Push To Strip Marijuana Smokers Of Second Amendment Rights

The U.S. political elites never miss an opportunity to take away more human rights or increase their repressive powers, it seems. Now they're using- predictably- the murderous rampage by the vicious weirdo Jared Loughner in Tucson, AZ, as a wedge to strip grass smokers (who number in the tens of millions) of their "guaranteed" right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, says that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Of course there's been plenty of infringing of that right for the last century. Now "drug users" are to be banned from gun ownership, if Senator Charles Schumer (Wall Street's main agent in the Senate and a big fan of repressive legislation) and the New York Times get their way.

Schumer says that Loughner could have been barred from buying a gun had the military, which rejected his enlistment attempt because he smoked grass, had reported him as a drug user, and if "drug users" (marijuana is a plant, of course, not a "drug," not a "narcotic" either, both epithets routinely applied to it by the establishment propagandists) are excluded from gun ownership. The NY Times thinks this is a swell idea. And dwarf economist and Bill Clinton stooge Robert Reich chimed in in an op-ed piece in the Sunday NY Times Week in Review section on Jan. 23, 2011. Not only does he call for the stripping of Second Amendment rights from people who fail military "drug" tests, he also wants everyone on the Government's "terrorist watch lists" added, as well as people who receive mental health treatment.

Well, there's hundreds of thousands of people on these various "terrorist" watch lists. As it has done throughout its history, the FBI shitlists everyone it can identify with progressive political or social values. These days they're branded "terrorists." Every year the FBI sends out 50,000 demands for personal information on people from banks, ISPs, email providers, libraries, and the like. Do you really think there are hundreds of thousands of terrorists in the U.S.? Examples of people the Government considers "terrorists" include environmentalists, peace activists, Quakers, and nuns. Reich thinks all of the above and more are too dangerous to be allowed to have guns. (Too bad most of them don't even want guns- they could sure use them.)
Of course, once you establish the principle that "drug users" should be stripped of a basic constitutional right, there's no reason to stop at barring just those who try to join the military. MILLIONS of people are arrested EVERY YEAR in this very repressive country for marijuana possession. All those people have court records. (Which includes "sealed" ones, a bogus farce.) They've already stripped us of our right to be secure in our homes and possessions (and cars) using the "war on drugs" as an excuse. What's one more basic right down the toilet?

And would such massive crushing of rights have stopped a deranged missile like Loughner? Of course, Loughner could still have bought a gun at a gun show, from a private individual, or stole a gun, or borrowed a gun. Or used ID other than his own to buy in a store. The gun "controllers will never admit that their end goal is total disarming of the civilian population. All their half measures inevitably fall short of "preventing tragedies" and "keeping guns out of the hands of criminals." And they give the game away by describing their suggestions as "the minimum" or "a good first step." (NY Times anti-gun editorials do this for example.)

Obama's Latest Crime

The "anti-business" (as the crackpot big business ideologues and CEOs of huge corps. have it) Obama has ordered the Dept. of "Justice" to exhort the Supreme Court to rule in favor of big greedy pharmaceutical companies that overcharged public hospitals and clinics serving the poor. Legally, these providers are entitled to discounts, which the evil drug corps. cheated them out of. The Obama regime, typical for U.S. administrations, and esp. for "New" Democrats in the Clinton-Gore-DLC mold, takes the side of Big Business against people. They are actually arguing on behalf of the thieving drug corps. that those they ripped off have NO RIGHT TO SUE.
But don't expect neofascist rags like the Wall Street Journal to stop raving that Obama is "anti-business." You can't appease fascists.

See "U.S. Backs Drug Firms in Lawsuit Over Prices," NY Times.
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/us/politics/10drug.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=us%20bakcs%20drug%20firms%20in%20lawsuit%20over%20prices&st=cse

Creepy Murderer Loughner Won't Be Executed

Bad news about the nasty wacko Jared L. Loughner, who murdered 6 people in Tucson, AZ, including a Federal Judge and a 9 year old girl, and put a bullet through the brain of Representative Giselle Giffords- he won't be executed, in all probability. (Just look at the creep's mugshot- it is completely revealing of who he is. An evil Uncle Fester.) He has defending him Judy Clarke. Judy Clarke has a history of saving notorious murderers from the death penalty by some kind of legal magic.


http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/10/jared-loughner-mugshot-released-photo/

She got Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski off the death penalty hook. That was an extremely notorious case of multiple mailbombs, which took years to catch him. (And only because his brother turned him in after the FBI finally forced itself to overcome its hypersecretitiveness and release his philosophical writing.)

Anti-abortion cop murderer, nurse maimer, Olympics bomber Eric Robert Rudolph is another piece of vicious scum who she saved.

And toddler-slaughterer Susan Smith of South Carolina, who drove her car into a lake to drown her own children, in the delusional belief that being rid of them would enable her to hook up with a start a new life with some guy she longed for, after originally sentenced to death in that cruel southern state, got resentenced thanks to Judy Clarke.

I don't know what legal alchemy Clarke works, but she's obviously very effective. Too bad in some cases.

there are various youtube posts of the mugshot with commentary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrQ2bRUbo20

Loathsome Lanny Davis Has More Blood On His Hands

Lanny Davis, one of the scummy, soulless, immoral self-promoters who latched onto the Clintons and served a key role in the regime of Bill Clinton, is at it again. These days he whores his ass out as a propagandist for dictators.

Earlier this year he was shilling for the Honduran oligarchy, which overthrew the democratically-elected president for the crime of raising the minimum wage. (The official excuse was he "tried to change the Constitution so he could run again." A lie, but even if true not a crime. He tried to put a NONBINDING resolution before the Honduran people to let them vote on the idea.) Being the enemy of poor people everywhere, and friend of the rich in all lands, the U.S. sneakily supported the coup while publicly pretending not to. (Another one of WikiLeaks "crimes" was exposing this duplicity via leaked State Department documents.)

The Honduran criminals have murdered many Hondurans since seizing power, and repressed all rights of dissent. Lanny Davis uses all his skills as a sophist and twister of reality and just flat out liar to defend this criminal regime.

Another of his "clients" is the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, who he tries to trick the world into believing is a swell guy and worthy of respect and support. And anything to the contrary is just a lie, according to Despicable Davis.

Now he's at it again. This time he's aiding the dictator of Ivory Coast, a greedy piece of work named Laurent Gbagbo. (This thug's official title is "President," but that's totally misleading.) Gbagbo refuses to admit that he just lost an election. For once, the U.S., other African "leaders,
and others are insisting that the dictator leave office and abide by the will of the people.

So who pops up spewing lies and propaganda on Gbagbo's behalf? Lanny the Lying Leech. Here's how he trashes a UN report about Gbagbo's thugs' murder of 200 (so far) people: he says he wants to "talk to who wrote it" and "see the evidence," and anyway UN "reports" (sic) about the Gaza War (there was just one, the Goldstone Report, by an eminent JEWISH, self-professed ZIONIST, South African jurist) have been "discredited." (Well, the U.S. and Israel trashed it, but that hardly constitutes "discrediting," except maybe in the propaganda sense.) The body of at least one journalist has already been dumped roadside by Davis' client's hoodlums.

Davis claims he only wants to "present the facts and the law as to why there is substantial documentary evidence that President Laurent Gbagbo is the duly elected president as a result of the Nov. 28 elections." Funny, no one else agrees with this, except the tyrant Gbagbo, and his goons.. Not even the rulers of the surrounding African states agree.

Few spewing his vile propaganda, Davis is getting $100,000 a month. Some would say he "sold his soul." That is stupid cant, since Davis obviously has no soul. He's an anti-human, not a human.

It's a mark of the moral depravity of the culture of American Power that this creep is no pariah, but a respected voice in D.C. who can charge big bucks to defend thugs. He's not the first, and he won't be the last. Until the vicious U.S. system is either overthrown, evolves into something resembling a normal human system, or self-destructs or rots to the point of collapse, there will always be loathsome dirtbags like Lanny Davis.

