Propaganda Works!

The propaganda of blaming the wrong people for failure works in the US; citizens were persuaded to blame the wrong people for “loosing the war” in Vietnam. Some willingly took “action” based on misleading misinformation and threw rotten eggs and dog crap at the returning soldiers. That’s something many would rather forget, but it’s something the country has forgotten at her own peril. 

This blame game of propaganda still works today. It’s the “welfare bums” and old people sucking down Social Security and Medicare dollars causing the so called huge deficit, perpetual war spending doesn’t even come into question. 

The Washington Spectator reports that the military budget already “gobbles up over half of federal discretionary spending.” Journalist James Risen reported that the US has spent $4 trillion on war thus far. We’re no safer now than when we first started this “war on terror”. It’s a lot of spending with poor results. Sound familiar? 

From the Nation magazine-“ The drumbeat for war has already spiraled into calls for increased military spending that will lift all boats; hawkish members of Congress are using the IS war as an occasion to push for cancellation of the entire Pentagon sequester, which would increase funding to defense contractors across the board.” And, “Ramping up American’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga; America’s defense industry.”

Senator Lindsey Graham is banging the drum for war with his shrill prediction that we’re all gonna die if we don’t defeat ISIS now and wants to send 10,000 ground troops immediately. Only one percent of this country serves in the military, where are the ground troops coming from? Presently, twenty-two veterans out of this one percent commit suicide each day. This should be telling us there’s something very wrong with America’s perpetual wars; but since it doesn’t receive as much corporate media attention as the “ruinous debt” this tragic warning sign is ignored.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Question everything” and that includes budgets for wars with scant or absent details. How do we know all that defense money is being spent wisely? What protections are in place to guard against corruption and inherent human greed that occurs during wars “when no one is looking”? The Pentagon Papers should have taught us to question what we’re being told about war. No one questions it though, the lessons of Vietnam have been unlearned. 

Lack of knowledge didn’t stop citizens from blaming the wrong people for failure in Vietnam and it doesn’t stop the country from blaming the wrong people for financial debt. This country has spent four trillion on war and twelve trillion on banks that were “too bit to fail”. That’s sixteen trillion just to war and Wall Street. Does the country believe it? No, but we don’t mind spending those trillions on the revered few, after all, the banks drive “job creation” and the war mongers “keep us safe”. Jobs and safety sounds promising, but the corporate owned media is wrong about causes of government debt and the not so promising ability of war to bring us peace. 

Patrick Henry said, “I know of no way judging the future but by the past.” Blaming the wrong people doesn’t work, history proves it. 

Judging by the past

Alexander Hamilton said, “A power over a man’s support is a power over his will.” The few who have the power over the “will of men” incite the raging inequality, division and political dysfunction gripping this country.  

Nomi Prins writes in the Washington Spectator, “Since the turn of the twentieth century, a small set of the same families has wielded disproportionate influence over our nation’s economy, policies, and politics. Today’s “Big-Six banks are mostly incarnations of the Big Six banks that existed a 100 years ago.”

The Nation magazine writes, “Tim Pawlenty, in his first two months as head of a lobbying association for financial companies that include Barclays and Wells Fargo, made more than double his  annual $120,000 salary as governor of Minnesota. The self described “Sam’s club Republican” earns over $1.8 million a year working largely on banking regulation.” Is it coincidence that banks have become 38 percent larger than they were before the crash in 2008? Or that the industry with the highest pay increases are banks?

From the MWDN “The high cost of leadership” May 28, 2014, “The industry with the biggest pay bump was banking. The median pay of a Wall Street CEO rose by 22 percent last year, on top of a 22 percent increase the year before.” The assets of the average citizen have not risen 38 percent nor are a majority of American’s salaries 22 percent higher than they were last year.

When it’s the supposed 47 percent of citizens not paying taxes, there’s a cry and a hue about these lazy, immoral takers bankrupting the government, but there’s not too much focus on the tax dodging corporations.  

The Washington Spectator reports, “Over the past two years, CEO’s at the National Restaurant Association’s 20 largest corporate affiliates were paid $662 million in full deductible performance pay. Had that compensation been taxed as salary, those 20 corporations would have paid the IRS an additional in $232 million.” 

Former Senator Mike Gravel who ran for president in 2000 although few knew, writes in his book “The Kingmakers," “the media echo chamber not only jeopardizes our security by hyping phony threats, it strangles our democracy by hyping favorite candidates” and “freedom of speech is not sacred in the echo chamber.” 

These are just some of the paymasters who tilt the balance of power in their favor by waging fierce partisanship on the outside, single handed control on the inside; all fueled by the lap dogs in the echo chamber. 

Patrick Henry said,  “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience, I know of no way of judging the future but by the past."

Judging by the past, the worst cruelties are yet to come. All possible through a populace duped because they’re not on the right side of the revolving door. The lives and fortunes of our nation is not a contest between Republican vs. Democrat. It’s the many versus the monied few, just as it has always been; entire populations can’t be born into monarchies or obscenely wealthy families.

Ownership of opportunity

The Washington Spectator reports that the Powder River Basin in Wyoming is a carbon reserve being mined for shipment to China; corporate coal-export company Peabody Energy is seeking to build a terminal in Washington and Oregon. The Spectator also states “The corporate architecture behind the deal are elaborate. Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer in the world, operates the strip mines in the Powder River Basin. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company owns Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (BNSF), which will move the coal from Wyoming to ports in the Pacific Northwest. Goldman Sachs owns 49 percent of Carrix, Inc., which owns SSA Marine, which in turn owns Pacific International Terminals, the subsidiary that will operate the coal port. Buffet wins, or looses, on both ends of the deal. As investment banks were collapsing in 2008, Berkshire Hathaway bought $5 billion in preferred Goldman Sachs shares.”

