the ACLU’s Torture Report points out, this was a lie. Congress never acted to sanction the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

This is what we as a country have come to. After Congress ignored the conclusions of most legal scholars and a letter to the Senate signed by four retired Judge Advocates General, that waterboarding is “inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal,” Michael Mukasey was still confirmed as Attorney General. This in spite of the fact that in the Senate confirmation hearings, he had refused to acknowledge that drowning people virtually to death is torture.

This is a brief summary of the ACLU’s Torture Report and why it is so important that we don’t fall for the “let’s look forward and not backward” line that criminals always think is a good idea.

Like a brilliant marketing campaign, the American people are conditioned to understand the meaning of key phrases over time. The less intelligent politicians still say stupid things when they try to speak off the cuff. But when they huddle with their advisors, the peanut section chooses its words carefully. It is no accident that Senator Mitch McConnell has called Assange a terrorist, saying “I think he needs to be prosecuted to the, the fullest extent of the law; and if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law”; or that Rep. Peter King has moved to declare WikiLeaks as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

No discussion of the latest from the nitwits would be complete without an honorable mention of Sarah Palin’s opinion that Assange should be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden; or of the just intelligent enough to be really dangerous position of Newt Gingrich. He believes we should invoke the ultimate totalitarian tools of the Patriot Act and have the President declare Assange as an “enemy combatant.” That handy little phrase is the best instrument in an American dictator’s arsenal. It would allow the Government to indefinitely detain him with no charges, no explanation, and no right to an attorney. This is scary stuff. Sometimes it seems as though the nation is morphing into the citizens of Oceana in George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four:

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

The greatest threat to our national security is not WikiLeaks – but the way we conduct ourselves in the eyes of the world. If we are seen as a war mongering, imperialistic, greedy power that makes up the law as it goes along; that tortures and imprisons people with no due process or fundamental rights; that invades other countries and never leaves; and that has no regard for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, or the right of the citizens to govern themselves – that is the greatest threat to our national security. We cannot be safe as long as the rest of the world fears what we will do next. And who wouldn’t fear us now?

Copyright © 2010, Rick D. Massey, JD

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg plays with something behind the microphone while expressing his compassion for the “small people”

Corporations and politicians are very much into buzz words. Little hot pockets stuffed with meaning can be handy tools when you need to influence the behavior of others. Even when they are patently ridiculous, people often ingest and regurgitate them without noticing their absurdity. If we take time to think about it, we are intelligent enough to see buzz words for what they really are. Bringing these things to our attention has made folks like George Carlin a lot of money. But we are so conditioned by their constant use and so overwhelmed by our own busy lives that we repeat them anyway.

One of the more popular ones in recent years is the concept of being a good “corporate citizen.”  Can a corporation even be a citizen?  Strangely, the U.S. Supreme Court (which had decided slaves were not citizens only thirty years earlier) thought so in 1886. But do you really believe Exxon Mobile, or General Electric is a citizen?  Our highest court may have finally given them the right to buy votes (and politicians) in December of this year, but they still cannot vote themselves – at least not yet. Nevertheless, it must be possible to be a good corporate citizen because one web site publishes lists of who the top corporate citizens are. How are the top one hundred selected? A good corporate citizen must “maintain high ethical standards”, decrease the negative effects it has on the environment, and give back to the community. In case you are curious, the top three are Bristol Meyers-Squibb, General Mills, Inc., and IBM Corp. Exxon Mobile Corp is number eleven.  And General Electric Co. comes in at number fifty-two. 

There don’t seem to be any mom and pop shops here, so it must be safe to assume that being a “good corporate citizen” requires a boat load of money. Apparently, none of the small corporations had enough ethical standards to knock Bristol Meyers-Squibb out of first place – even though it had to settle a Minnesota price fixing lawsuit for $5 million dollars in 1996 and was ordered by a federal judge to stop lying about its competitors’ products in 2001.

Maybe a shortfall in the “high ethical standards” department can be compensated for by decreasing the corporation’s negative effects on the environment? Everyone knows what a great job Exxon Mobile is doing to decrease its impact on the environment; well except for that whole fighting tooth and nail against any legislation that would limit greenhouse gasses and their continuing to proclaim that global warming and greenhouse emissions are not related.