Update: according to the NY Times of 12/30/10, Davis apparently couldn't take the heat- and no doubt feared that damage to his reputation would hurt his chances of future propaganda gigs- so he's suddenly dropping Gbagbo as a client.
12/31/10: another Times article confirms what I said yesterday. ("Key Lobbyist's Client List Puts Him on the Defensive," p. A10.) The article is pretty disgusting in its own right, giving us copious Davis bullshit, such as Davis "said his client list reflected his philosophy [sic] that everyone deserved a voice, particularly companies and causes [sic] that challenged conventional wisdom [i.e. reality] or the public's sense of the politically correct." There's a lot more sick bullshit in this vein, pure self-serving, disgustingly self-righteous and phony Davis propaganda about himself rewritten by the Times hacks. But they're just being "balanced," I guess. Except if you're going to transmit someone's bullshit, you should also report the information that clearly shows what a load of horsecrap it is. They do mention some of his loathsome "causes," and Davis absurdly calling himself a "liberal Democrat." That in reference to his propaganda work for the kleptomaniac tyrant of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
The transcript of Davis' appearance on Democracy Now, defending the Honduran coupists, is a great example of his bullying, lying, twisting-reality methodology.

U.S. Military Unleashes Cyberwar Against WikiLeaks

The U.S. hasn't been content to get their Swede stooges to trump up bogus sex charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (The various versions we're getting is that he didn't stop humping when two women changed his mind, or he didn't use a condom.) Nor having Interpol pu this dangerous global menace atop its Most Wanted list. (Which is doesn't do with genocidal dictators who have indictments, or CIA officers wanted in Italy and convicted in absentia, for example.) And threats of prosecution and long imprisonment, and calls for his assassination, aren't all the U.S. is doing either. WikiLeaks the website is being hounded from pillar to post. Their domain name provider unceremoniously dumped them, claiming that the tornado of cyber attacks on WikiLeaks endangered their architecture. Amazon threw them off their server after menacing grows from right wing dog Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose aide called Amazon to "inquire" about it. Amazon put out a lame excuse that W. violated Amazon's terms of use because they didn't own the copyright to the Government documents W. posts. (As a matter of law, U.S. Government documents CANNOT BE COPYRIGHTED.) PayPal dropped WikiLeaks due to unspecified "illegal activity." That's funny, they haven't been indicted, at least not yet.

The U.S. military has launched what are called Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks on WikiLeaks. This means taking over numerous computers with implanted malware that causes those computers to try and log on to the target website. The idea is to crash the victim website by overwhelming it with a large number contacts that are more than the host server can handle.

December 4, 2010

Death Threats Against Julian Assange

It didn't take long for my post of late November about the grave danger facing Julian Assange, to be confirmed very blatantly. Various politicians and "commentators" have called for imprisonment and worse for Assange. The 1917 "Espionage Act" has been dusted off. This is one of the vicious bludgeons the U.S. uses to crush dissidents. During WW I it was used to imprison socialists, pacifists, and activists of all stripes. So much as questioning the U.S. jumping into WWI was a felony. (One of the Big Lies in America, periodically exposed as a sham, is the myth of free speech, and the Constitutional "guarantee" of same. Guarantee my ass, you lying dogs.)

Various bourgeois figures have even made public threats against Assange's life, calling for his death.

Sarah Palin, who has a lavishly paid perch on Rupert Murdoch's neofascist agitprop channel Fox "News," wants Assange "hunted down." Like a moose or elk, Sarah? We know what U.S. cutthroats do when they "hunt down" people. They either disappear them into secret torture dungeons or kill them.

One of Murdoch's Minions, the deranged liar and bully Bill O'Reilly, calls WikiLeaks "despicable" and the "leaker" "a traitor" and "traitors should be executed or jailed for life."

Tom Flanagan on Canadian TV, (CBC the main channel), said Assange should be assassinated. He even suggested a method for Obana to use- a drone missile strike. Flanagan is a member of rightwing Canadian PM Harper's inner circle and campaign manager for the "Conservatives" in the last two Canadian elections. Unlike here, where the people are either rabid barbarians or politically comatose sheep, in Canada this open call for state murder created an uproar, and Flanagan had to make light of his death call and "apologize," sort of, kind of.

Michael Huckabee didn't threaten Assange specifically, but called for the execution of leakers. "Anything less than execution" for leakers to WikiLeaks "is too kind a punishment."

I wonder if he feels the same about all those anonymous government officials who plant propaganda in the media on a daily basis.

Huckabee is an arch-reactionary, GOP presidential candidate wanna-be in 2008, a pseudo-Holy Man who presents himself as a pious "Christian" to appeal to the backwoods holy rolling speaking-in-tongues primitives that infest Arkansas and so many other U.S. backwaters. He aches to get elected President in 2012. Currently he too is ensconsed in the neofascist stable of evil media czar Murdoch, for handsome pay of course.


One sickening- and unremarked upon- hypocrisy in Huckabee's Tough Guy stance is that as Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee had a bad habit of freeing dangerous, violent felons (but not deserving prisoners, like victims of the drug war) early, against official advice. One of the objects of his kindness went on to murder four police officers in Washington State. This hasn't harmed Huckabee's media standing in the slightest. Unlike what happened to Michael Dukakis, who was held responsible for a rape and assault by Willie Horton, when Horton fled during a work release program. Horton of course never should have been out, but that wasn't Dukakis' personal doing, but rather a dysfunctional work-release program. Even to this day we get reminders of Dukakis-Horton.

You see, reactionaries can do no wrong in the U.S. Another example: G. Gordon Liddy on his radio show- a travesty that that fascist thug has his own radio show!- exhorted people to shoot ATF agent. Didn't cost him a thing in consequences or media esteem. Or when Ann Coulter slimed 9/11 widows, or called for the NY Times to be bombed, that was fine. Even the NY Times has never stopped promoting her. On the other hand, Professor Ward Churchill was swiftly purged from the University of Colorado for writing in an essay that among the dead on 9/11 were "little Eichmanns." Ideological watchdogs quickly pounced, making the comment a national issue of outrage. (I remember all the posts on military.com after 9/11 ghoulishly calling for the nuking of Afghanistan. I think undoubtedly there are many little Eichmanns in America, many in the media, and no doubt some met a deserved end on 9/11. But so did many people who didn't deserve to die. That's the trouble with the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, like when, oh, say, the U.S. bombs Afghan wedding parties, or drops atomic bombs on cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not that two wrongs make a right, just that some LOUD MOUTHED HYPOCRITS ARE MIGHTY ANNOYING IN THEIR MORALISTIC POSTURING.

And oh, Flanagan has a perch as a university professor. You can bet he won't be purged from it.

And funny how the main U.S. "ally" in the war on terrorism is the biggest sponsor of the people the U.S. currently brands "terrorist," namely Pakistan, the country that planned and sponsored the attack on Mumbai, on the Indian parliament, and innumerable other terrorist acts. In fact, the U.S. is grumpy about the fact that the Pakistanis currently provide safe havens for the Afghan Taliban forces. David Rohde, a NY Times correspondent taken hostage by them and kidnapped to Pakistan, has given an account of how his kidnappers were protected by the Paki army. Even after his escape, they did nothing, and this with a Paki military base less than a mile from his kidnappers' lair.

December 4, 2010

Pope Grants Permission For Male Prostitutes to Use Condoms: Prostitutes Rejoice

Answering the long-time prayers of male prostitutes around the world, the Pope, the Holy Father, the Infallible One, True Representative of God on Earth, has decided in his infinite wisdom that it's a "step on the way to morality" if male prostitutes use condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, so maybe it's not so bad.

"This is wonderful news!" rejoiced "David," a male prostitute who did not want his full name used. "We've been waiting a long time for the Pope to grant us permission to use condoms. This doesn't come too soon as far as I'm concerned. I know too many people who succumbed to AIDS because the Pope banned them from using rubbers."

Many people saw the slight movement in the granite-like dogma of the Catholic Church as a seismic shift from its previous position that condoms were NEVER EVER justified under any circumstances. It would also seem to contradict on its face the Church's position of just a few years ago that condoms don't prevent AIDS, only abstinence or monogamy does.

But seriously, only jackasses let the pedophile-ridden Catholic Church dictate their sexual behavior to them! This is a Church that has expended great effort to PROTECT pedophile priests and stonewall their victims. (Not to mention its history of horrible tortures and mass murders over the centuries during the Inquisition and other times, and their complicity in numerous fascist regimes in the 20th century.) And considering that the Church's poohbahs are officially asexual, presumably they know NOTHING about sex...

I tremble for Julian Assange

The U.S. has murdered people for a lot less than what Julian Assange, the public face and proprietor of WikiLeaks has already done. After posting U.S. military documents showing massive U.S. complicity in torture of prisoners in Iraq, now WikiLeaks is posting a quarter of a million State Dept. documents that reveal U.S. diplomats tasked with swiping credit card numbers, fingerprints, DNA, even iris (eye) scans (!) and other info from foreign diplomats. (The domestic media has focused on the trivial content, the catty gossip about foreign rulers in the state dept cables.)

As with earlier leaks, the U.S. Government is raising a bogus hue and cry about "endangering lives," which is sheer bullshit. Politicians are bellowing for Assange's arrest and persecution. Congressman Peter King, a jackass generally, demands that WikiLeaks be branded a "terrorist" organization. NBC put him on TV to rant that Assange is killing people, "has blood on his hands" and thus should be treated as a terrorist. [I.e. murdered or kidnapped to a CIA secret torture chamber and then to Guantanamo Bay, the naval base on land the U.S. stole from Cuba when it "liberated" it from Spain.]

AG Eric Holder Jr. (a Clinton regime retread) is vowing criminal charges. Ominous sounds issued from the noise hole of White House chief flack Robert Gibbs ( a real coward when it comes to answering right-wing attacks on his master, Obama), to whit: "this administration thinks it's a big deal." He said "those that have been involved in the stealing of and the dissemination of this information are criminals."

Gibbs said he "wouldn't rule anything out" when it comes to legal action against Wikileaks, stating that in addition to an ongoing criminal investigation the administration is looking at "a whole host of" options. Like what, Gibbs? More frameups on fake charges in other countries? "Dirty tricks"? We know, like JFK, that Obama is enamored of "special ops." It was JFK that brought systematic torture to Latin America, sending thugs like Dan Mitrione to the Southern Hemisphere under the aegis of the "Office of Public Safety" within the "Agency for International Development" to train Latin fascists in torture techniques, [See Office of Public Safety at Wikipedia.]

The U.S. already got their Swedish stooges to bring rape charges against Assange. The U.S. has a history of murdering dissidents generally. Sometimes they murder people by sabotaging planes they're on. Sometimes they arrange traffic "accidents." Sometimes they give people cancer or mysterious fatal illnesses. (As happened to Yasir Arafat, and was planned for Fidel Castro via a thallium poisoning plot when he was visiting New York City.)

Assange also has to worry about being kidnapped from abroad by U.S. Marshals or the DEA. (The DEA lately has branched out into kidnapping arms dealers, most recently Victor Bout, who they busted in Thailand when he fell for DEA agents pretending to be from FARC, the Colombian guerrillas the U.S. labeled "terrorists." Basically a "terrorist" is anyone the U.S. doesn't like. Thus militant environmentalists are "ecoterrorists," peace activists are "supporters of terrorists," etc.)

U.S. courts don't care how someone is dragged into U.S. courts. (Back in the 1950s the FBI kidnapped Morton Sobel, a co-defendant of the Rosenbergs, from Mexico. He was lucky. They only locked him up for 20 years instead of electrocuting him as they did the Rosenbergs.)
Seems like only a matter of time before the gangster U.S. gets Julian, one way or another. Too bad. Only hope is a future world without the U.S.

Krazy Karzai Kracks Up, Bites Hands That Feed Him

"President" Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is like an ill-tempered Chihuahua. A lapdog who delusionally thinks he's a top dog, in response to President Obama pressuring him, once again, to "do more" about ending (sic!) corruption, and make "faster progress" on providing good government, just days later responded with a deranged rant claiming the foreign observers and UN election overseers were the ones committing electoral fraud, attacking the western media, the U.S., and threatening to join the Taliban if they didn't lay off him.

For infuriating effrontery, this must be some kind of world historical record. This SOB tried to steal the election, committed massive fraud, and eventually his opponent saw it was hopeless and dropped out. So Karzai's "reelection" was only by default. Now he whines that he would have won outright if not for the cheating of the foreign observers.

Then he calls Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and feeds her a two-faced sack of bullshit saying he didn't really mean it. What a con man.

After THAT, he's at it again, launching outrageous attacks on the foreign powers that are the only thing between him and a noose around his neck tied to a lamppost courtesy of the Taliban.

The joke is, the U.S. is still pretending, that after over 8 years of running the most corrupt, and one of the most ineffective, governments on earth, that Karzai is or will "do something about" corruption. He's the head crook. His brother is a major drug dealer. Don't you get it? Karzai is just a sleazy hustler. After this string runs out he'll retire to his Swiss bank accounts. (Assuming he can stay one step ahead of the Taliban.) If anyone deserves the Diem treatment, it's Karzai.

What is the World's Worst Company to work for?

Good question. There are so many horrible choices to choose from. Companies that pay their workers slave wages. Companies that exploit "illegal" immigrants. Companies that cheat their workers out of pay, or overtime. Companies that destroy or endanger their workers' health by exposing them to dangerous substances, or unsafe working conditions. Companies that are just plain evil, involved with fascist death squads to murder workers trying to organize their fellow workers, for example. Companies that sell repressive technology and machinery to oppressive regimes. (Like western corporations selling surveillance equipment and software to China, companies that sell arms and "riot control" equipment to dictatorships, Caterpillar selling armored bulldozers to Israel to raze the homes of Palestinians, and murder the occasional activist like Rachel Corrie.)

So I guess Rio Tinto isn't the world's worst company to work for. But I sure wouldn't want to work for them. They just threw 4 employees to the wolves, abandoning them to a Chinese prison on trumped up charges. Even before the "conviction" in a bogus, secret "trial," the head of Rio Tinto was distancing his company from these expendable executives and sucking up to the Chinese rulers. Utterly disgusting. The instant they were "convicted," they were fired. Some people really do care only about money.

RT is an Australian company. One of the victims is an Australian citizen (but ethnically Chinese, which I think might be relevant in terms of the Aussie Government's attitude) and the other 3 are Chinese citizens. The Australian Government has been pretty feckless, making mealy-mouthed pleas for more "transparency" in the "trial." (The men were held virtually incommunicado for months preceding the "trial." Their lawyers had almost no input into the "process." ) It's reminiscent of the Australians' going along with the Indonesians' pathetic lies about murdering a group of Australian journalists during the invasion of East Timor back in the 1970s. Apparently caving in to thugs is an Aussie habit.

Media Barons Topple 2nd N.Y. Governor in a Row

The media barons of New York (who are also national "players" with many other media properties), Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times, Rupert Murdoch of the New York Post, and Mortimer Zuckerman of the New York Daily News, have flexed their muscles yet again, toppling a second N.Y State Governor in less than a year.

Last year they ousted Eliot Spitzer, a genuine reform Governor. Months of attacks on Spitzer culminated in the FBI handing the media a prostitution "scandal" they could use to finally force Spitzer from office. The only possible motive must have been that despite their pseudo-moralistic fulminations against the corrupt state government, they actually oppose reform. Spitzer was attacked for having a lousy personality, and then when his underlings exposed a real scandal- Republican State Senate boss Joseph Bruno using State Police helicopters to ferry him to partisan political errands, the media twisted it into a scandal against Spitzer for leaking the info! Amazing. When that wasn't enough to oust Spitzer, the FBI helpfully came through.
Now the media oligarchs have toppled Spitzer's unelected successor, David Paterson, a political hack who dropped his "liberal" politics like a snake molting its skin to move sharply right as Governor. (For example, suddenly defending the rich from taxes and wanting to slash social services, opposing a special prosecutor to investigate police crimes, which he'd "supported" as a state senator, etc.)

The media barons are surely feeling their oats. The tabloid rags, the Post and Daily News, scream in large block letters on their front pages in the crudest terms for Paterson to "go." (See their covers from late February 2010 early March. http://www.nypost.com/, http://www.nydailynews.com/.) Not content with his dropping out of the election campaign scheduled for the fall, they want him to resign immediately. The papers are openly demanding that the current unelected Lt. Governor, Richard Ravitch, take over. Ravitch is a lifetime member of the unelected nomenklatura in New York State, one of the grey eminences who wield power behind the scenes. Since he doesn't have to answer to the people, he can savagely attack their interests with impunity, including social services, and institute even more regressive taxation. (Sales taxes in NYC, for example, are just a hair below 10% now.)