Maybe the most important thing is to give back to the community. How much did you pay in taxes last year? Well, if you were Exxon you could have sucked up $35 billion dollars and paid zero – no taxes at all. By setting up wholly owned subsidiaries in Bermuda, Cayman Island, and the Bahamas, you could have legally laundered your cash from your profits in the Middle East and avoided all taxes. If you were GE, you could have submitted a 24,000 page tax return and escaped paying any taxes on your $10.3 billion in profits.

If you ask most Americans, they know the difference. Corporations are not citizens, good, bad, or otherwise.

To assign them human attributes is to play into the scam. For-profit corporations are legal entities that only exist for two purposes: to make money for their shareholders, and to protect their owners from personal liability. If they say they have any other goal – any other goal at all, it is a lie. If the corporation screws up and that screw-up results in a catastrophic accident, it is not you and I - the small people that the Board is really worried about. 

Copyright © 2010, Rick D. Massey, JD

If you haven’t flown lately, you can read an excellent post describing the pathetic process you will be subjected to at The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.  No thinking person can read these accounts without wondering just how far our government is willing to go toward stripping all of us of the last vestiges of individual rights and human dignity we may have left. 

You would think “the terrorists” were the biggest threat this country has ever faced.  In fact, the threat is so ominous and pressing that the right wing basket cases – the same folks that argue that there is no global warming and that spewing tons of garbage into the air may not harm the planet at all – even those folks are wringing their hands in a panic over it.  They believe.  On the other hand, it’s a good thing they don’t believe anything scientists have to say.  According to astronomers, our chances of a catastrophic asteroid collision are only one in two hundred thousand! 

You know they are everywhere – the terrorists I mean.  Why in the last fifteen years we have been attacked by them almost five times!  And they weren’t all Christian rednecks from Kansas!  Some of them were dang fureigners with scary eastern religions.  We even had one guy with plastic explosives in his underwear.  Okay.  He never was that much of a threat anyway, and experts seriously question whether his drawers could have brought down the plane if they had gone off as planned.  But it did serve the useful purpose of providing a grandstand for our old friend Michael Chertoff to divert $25 million dollars of tax money to a company that makes strip-search scanners (with a commitment from the TSA to spend another $173 million) – but more about that later. 

It hasn’t all been about exploding shoes and underpants either.  We did have that whole 9/11 attack that killed a lot of innocent people.  This really tall guy who we think lives in a cave in Afghanistan planned the whole thing and brought this country to its knees.  He sent a gang of assassins from Saudi Arabia that succeeded in killing 2752 Americans.  It completely dwarfed the standing record of 168 deaths caused by our own home-grown fanatic nut job.  That got us pissed.  But at the time our President’s whole family was in the oil business with long standing Saudi connections and wanted to continue having members of the Royal Saudi family over at his place for sleepovers and who knows what all.  So we obviously weren’t going to stir up a ruckus with Saudi Arabia. 

What could we do?  Since we already had a massive military build-up prepared and determined to invade Iraq, and since people were beginning to doubt the stories about why we were itching to invade the country anyway, why not blame all of this on them?  That way, our “elected” leaders could keep their promises to Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other corporations licking their chops to profit from a protracted war. 

After losing substantially more American lives (4,429) going after Bin Laden than he had murdered in the first place, we finally realized he must not be in Iraq.  Perhaps he was really in Afghanistan where everyone said he was all along?  And since the Soviet Union had already shown the world how ridiculous the chances of winning a war there can ever be, what better way to guarantee the corporate machine continuing profits for years to come?  How often has our country really been attacked since World War II?  And yet, with five percent of the world’s population, we account for forty percent of the military spending for the entire world. 

But I digress.  What is up with the strip-search scanners at the airport?  The scariest and most frustrating thing in all of this is that people will fall for the cunning misdirection and miss the most important point.  We have been offered a Hobson’s choice between two completely unnecessary things: get a full-blown electronic strip-search, or get yourself and your family felt up by the diligent, famous for their compassion and professionalism, TSA troopers. If they can get us to say, “okay you can look but don’t touch,” they will have won.