The means of ousting Paterson consisted of the Times rooting around for skeletons in his closet. They found one in the closet of his trusted aide-de-camp, David Johnson, a 6 foot 7 inch bully with a bad habit of beating up his girlfriends. The campaign started with the media hyping rumors of unspecified dirt that the Times was about to spring that would force Paterson out. After a couple of weeks of shameless rumor-mongering and wild speculation by the rest of the media, the Times came out with an article closely tying Johnson to Paterson, painting him as his main political adviser and right hand man, with some hints of legal troubles. Days later, they let the other shoe drop with the news that a girlfriend Johnson beat up was then leaned on by the State Police- specifically the unit that functions as the Governor's Praetorian Guard, and does dirty work for ALL Governors, and that Paterson himself spoke with her on the phone the day before she was due in court to seek a permanent order of protection. When she failed to show up in court, the matter was dismissed.

Now the media pile-on is unrelenting for Paterson to resign, not just not run for election in November.

The moral of the story? The major corporate media constitute the top power in the U.S. Politicians are ultimately at their mercy, because the media control the perceptions of the populace. The populace are deluded that the image of the world presented by the media constitutes reality.

World's Most Expensive Show Trial Hits Snag

The world's - indeed history's - most expensive (by far) show trial hit a snag a few days ago. Obama and his "team" wanted to make a display of American righteousness with a show trial of "self-professed 9/11 mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "and four codefendants." (This is the obligatory way they are identified in ALL U.S. media accounts. On some matters, the U.S. corporate media is as slavishly conformist and hews in lockstep fashion to propaganda tropes as the Chinese media.) After years in U.S. dungeons, where they were subjected to torture- the U.S. media openly admits, without any embarrassment, let alone shame, that Mohammed was waterboarded- that is, subjected to drowning - 187 times- we are now being treated to a demonstration of the fairness and justice of the U.S. legal system.

The public is supposed to be mentally numb, like the populace in George Orwell's 1984, to glaring contradictions, such as the "right" to a speedy trial, and the presumption of innocence, blatantly violated in this case. (Just one example of the latter: David Axelrod, Obama's main political consiglieri, said on TV that they WILL be convicted and WILL be executed for their "murders." Of course, the entire American public has been convinced of their guilt, so an unbiased jury cannot be impaneled in the U.S. And if ever a case cried out for a change of venue, it's this one. Instead, holding the trial "blocks from the World Trade Center Site," was hailed as a perfect site for vengeance- er, "Justice." Like an old West hanging by a posse.

Don't get me wrong, I think they may be guilty- although we really only have the word of their torturers for that. After years of torture not many "defendants" are going to go back on the agreed upon story.

What a nightmarish, violent police state America has become.

The cost of this political theater was pegged at an incredible $200 million a year, for five years, (what could take so long? The conclusion is foregone) for a total of $1 Billion. For "security,"- i.e. overtime for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's thugs, snipers on roofs to make us all feel nice and secure, (snipers glaring down on me alwaysgives me a warm and cozy feeling), and expensive police toys.

The billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed it, and snarled dismissively at the plaintive bleats of the local community board objecting to being locked down for 5 years. (In New York City, community boards are utterly powerless bodies that supposedly "represent" neighborhood residents. The real rulers cynically set them up to give citizens a forum to exhaust themselves in ineffectual venting.) But then a funny thing happened: Commissar Kelly briefed the people who matter- the big landlords and other "business leaders"- on the police state hell he was planning on creating. So then these CLASS A citizens complained to their fellow plutocrat Bloomberg, and lo and behold, suddenly Bloomberg said it wasn't so smart to hold the trial in the crowded, congested tip of lower Manhattan, base of various high finance organizations. (He previously spat at the community board chair who'd suggested moving the trial to Governor's Island, calling her suggestion "stupid." One reason the rich love this Profile in Courage is his willingness to tell the proles off.)

So now the Obama regime is squirming. While the media claims lower Manhattan is off as the trial site, officially the regime denies that. And the torture-loving right wing of the U.S. elite insists that a military "commission" (i.e. drumhead proceeding) is all these defendants "deserve."

Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?

Ex-leftist Christopher Hitchens, now ensconced with his new buddies on the right at places like the neofascist Wall Street Journal, promotes the term "Islamofascist" to describe Taliban and Al-Qaeda types. (Ironic given his new bedfellows.) These fundamentalist fanatics are certainly violent and totalitarian in the extreme. Does that make them fascist?

Well, that depends on the definition of "fascist." People who use the term virtually never define it.

But here are what I see as some commonalities between one group of undeniable fascists, the Nazis, and the vicious, terrorist murderers of the (Sunni) Islamic persuasion:

-Hyperviolent and sadistic

-Extremely fanatical (thus uncompromising- yet we keep hearing naive talk of negotiating/compromising/listening to their grievances)

-Possessors of an anti-human ideology which they impose by extreme force

-Murderously intolerant of most other people on this planet

-Terrorists- systematically use terror not just as a weapon to seize power, but as a permanent instrument of rule, used ubiquitously to keep their oppressed subjects under their power

-Uncompromising as noted, except tactically when it suits them to gain advantage and then only temporarily. (The tactics of the Taliban in Pakistan, where they negotiated to take over the Swat valley, and then immediately grabbed more territory, are reminiscent of Hitler's prewar games over Czechoslovakia and etc.)

-Feign sham interest in "peace" & "negotiations" with adversaries, as a trick or ruse or temporary expedient to grab an advantage. Any "peace" thus gained is extremely temporary. Inevitably they must be fought by force of arms

-Despite their extreme ignorance and intolerant narrow-mindedness, possess a dangerous degree of animal cunning about power, politics, and manipulating other people

-Totally ruthless, unethical, immoral, and unburdened by conscience.

 So they certainly have things in common. But this description could apply to others. Perhaps "Islamofascist" is sloppy and lazy, an easy epithet used as a shortcut to a more accurate description. I guess it's serviceable if you need to reduce the description of these horrible creeps to only one word. (Forget 9/11- these shitheads throw acid on little girls to stop them from going to school, among other monstrous atrocities. What they do to other Muslims is far worse than what they've done to the U.S. And they've killed more Muslims in other countries than the number of Americans killed on 9/11 and in the attacks on the two U.S. embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole combined.)

Intellectual Architect of Kent State Massacre Finally Dies

Irving Kristol, one of the endless supply of rightwing ideologues who provide intellectual justifications for the current social, economic, and imperialist order in America, has finally died. Treated as a major figure, not because of his brilliant ideas, but because of his political significance as an ideological Godfather of one of the many strands of anti-human reaction in the U.S., in his case the one called "neoconservatism." (A claque of mostly Jewish reactionaries ensconced in New York City institutions, including academia, private propaganda nests, and right-wing rags which are always copiously funded by the right-wing rich.)

Days before the Kent State massacre, Kristol met with President Richard Nixon (a truly pathological creature and one of the most evil presidents in U.S. history, which is really saying something) and urged Nixon to crush the anti-war movement on the college campuses. Days later, Republican Ohio Governor Rhodes unleashed his National Guard on defenseless students, murdering four and wounding others, including one rendered paraplegic for life. This was preceded by and followed by a reign of repression directed against the students, turning the campus into a police state. Students wandering into town were subjected to baseless, summary arrest, and assault by local louts.

Of course, the establishment rag The New York Times rolled out a huge obit, fawning over The Great Man. As usual when they fete reactionaries, they do not quote his actual "ideas," which are shockingly stupid and vicious, as always with reactionaries, no matter the verbal finery they're dressed up in to appear "intellectual."

Kristol was an enemy of humanity in everything he wrote and did.

NY Times STILL Running Pinochet Propaganda

Chile is one of many countries in which the U.S. instigated a military coup and subsequent bloodbath in order to keep a society backward and oppressive, and ripe for economic exploitation. Immediately after the 1973 Chilean coup, led by traitorous fascist general Augusto Pinochet, the military junta put out the false story that President Salvador Allende committed suicide. In fact, he was executed in the Moneda Presidential Palace. The last photo we have of Allende is of him in a steel helmet carrying a gun, determined to defend the Moneda and Chilean democracy.  And none other than the FBI, a rightwing U.S. secret police organization, concluded that the suicide story was false.

The FBI came to this conclusion in the course of investigating the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt by terrorist bomb in Washington, D.C. Within a week of that bombing, Newsweek ran CIA disinfo in their "Periscope" column saying the junta and DINA, their secret police, had nothing to do with it. That was a lie, of course. Turned out the junta hired American terrorist Michael Vernon Townley and some fascist Cuban terrorists to make and plant a bomb in Letelier's car. Pinochet's cover story was that Letelier bombed himself to be a martyr. (So much for the credibility of their "Allende killed himself, we didn't" story.) George Bush the Elder was CIA director at the time, and thus a terrorist accomplice. The CIA also helped smuggle Townley into the country under a false passport. The Bush family's material support to terrorists also include sheltering Orlando Bosch, an architect of an airliner bombing that killed 73 people. The U.S. continued to employ, and shelters to this day the terrorists responsible for that terrorist atrocity. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_Flight_455 or search "Cubana airliner bombing" for more.] [There are two good books about the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations and aftermath that I know of- Assassination on Embassy Row by Landau & Dinges, and Death in Washington: The murder of Orlando Letelier by Donald Freed. Only Townley was punished, and he only served 3 years. On the other hand, "ecoterrorists" get that and heavier sentences for vandalism, and Muslims running charities for Palestinians get 65 years in prison, which just happened. Which proves how blatantly political the U.S. "justice" system is.

So now, 36 year later, the New York Times is still running fascist propaganda. And apparently so is the rest of the U.S. corporate propaganda system (aka "the media").  They cribbed an AP obituary of Allende's wife, who just died, which repeats the suicide canard intended to exonerate the regime for its murder of the President and make Allende appear cowardly.

"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 18, 2009

"On Sept. 11, 1973, while under air and ground attack at the presidential palace, Mr. Allende killed himself rather than surrender to the military."

Of course, the Times was an enthusiastic backer and celebrator of the Chilean coup, and hired a noxious propagandist by the name of Shirley Christian to write pro-Pinochet propaganda for the paper, at which task she was quite prolific. (You can search the NYT archives under her name. Christian was also a big fan of U.S. client dictator Somoza of Nicaragua, and excoriated the U.S. press for what she took to be their insufficient enthusiasm for that butcher. But they only soured on him after his thugs murdered one of their members, a stupid move.) 

It's a small lie as U.S. media lies go. Bigger ones: the Kennedy and King assassinations, "Yellow Rain" (bee pollen the U.S. media claimed was Soviet chemical warfare), the "Pope Plot," (Turkish fascist terrorist shoots a Pope, KGB and Bulgarian diplomat framed by CIA and their U.S. media pals) and on and on. 

This is not the first time the Times has included political/ideological propaganda in an obituary. It seems there is no part of the Times that is off-limits for nonobjective content. (For example, after Oliver Stone came out with the movie JFK, the Times, an assiduous promoter of the official coverup of the assassination, went ballistic, and for months afterwards barbs aimed at Stone would pop up in the middle of unrelated articles. You'd be reading a restaurant review, say, and suddenly read something like "the soup left one with a feeling of nausea as if one had just viewed an Oliver Stone movie." I don't know if they put out a memo to the staff to "get Stone," or the kind of careerist creeps who work at the Times just took it upon themselves to score brownie points with their editors, but it was truly batty.)

Ironically, this pro-fascist paper (there are plenty of other examples of its support for fascist regimes, like in "South" Vietnam, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, etc. etc.) is reviled as "liberal" by domestic U.S. fascists and reactionaries. Guess they don't know how to read. (Ranting, raving and reviling they do, not reading. Or thinking.)

NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

In Wake of Tiller Assassination, NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

Monday, June 8, 2009, on page A10, the NY Times is at it again, running political interference for the anti-abortion movement. Almost the entire page is taken up by a puff piece on the anti-abortionists and their alleged dilemmas and uncertainty in the wake of their smashing victory resulting from the execution of Dr. George Tiller. The Times repeats over and over the phony disclaimers of responsibility and alleged regret over the murder by the anti-abortionists, and reinforces the sham contention that there is no terrorist wing to the anti-abortion movement. (This contention is belied by the support given to terrorists like Slepian assassin James Charles Kopp and clinic and Olympics bomber and cop-killer Eric Robert Rudolph, who were able to avoid capture for long periods because of support from the anti-abortion community. The Catholic press even editorialized on behalf of Kopp while he was on the lam.) The article reeks sympathy for these terrorist supporters, who are no doubt secretly gleeful over their success in permanently ending Tiller's medical practice after decades of attacking him, his workers, his family, and his clinic.

This most recent Times article on behalf of the anti-abortionists falsely distances the assassin of Tiller, Scott P. Roeder from the movement he is a part of, repeating absurd lies that no one knew him, he wasn't connected to them, etc.

And of course the times continues to hide FBI complicity in the latest murder, namely their refusal to enforce Federal law and arrest Roeder when he was caught redhanded by clinic personnel glueing their locks the day before carrying out the assassination, and previous Federal crimes he was seen committing. (The bogus Federal Clinic Protection Act is one of these window-dressing laws designed to dupe people and keep them passively waiting for the Government to protect them. It neutralizes people by keeping them corraled within the system, while with the other hand the Government allows terrorists to operate freely.)

The Times also ignores the vicious hostility of Kansas "authorities" (the legitimizing term for people in power) towards abortion providers, including Tiller, who they repeatedly harassed, investigated, and prosecuted, while ignoring criminal violations by the anti-abortion terrorists. (Screaming in people's faces to change their behavior certainly constitutes terrorism in its low-grade form. And as with mob pressure, the implied threat of violence backs up what the anti-abortionists do.)

The Times of course has long been anti-abortion, in a smarmy, underhanded, dishonest way, trying to undermine the beliefs of their "liberal" readers. It does this most obviously by using anti-abortion terminology in its "news" articles (which is pretends are "objective"). It never calls intact dilation and extraction just that, but uses the inflammatory anti-abortionist propaganda term "partial birth abortion." It calls the anti-abortionists "pro-life," another propaganda term. (These fanatics who allegedly find life so sacred, never made a peep about Reagan's massive state terrorism in Central America in the 1980s, for example.)

The Times also consistently slants its abortion coverage negatively towards women's right to control their own bodies. They paint pro-choice people are unreasonable and uncompromising.

This is a line the whole ruling class of the U.S. pushes. The right to abortion was one of the concessions the rulers of the U.S. were forced to make in the 1960s and '70s under pressure from militant movements from below. Ever since, they have been trying to reverse these concessions, including the right to abortion, which they constantly chip away at and demonize. Laws and court decisions keep adding more and more restrictions to the "right," (some right!). Abortion, when it is discussed in the media, is treated as something awful or tragic, or at best something undesirable to be eliminated. Pro-choice people are constantly invited to "the debate" in terms of how to eliminate abortion. Abortion providers have been effectively isolated from the medical establishment, forced to practice in standalone clinics which is like painting a bullseye on them.

The massive terrorism starting under Reagan, which included countless thousands of acts of intimidation, threats, vandalism, firebombings, bombings, maimings and now 8 known assassinations, is blacked out by the Times and the rest of the U.S. media. Only an out and out assassination is "newsworthy" to these propagandists. Environmentalists who commit property damage are reviled as "ecoterrorists" by the media, Times, FBI, and the full weight of secret police methods is brought to bear against them- infiltration, agents provocateurs, every kind of spying method, draconian "conspiracy" and "terrorism" laws, Grand Jury dragnets; the whole panoply of repressive methods the U.S. has in its arsenal. Same thing they did to the totally legal Central American solidarity movements. The FBI even tried to have one of its infiltrators, Frank Varelli, plant guns on one such group, according to Varelli's Congressional testimony. More recently, Muslim men were subjected to a massive roundup and brutal internment in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. Government covered up the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy, even though they had moles inside the terrorists' nest in that case. No raids or roundups resulted. Muslim charities have also been shut down and persecuted, with draconian sentences for people sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

But repression by U.S. secret police agencies doesn't stop there. They also use rightwing terrorist organizations to carry out bombings and assassinations. A few of many examples include the San Diego “Secret Army Organization.” An FBI agent (i.e. badge-carrying member of the FBI, an alleged “law enforcement officer,” participated in a shooting attack on an academic perceived as leftwing by the FBI. He was in the car with the gunman who fired into the professor's home, hitting a woman in the elbow, permanently maiming her.