Are you getting sick to death of being lied to?  I know I am.  This is NOT about airline security.  It is not even about allowing TSA storm troopers to molest your grandma.  They know most people are not likely to tolerate that stupidity long term.  And after all, there is not a lot of money to be skimmed off directly by these perverted pat downs.  Furthermore, continuing this practice will hurt sales for the airline industry.  Our law makers were not bought and placed in office to put major corporations out of business.  Indeed, if our Government was not all about protecting the airline corporations, it would make them buy their own strip-search scanners.  This temporary damage to the air travel business is merely an investment toward the long-term scheme of funneling public money to the politicians’ pet contractors. 

They know the machines don’t even work – at least not according to the Israeli security experts that refuse to use them.  So here are some basic predictions about where this whole TSA flash in the pan will lead. 

As the thugs that pull the strings for the TSA accurately predicted, people don’t like watching their wives and children get molested at the airport by our Government. 

The molestation of citizens at the airports will be greatly reduced very soon.  After all, they have completely served their originally intended purpose of making the strip-search machines seem really not all that bad.  This should pave the way for the sale of more strip-search machines and funnel more American tax dollars to companies that have bought and paid for our law makers. 

We are told that either the strip-search machines or the “trust us we are doing this for your own good” degrading pat down would have caught the underwear bomber earlier this year. Of course the far less invasive method of listening to the guy’s own father who walked into a U.S. embassy and warned us that his son was up to something like this, or of updating the TSA’s computer network to notify screeners that he was a known suspected terrorist could have stopped him as well. Forcing everyone to completely disrobe at the security check would also be quite effective. But don’t worry.  There does not seem to be any corporate profit in making us do that.

Copyright © 2010, Rick D. Massey, JD

So the politicians are chosen for the people from among the leaders in the big business community. The people vote for one of the choices that they believe will best represent their interests. But neither of the potential leaders understands or cares about the people’s interests. They both work for a corporate structure that handpicked them as candidates, paid for their campaign, and already has an agenda for them to dutifully follow. The corruption of the system has gotten so bad that the country’s leaders (all bought and paid for by corporate money) serve at the beck and call of the corporate structure. The “people” still have a military. But it follows the directions of the corporations, which also have their own militaries working in lock-step with the military of the people. If you cross the corporations, they will bring in their own militaries to whip you back into shape. If that doesn’t work, their government will bring in the “peoples’ military to finish the job.

Now suppose you find yourself trapped in such a country. Some argue that you aren’t really trapped because there are no laws forbidding you to leave. You are in fact “free” to go or stay as you see fit. The problem is that you have no means with which to leave. The Corporation for which you work also happens to be the bank that holds the mortgage on your house. But that is not all the Corporation owns and controls. This Corporation also regulates your country’s economy. Everyone in your society owes the Corporation more than they will ever be allowed to earn enough to repay. The only hope you have of surviving from week to week comes from your job with the Corporation. When you can no longer endure the increasing hopelessness, depression and suffering of yourself, your family, and your neighbors, you revolt against the Corporation. You and the others in your community join together and refuse to continue to participate in the society’s corporate controlled economy. You refuse to work for the Corporation unless and until it agrees to grant you some basic human rights.

But your protest is met with violence. The corporation sends in its “security” forces to foreclose on all of your houses and to force families out into the streets. But the people are desperate and angry, and they fight back. The corporation’s “security” officers are losing the battle. So the Corporation’s military – the army you thought was your military whose purpose was to protect you, is called in to end this “uprising.”

Would you allow such a thing to happen to America? It already did. In 1921 all of these historic precedents were established at the Battle of Blair Mountain. This conflict was the only time (so far) in American history that the President has sent its own military to drop bombs on its own people. The “country” in this case was the community of Logan County West Virginia.

If you think all of this changed a long time ago you have not been paying attention. The martial law declared by the government to justify unleashing the military on its own citizens is still on the books. The government is (now more than ever since this year’s landmark Supreme Court decision) bought and paid for by big business. Some of the names have changed, but not much else.  The corporate/government security agency Blackwater (now known as Xe Services LLC) has replaced the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency as its mercenaries of choice.

This video describes some of what happened 80 years ago in the greatest armed labor conflict in U.S. history.

And what ever happened to the corporate stranglehold the coal companies have held on these people since 1921? The Massey Coal Company is still treating people like corporate cannon fodder in Appalachia, as is shown by the deaths of 29 miners earlier this year after the company was cited with 50 safety violations in the month preceding the disaster, some of which may have resulted in the deadly explosion.