When the KKK assassinated civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, FBI “informer” instigator Gary Rowe was in the assassins' car. The FBI was in the business of persecuting civil rights activists. Headed for years by notorious racist J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into committing suicide before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize by making him aware of their tapes of his sexual trysts in motel rooms. (The “respectable” “commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an avowed admirer of fascists like Franco and McCarthy and known anti-Semite, was the FBI's media conduit for “leaking” this sexual blackmail dirt into the public domain. It speaks volumes about the political economy of the U.S. that Buchanan is a ubiquitous presence in the U.S. media.)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (part of the U.S. Treasury, which contains a number of repressive “police” agencies, has been involved in various acts of terrorism through surrogate organizations. The BATF had an infiltrator in the base camp (“Elohim City”) from which the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing emanated, and was forewarned by their mole.

BATF also had one of two Government agents inside the Klan-Nazi combine that murdered five leaders of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. In fact they organized the assassinations which specifically targeted the CWP leaders at a public demonstration. The NY Times went so far as to label a photo of the assassins taking guns from the trunk of their car as “CWP” members. (Stalinist propagandists had nothing on the NY Times.) Not only is this not secret, but the PBS show Frontline even had a program about it discussing the instigation by these Government agents provocateurs. (The assassins were acquitted at trial, this being the reactionary South. The CWP was effectively destroyed. The Government targeted the CWP because the CWP was effectively standing up to the Klan-Nazis and encouraging armed opposition to these Government-sponsored terror groups.

As in the Weimar Republic, where Nazis could murder leftists with impunity, but leftists who fought back were vigorously prosecuted for self-defense, the heavy hand of state power puts progressives, and indeed any decent human beings who want to be politically engaged, at a huge and physically perilous disadvantage. Since people who engage in what is supposed to be legal political activities are also targeted for “neutralization,” -anything from constant harassment, firing from jobs, evictions, false arrests, oppressive surveillance through electronic and other means, on through to long prison sentences on trumped up charges with perjured and fabricated “evidence” and even assasination, this makes it virtually impossible to effectively organize for change in America. (And then the impulse for change gets channeled and neutralized by gulling people into following Pied Pipers like Barack Obama.)

Meanwhile the anti-abortion terrorists have scored another victory. Abortion is unavailable in at least 83% of all U.S. counties. Tiller's clinic is closed permanently. More people are intimidated. The official U.S. definition of terrorism is violence used for the purpose of achieving a political goal. If the U.S. media and Government weren't totally cynical in their use of law and language, they would have long ago used the words "terrorists" and "terrorism" for the violent arm of the anti-abortion movement and their crimes. But of course they won't even report their thousands of crimes with exceedingly rare exceptions.

The "law" is not neutral, and "justice" is not blind. Laws are instruments of power for rulers, which only fitfully are related to morality, and their application and enforcement are rarely evenhanded and in the interest of justice, understood in terms of normal human morality. This is true in most countries, and most certainly in the U.S. Meanwhile the pernicious false consciousness promoted and reinforced daily by the system's propaganda organs, aka "the media," needs to be chipped away at with facts and truth.
June 10, 2009

NY Times Phony "Reform" Editorials

Every week or two the New York Times runs an editorial bemoaning the dysfunction of the State Government in Albany and calling for "reform."  But when there was an actual chance for reform to occur, the Times went all-out to sabotage it.

I refer to the aborted Governorship of Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, unlike all the phonies who preceded him in the office, actually was determined to reform the horribly corrupt, inept, dysfunctional and ossified political setup perpetuated by the horrible hack politicians who rule New York State. Spitzer was a driven and hard-driving, moralistic man who genuinely tried to shake up the venal political system. 

Immediately the Times and the other NYC daily rags (NY Post and NY Daily News, owned respectively by plutocrats Rupert Murdoch, a global purveyor of crude fascistic agitprop, and real estate baron Mortimer Zuckerman) set out to check Spitzer. Instead of supporting Spitzer, the Times ran character assassination pieces about what a rotten personality Spitzer had, this being the putative reason he was running into opposition to reform! (That the entrenched vested interests could care less about his personality, and resisted change because of their self-interest, is obvious, and was ignored in these Times' hatchet jobs.) 

Next, Joseph Bruno, a lifelong corrupt hack who was the Republican boss of the State Senate, was discovered to be misusing State Police copters to ferry himself around the state on partisan political errands. When Spitzer's people leaked this to the press, the press turned it into a scandal against Spitzer! That is, Spitzer broke some unwritten rule by investigating Bruno and by leaking the results. This was labeled "Troopergate" by the media lynch mob. Even to this day, "Troopergate" means a Spitzer scandal, not a Bruno scandal. Amazing.

Finally, the media found a sword with which to slay Spitzer. The FBI, one of the U.S.' secret police agencies, snooped into a prostitution ring. (Or were tapping Spitzer.) Of all the upper classs clients of the ring, ONLY SPITZER was named. Yes, he broke the law. Of course, it is oppressive and unjust that prostitution is illegal in the first place. And Spitzer was hypocritical (show me a person who isn't hypocritical about something!) because of his past public crusading against prostitution and johns. But Spitzer was in the bullseye of the finance capitalists and their Federal hatchetmen who held a grudge from when, as State Attorney General, he went after Wall Street and made them pay fines for their various crimes and misdemeanor. (The financiers and their organs like the Wall Street Journal were positively gloating when they got Spitzer.)

As recently as Saturday, June 6, 2009, the Times was at it again, with another hand-wringing, sanctimonious "reform" editorial. They're full of it. The Sulzbergers and their fellow plutocrats like the political system just the way it is, because the corrupt hacks in Albany (and in New York City for that matter) give them everything they want. For instance, when the Times needed to run roughshod over property owners in Times Square to seize a site for its new temple, the Government used its power to do the Times' bidding,

It's easier to control unethical, amoral hustlers who have no principles and are dependent on and beholden to the media. The reason these rags run fake calls for "reform" is pure posturing, and to fool the rubes who credulously believe the propaganda they're reading. Apparently you can fool most of the people most of the time quite easily.

Since this was originally posted,  the Times has run a couple of more editorials (through June 14, '09) bemoaning the political circus in Albany. Two putative Democrats, a girlfriend-face-slashing bully named Hiram Monserrate, and a sleazy crook named Pedro Espada Jr., were paid by a billionaire named Thomas Golisano to vote with the Republicans to seize control of the State Senate from the Democrats. Golisano had the brass to run a full page ad in the NY Daily News braying about how wonderful it all is. (Both Monserrate and Espada are under investigation for scams whereby they set up "nonprofits," fund them with taxpayer money, and siphon off the proceeds. Espada also lies about where he lives- he doesn't live in the district he "represents," as required by law, but lives outside NYC in an "upscale" area. They are classic examples of amoral, ethics- and scruples-free political animals who dominate politics, especially in New York.) 

So the times just deeps its cynical hypocrisy with each new handwringing editorial bemoaning the tawdry state of NY politics, which it helped perpetuate by sabotaging would-be reformer Spitzer.

The Shameless Moral Chutzpah of Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel is a Hero of Western Imperialism because for years he was the bourgoise President-In-Waiting for Czechoslovakia. Hailing from a rich landowning family, all he had to do was bide his time until the decrepit system of Soviet socialism collapsed in order to take over the country. (No such thing is possible in the U.S. Empire, because all potential opposition leaders in places like Latin America are systematically murdered. Miraculously, in a few countries new people's leaders have arisen anyway.)

Havel is an adoring fan of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet (not a secret, but a fact never mentioned in the U.S. press). So it's sickeningly hypocritical (if not downright cynical) whenever Havel presumes to climb on a moral high horse and denounce/lecture.

Most recently he was at it on the NY Times op-ed page (May 11, 2009; May 10 in their online archive), denouncing the "tyrants" of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Sure, the UN is full of shit. A club of bosses of the world's nations would have to be loathsome. But the idea that Havel hates tyrants and loves democracy is a sick joke. Capitalism is what he loves. Salvador Allende, the President of Chile murdered by the fascist traitor Pinochet, was a democrat- too democratic, as it turned out. Since Havel celebrates his murderer, Havel is obviously an ANTI-democrat, notwithstanding his grotesque posturing to the contrary.