It should be no surprise that the coal industry is now using its corporate and political power to destroy the site where all of these inconvenient incidents took place. In April of 2009 historians, preservationists and local residents succeeded in getting Blair Mountain added to the National Registry of Historic Places. This listing would protect Blair Mountain as an historic site. Not so fast peasants! In December 2009 the Interior Department’s National Park Service removed Blair Mountain from the National Register of Historic Places. Arch Coal, Inc., and the Massey Coal Company have permits to strip-mine the area and blow the top off Blair Mountain just as they have done with virtually every other mountain in the region. Blair Mountain was removed from the Registry after the coal mining industry insisted on a recount of the votes of “property owners.” The recount was later shown to have included “owners” that were dead or that had sold their property years ago. But the Park Service decided the fraud was uncovered too late to correct the situation. Next time you hear someone quote the patron saint of modern capitalism reminding you that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”, think about who really controls the government - and its National Park Service.

After years of fine-tuning its message, the rest of the country is rapidly beginning to swallow the gospel of unregulated and unrestrained capitalism. The future is now. And that imaginary country is just over the horizon. Soon the whole nation can sing the words of the immortal song Sixteen Tons: “St. Peter don’t ya call me ’cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.”

Copyright © 2010, Rick D. Massey, JD

. . . Nuff Said. . .

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell

Every first year law student knows the famous rule of argumentation. “If the law is on your side, pound on the law; if the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; if neither is on your side, pound on the table.” Scanning our current political scene, there has never been less in the way of facts and more table pounding than in the most recent election cycle. The Republicans and the Democrats got us into this swirly pattern by delivering our country lock, stock and barrel to a handful of wealthy international corporations. I urge you to take about ten minutes to watch the interview at the end of this article. It is well worth your time.

We are told that if the Democrats just have more time to “finish what they started” all will be well. They are asking the American people to trust them to fix things. But the problem is not that they have failed in what they have tried to do. They tried to find a way to fix healthcare without punishing the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies that created the problems in the first place. So they got coverage for some thirty million more people than before. I applaud them for that. But I don’t appreciate the fact that they did it exactly the way the Republicans would have done it if they had cared enough to try it on a national scale in the first place.

They did it by following the old time tested liability insurance requirement for all drivers model. They forced everyone to do business with the very criminals whom they themselves admit created the problem through greed and monopolizing the market. Then, because the method that was basically outlined by their guy, Mitt Romney, was enacted by Democrats instead of Republicans, the Republicans characterized the approach as a “government takeover of healthcare.” When their guy was doing the same thing in Massachusetts in 2006, they understood what it really was – a government mandated corporate takeover of healthcare. And that was just fine and dandy.

Meanwhile the Republicans assure us that if they could only regain power they would fix everything by cutting “everyone’s” taxes (which is a sneaky way of saying they would include the richest people in the country in the tax cuts everyone else was going to get anyway). I am not bragging on the Democrats here. I am completely disgusted with the way they have handled their opportunity to get the country back on track. But it astonishes me that people are falling for the ridiculous claims from both sides. How did the Republicans convince so many people that giving billionaires a bigger percentage of their profits will cause them to divert their money from foreign sweat shops to American factories? How did the Democrats convince so many people that they are protecting ordinary people by bailing out the banks and forcing citizens to buy from rapacious insurance companies?

From the Movie "The Flim-Flam Man"

What do all scams have in common? The promise of something for nothing to entice you into giving the scammer something you already have. These lies work because no one wants to face the cold hard truth. “You can’t cheat an honest man” says Mordecai Jones, the old con artist to his aspiring student in the 1967 movie The Flim-Flam Man.

The bottom line here is that the politicians from both political parties have sold out this country. As John Perkins’ recent article explains, when you hear politicians talking about a “global economy” they aren’t just whistling Dixie. They have been bought and paid for by international entities that do not care whether or not this country survives. According to Perkins, the root problem is not “capitalism” itself but rather the “predatory” form of capitalism that began to develop about thirty years ago and really took off under Reagan and was solidified under Clinton. Our Supreme Court may have given these imaginary citizens the inalienable rights that the framers of the Constitution intended for people, but they are not Americans. Their paper “corporate” existence transcends borders. We can’t just pick up and leave. But they already have. Everyone should take a few minutes to watch this interview.

Copyright © 2010, Rick D. Massey, JD