Of course the NY Times is guilty of the worst kind of bad faith for not only running such deceptive and dishonest propaganda, but for promulgating a totally fraudulent worldview, the purpose of which is to create and sustain a false consciousness of reality among the public. This false consciousness if a basic reason why America is hopeless and cannot evolve in a positive direction. (All you dupes of the Pied Piper Obama, President "Hope & Change," I hope you're keeping count of his broken campaign promises. He's been breaking several a week now.)

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the George Bush of Astronomy

Just as Bush by edict creates his own law, Tyson by personal fiat demotes Pluto from a planet to a...what exactly he doesn't say. Heavenly body, I guess. His grounds? It's too small, and it's orbit is too elliptical. Or as he says on the website of The Planetary Society (conveniently he's Chairman of the Board of said Society) “Pluto has 'peculiar' written all over it.” (His essay on Pluto is at http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/topten/tyson_pluto_is_not.html.) Another part of Tyson's rap against Pluto is that its moon, Charon, is too large in relation to Pluto.
But Pluto has three moons. The other two are Nix and Hydra. That's three times as many moons as Tyson's native planet, Earth, has. Spunky Pluto has enough pull to keep three moons in its ambit.
And why do all the planets have to orbit the Sun in lockstep conformity for Tyson to let them in the Planet Club? More to the point, who vested Tyson with the authority to eject longtime members in good standing of the club?

With their instinctive common sense, schoolchildren the world over have rejected Tyson's cruel banishment of Pluto from the family of Planets. Pluto is a planet whether Tyson likes it or not.

Hurray for Pluto! Long Live Planet Pluto!

The Media Destruction of Eliot Spitzer

The GOP-controlled secret police units and Federal prosecutors lit a fuse in the media by illegally feeding them allegations about New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes. (We only can surmise they are true allegations because Spitzer threw in the towel. We can further assume that with his combative personality, if the allegations were false he would have at least initially denied the allegations.)

It was assumed from the start of the media firestorm that his position was hopeless. Somehow such a revelation automatically forces a Governor from office. (The media has no interest in the crimes committed by their "sources" in feeding them the dirt on Spitzer. Of course, such crimes impact the public and society far more than Spitzer's private sexual peccadilloes do. But the public interest has never been the guiding principle of what is "newsworthy" in the eyes of the corporate media. The interests of the permanent ruling class are what matters.)

A good example of the juvenile lynch mob mentality of much of the U.S. media is illustrated by the cover of New York magazine dated March 24, 2008. The cover consists in its entirety of a stark photo of Spitzer against a white backdrop, his hands clasped stiffly in front of him, smiling, and in large block letters in a lurid red box the word "BRAIN" with an arrow stabbing straight into Spitzer's groin. Unlike most New York covers, there are no titles of other stories inside, creating a mono-focus on humiliating the ex-Governor. (New York is a bourgeois rag dedicated to relentlessly promoting the most vapid materialism. It spawned a bunch of copycat rags that encapsulate the "Yuppie" mentality, or what would more correctly be called neobourgeois. The pushing of shallow materialism started as a counteroffensive against the Counterculture of the 1960s and early '70s, which the rulers and their minions correctly recognized as a threat to their system by challenging the arid, anti-human values of the Establishment. Unfortunately the counteroffensive, which included state violence and secret police persecution and repression in addition to media and ideological assaults, was successful.)

The same issue of New York apparently felt a need to explain away another apparent double standard or contradiction: namely why was Spitzer pulled down but not Bill Clinton? Various bogus explanations are adduced, ignoring the actual reason- Clinton had the POWER to hang on. The Federal Government, being under his control, wasn't going after him. The GOP hit man Kenneth Starr, appointed "special prosecutor" to get Clinton after the previous special prosecutor, also a Republican, failed to come up with charges against the Clintons. The Paula Jones lawsuit which led to the exposure of Clinton's dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was an arranged GOP plot. Starr took his case to the House, which under GOP control duly impeached Clinton (the equivalent of an indictment). Lacking a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him, Clinton beat the rap, which was mostly based on perjury and witness tampering. Spitzer, on the other hand, is subject to attack by the Federal Government (which I can guarantee you wouldn't be happening if the current President were a Democrat as Spitzer is).

Contrast the treatment Spitzer got, and his enforced overthrow within just days, to what happened when GOP Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter were caught in similar scandals. They're still in office. Both committed illegal acts (Craig soliciting sex from an undercover male cop in a public restroom, Vitter patronizing prostitutes in D.C., same as Spitzer.) Vitter isn't being investigated and prosecuted, like Spitzer is. (Spitzer hasn't been indicted yet, but that seems certain.) WHY THE DOUBLE STANDARD?

In an even more stunningly blatant example of naked double standards and media hypocrisy, the same day the replacement NY Governor, David Paterson, was installed to media and political huzzahs, he admitted that both he and his wife were adulterers! That may not be exactly the same, since presumably they weren't paying for sex, but in terms of not remaining sexually loyal to their spouses, it was the same. Also adultery is illegal in many states (perhaps not in NY however). The NY Times for one covered the news in a tone of complete neutrality. Of course Paterson is a creature of the corrupt establishment, having been in the corrupt and morally depraved NY State Legislature for the past 18 years. So he's "safe" for the powers-that-be.

The media, of course, get to have their cake and eat it too. While feigning shock and moral outrage that a man would want to have sex with someone other than his wife (which would occasionally require paying), the New York tabloids, two reactionary rags, the NY Post and NY Daily News (owned, respectively, by two foreign plutocrats and arch reactionaries, the Australian fascist buccaneer Rupert Murdoch and the Canadian Jewish real estate baron and ardent Zionist Mortimer Zuckerman), drooled and slavered over the prostitute and ran large photos of her breasts (in a swimsuit) and other such T & A fare. (That's internal media code for Tits and Ass.) It also provided an excuse to do "explorations" of prostitution, as if the public has no idea what it is. Merely an excuse for voyeurism and titillation. (Perhaps their readership, thus aroused, is expected to masturbate and steer clear of prostitutes.) The Times did the same, only more "tastefully," that is, archly and stuffily instead of openly salacious and tawdry. Because the tabloids are aimed at working class lunkheads and the Times fancies itself the paper for the socioeconomic elite, their tones and styles differ, but not necessarily their essential content.

The Times gave as part of the "explanation" for the inevitability of Spitzer's fall the fact that he has an abrasive, prickly, arrogant personality. Unlike, I suppose, Rudolph Giuliani! Giuliani was extreme in all those descriptions, even browbeating and abusing reporters at his press conferences (and many other people besides). It never hurt him in the slightest. The media constantly built up Giuliani, (as they did Reagan, Nixon, and numerous other pathological beasts who run the apparatuses of state power in America). All that time they told us he was "America's Mayor," a National Hero after 9/11. (Besides providing fleeting emotional comfort to bereaved citizens and making sure to get his photo constantly taken, it's hard to see what he did that was so "heroic." His ineptitude was shown by the fact that he insisted on locating his Emergency Command [Fuhrer]Bunker in one of the destroyed towers, against the recommendations of security personnel. So millions of dollars were squandered on a command post that was destroyed in the very first emergency it would have been used in! )

So neither the "sex scandal" explanation, nor the "lousy personality" line holds up to logical analysis.

Let us move on to the "he had no allies" explanation. This certainly has merit. But it wrongly ascribes his lack of allies to his rotten personality. Again, many, many successful politicians are bullies, are abrasive, are prickly. (Many are criminals and even mass murderers, like virtually all U.S. Presidents. Their reputations don't suffer as a result.) I cited just one example above, that of Giuliani. So why didn't Spitzer have allies?

Because the people who would be his natural allies, the Democrats, are part of the corrupt political system in NY State. By threatening that system, Spitzer was a threat to them. They could only be relieved to see him knifed, à la Caesar, by the media. And the media certainly wouldn't ally with him, since they too benefit from the corrupt system and thus support it.

As for the special interest groups like Common Cause and anti-rape activists, they actually have no power anyway. But the ones privileged to get a quote in the media also said he had to go- the good-government types because they decided he could no longer be "effective" (i.e., in terms of power, he was effectively castrated), and the anti-rape anti-prostitution activists because of the obvious- that he was the type of man they regard as the enemy. Not to mention amazingly duplicitous. And they hate non-monogamous husbands. (Interestingly, women's rights groups stood behind Bill Clinton during his sex scandal. One explanation proffered for this at the time was their view of him as a bulwark in defense of abortion rights.)

The assault on Spitzer actually began months ago. When Spitzer frontally assaulted the ruling caudillos of the State Legislature, Joseph Bruno and Sheldon Silver, two horribly corrupt machine politicians who rule their respective chambers with iron fists, the media attacked Spitzer, mostly by criticizing his personality. (Which is irrelevant, of course.) When Spitzer sought to expose the venal Bruno's misuse of State Police helicopters for partisan political purposes and personal use, the media made the scandal THE EXPOSURE of Bruno! Instead of Bruno being investigated, Spitzer and his aides were subjected to witch-hunts by various bodies. These "investigations" continue even now. The NY Times led this assault, with the two city tabloids. Despicably, the Times likes to pose as pro-reform and pro-good government. Apparently it is not. (Bruno also corruptly arranges deals with various businesses that fund him and his party, including outside clients to whom he sells his favors. This has been endlessly "under investigation," despite that the facts are well-known, indeed common knowledge within the corrupt political and media establishment.)

What accounts for this support of a Soviet and Chinese-style legislature that "votes" in lockstep with party bosses? Firstly and most fundamentally, the rulers hate democracy, so the less democracy, the better for them. They don't want independent elected representatives who might actually represent the citizens who elect them (or who at least live in their districts if not actually bothering to vote). Secondly, the present arrangement allows for corrupt deals and favoritism directly for these three newspapers. The Post for example pretends for purposes of state taxation to be a nonprofit and is tax exempt. The Times just got the state to use its power of eminent domain to force out property owners on a site where it subsequently erected a new propaganda temple for itself to operate out of.

None of this should be construed as sympathy for Spitzer on my part. He himself is obviously a loathsome hypocrite, on several counts. As a prosecutor, he had a vindictive attitude towards the customers of prostitutes. And as Governor he pushed through more punitive legislation on this score. This is a sick deception on the level of all the gay-bashing reactionaries in the GOP and on "religious" right soapboxes who publicly hate gays and sponsor legislation to assault gays, while they themselves are in fact homosexuals! (There are numerous examples of them by now.) Or we could compare it to Jews who masqueraded as Nazis during World War II, although they at least had the excuse of survival, not mere opportunism and cynical self-promotion.

He is also a hypocrite (and a just plain liar), like so many politicians and other "respectable" elements of society, in that he pays homage to certain values which he claims to live by, and condemns those who don't, in this case, monogamy and the "sacredness" of marriage. He took a solemn vow when he wed his wife, which included a presumption of sexual exclusivity. Like so many pillars of the establishment, he wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to appear to believe in the values he claims to live by, but not really be restricted by them. So he "cheated." That is, he defrauded his wife, the mother of his children, the person he made a commitment to.

The members of the establishment, their minions, and all who want to be "respectable," the definition of which they endorse, don't necessarily want to live in the straitjacket they have
constructed for themselves. While hating "hippies," they want to have some of the same freedoms the hippies championed, while condemning those freedoms. But it doesn't work. There cannot be freedom in the context of repression. People who "cheat," betraying their wives or girlfriends, or who use illegal drugs and marijuana while condemning drug use and supporting repressive anti-drug laws, are not experiencing freedom. They are like burglars in the night, surreptitiously stealing pleasures they are ashamed to openly claim a right to. They cheat the rest of us by upholding our oppression while carving out a covert exception to the rules for themselves. And usually the rules are applied selectively so they get away with it even when caught. There are various legal loopholes and trapdoors and exceptions and carveouts and "diversion programs" by which the privileged and those who can afford expensive, politically-connected lawyers are allowed to slide for their indiscretions, even in the face of allegedly "mandatory" sentences.

Spitzer earlier in life could have chosen to live by less restrictive personal values. However he had ambitions to climb up the power structure, so he bought into that structure's repressive dictates, which includes demands of marriage and monogamy, upholding the criminalization of paid sex and using drugs for pleasure, and so on. (It's another irony that the police state instituted by establishmentarians like Spitzer entrapped him in its web. That is, banks filing "suspicious activity" reports is what led to his downfall. A half million of these reports are filed annually with Federal inquisitors. We can safely presume that the vast majority have nothing to do with real crime. Likewise, while the alleged purpose of currency reporting and "structuring" laws (that is, requiring the filing of reports of withdrawals of $10,000 and up in cash, or smaller amounts that add up to $10,000,) is to catch "terrorists," "drug dealers," and other despised scum, these laws are in fact used most of the time to punish "law abiding" citizens; ; that is, they are instruments of control and repression of the general population, i.e. us. Our money has to be controlled, our freedom of action is considered suspect, our privacy is considered a cover for evildoing, so we are stripped of it, and we are taught that we shouldn't mind if we "have nothing to hide." Thus is the desire for privacy and to be left alone by those in power, the "Government," itself considered quasi-criminal or evidence of criminal intent. The logic of repression, which demands ever-increasing controls and ever-shrinking freedom, was kicked into high gear after the 9/11/01 attacks, which the secret police deliberately allowed to take place for that very reason.)

Spitzer should have told his wife he was no longer willing to abide by their life contract. Of course he wouldn't do that because he needed a nuclear family to meet the definition of "respectable." (Apparently bachelors are unfit for public office, or for that matter high corporate positions, for which marriage is a strict requirement.) He not only double-crossed her ("cheated"), he potentially endangered her health by seeking condomless sex with prostitutes, a nearly sure way to spread diseases, including the lethal AIDS.

Politicians like him are usually allowed to practice a double-standard, until they get in the way or outlive their usefulness. If they're right-wingers exposed by some media outlet seeking immediate attention to juice their circulation or viewers, we see that they are usually allowed to stay in office. There is something arbitrary or capricious about Spitzer's treatment, but in no way is it akin to a Greek Tragedy. Nor do I buy the pop psychology analysis that it bespeaks some self-destructive impulse in him. More likely, having grown up rich and privileged, he merely assumed, with a combination of arrogance and thoughtless complacency born of habit, that he could do what he wanted if he was discreet. He was "stupid" in that he failed to calculate that, far from his position of seeming power making him less vulnerable, it made him more so, because he would be under heightened political scrutiny from his enemies in the GOP and on Wall Street, the financial plutocrats who sit at the very apex of power in this society, and who he antagonized when he put a brief fright into them with his threats and prosecutions as State Attorney General.

The establishment of the U.S. is pathologically schizophrenic about sexuality. While titillating the populace every day with scantily clad young women posing as sexual vixens and filling both the "news" and entertainment arms of its media with racy sexual content, it carries out increasingly puritanical policies. Sex education is mostly abolished in American schools today, replaced by anti-sex scolding called "abstinence education." Abortion is nearly illegal, now being unavailable in 87% of U.S. counties, subject to increasing restrictions and legal assault, and regarded as disreputable and a fit target for harassment and terrorism by primitive religious fanatics. "Family planning aid" abroad is barred to any entities that would even mention abortion. Chastity is the only method of birth control considered morally acceptable. The U.S. today practices a medieval sexual politics while its culture is drenched with overt sexual imagery. This is a form of mental derangement.

The counterculture implicitly made an honest critique of society's strictures. It said that relationships are naturally fluid and temporary, that sexual desire if polymorphous and fleeting and of its own accord cannot be limited to just a single person. In direct opposition to 2000 years of Western Christian culture based on guilt and suffering and repression, it said that pleasure is good, not evil. It advocated honesty in relations. Of course that was in theory. In fact the counterculture fell apart in part due to its own failures to live up to its ideals and the various contradictions they contained.

Rather than honestly advocate for greater human freedom, honesty and realism, the "solid citizen" duplicitous hypocrites want to have it both way, skulking around under cover of darkness to try and grab some furtive pleasures to fill the void in their bleak souls. Apparently the alleged satisfactions of "conservative social values" leaves them living in a spiritual desert, deeply unsatisfied with their lives and unconsciously groping for some gratification of an inner hunger they do not understand.

As for Spitzer and his ilk, a person who would deceive the person closest to them in life, their life partner, their soul mate, is obviously an untrustworthy person. In that sense, there is a "character" issue here that is relevant to a politician's public duties.

But you're a big boy or girl now. You didn't still trust politicians, did you? As a subspecies of (alleged) humanity, they are literally a different type of being from the rest of us.

But that must be the subject of another essay.