No wonder Warren Buffet said “Business has come back very well from five years ago when the panic hit.” and “The Forbes 400 List that just came out showed aggregate wealth of $2 trillion. You go back 20 years and that was $300 billion. So it’s up six or seven for one.“

Many millions of Americans have not come back as well. Sasha Abramsky reports in his book, “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives”, “Fifty million residents of the richest country on earth live at or below poverty line; that’s roughly one in six Americans…”

According to economist Emanuel Saez, the top 10 percent took home more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the highest share since 1917. The richest 400 hundred individuals now possess half the nation’s privately owned wealth.“

Complaining about concentration of wealth or ownership pyramids created through deregulation only elicit charges of jealousy, stupidity, communism or socialism. Neil Barofsky quotes a Kansas City Fed president who stated banks too big to fail are “still in control of our country’s economic destiny.”

Yet the free market enthusiasts insist reducing regulations will bring back economic opportunity for all. Neil Barofsky states“…the market distortions that flow from TBTF may have actually gotten worse. With megabanks’ continued access to artificially cheap credit, freedom from creditor-imposed market place discipline, and incentives that reward large and highly leveraged risks…, the presumption of bailout-remains unaddressed. By failing to alter this presumption, Dodd-Frank may have inadvertently sown the seeds for the next financial crisis.”

Where’s the concern for the future of the nation’s children, when they have to bail out banks too big to fail again? Oh that’s right, it’s only Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid threatening the future of the nation’s children not the banks or elaborate ownership schemes.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of wealth concentration and growth in poverty, the banksters and mega-corps are defended to maintain the fantasy that anyone can rise to the top in America and overcome adversity with hard work. Which is no longer reasonable to believe; the deck is rigged and if you’re on the lower deck it’s your own fault. Once again the country will be duped into blaming the economic victims in our society instead of the perpetrators, just like the country was convinced to throw eggs and dog crap at the soldiers returning from Vietnam, rather than at the political establishment in DC that caused that horror.

Scoundrel patriotism

The government ‘shut down’ is creating a lot of uncertainty for Americans.

The Head Start program and the WIC (Women with Infant Children) program have been stopped. Veterans services have been suspended including combat pay for our fighting men and women. Restaurants and retail businesses are devoid of customers in a Kentucky town where the IRS office is empty.

Speaker John Boehner is against government creating uncertainty went it comes to businesses offering health insurance to their workers, but when it comes to ordinary working Americans, the Speaker doesn’t mind creating uncertainty about weekly paychecks or daily meals for poor kids, the elderly, and babies.

The director of WIC said “these families don’t need uncertainty in their lives, they’re already challenged enough.” This shut down has literally taken food out of the mouths of babies.

Representative Eric Cantor said, “since the President gave businesses a waiver for implementation of the Health Care law, then the President should extend that same waiver to all Americans“. His concern for fairness is unimpressive, homes and food for all citizens, is not his concern.

Neil Barofsky Special Inspector for TARP in his book “Bailout an Inside Account of how Washington abandoned Main Street while rescuing Wall Street“, said, “…to hear Rick Santelli, a CNBC anchor, in midrant against the new TARP mortgage modification program. He described it as a plan for “losers” and compared it to Castro’s Cuba. At one point, he turned to the roaring traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and asked, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hands.” “Finally, in a phrase that would change the landscape of conservative politics in the country, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July.” Barofsky says in his book, Treasury, along with this rant “…had just helped give birth to the Tea Party.”

There were millions of dollars in the same TARP funds that bailed out the banks to help millions of Americans modify their mortgage payments. This was the catalyst for the Tea Party, resentment over helping ordinary working Americans stay in their homes. Where was Representative Cantor’s concern for fairness when Americans were doling out trillions to banks, the very same people who created and benefited from the financial collapse while millions of Americans lost their homes?

Edmund Burke said “the last refuge of a scoundrel is patriotism.” Increasing unemployment and taking food away from infants; the elderly, and invalids is not patriotism, it’s a cruelty the Tea Party politicians embrace, born out of resentment and adverse to reason, logic or humanness.

It’s no wonder they are willing to shut down government over health insurance and food for those whose lives are already filled with uncertainty.

This is only the beginning, for the tea party politicians,’ cruelty knows no bounds…

The suffering is coming, the suffering is coming… Brought to us by tea party scoundrels, and dumbfounded, ‘blinded by the lights’ Democrats.

The government who cried wolf

The government is beginning to sound like the boy who cried wolf. First it was Bradley Manning and his leaks which damaged national security. Those leaks occurred in 2010 and we’ve yet to see how in any way they’ve damaged our national security.

Over 500 hundred people have died in Iraq just this month alone. Seems that’s more damaging to national security than Bradley Manning, who, by the way leaked documents showing the number of people killed in Iraq is greater than what the government is reporting. We’ve been here before, the Pentagon Papers proved that what the government knew and what they were telling the country about what was going on in Vietnam, were two different things.

Now they’re saying the same thing about Edward Snowden and his leaks telling of government collection and storage of data, they say the leaks are a great threat to our national security.

Yet we’re to believe the price of oil rose because of the turmoil in Egypt. And because of this turmoil, the US is not going to send them four F-16’s, but the billions in military aid will keep flowing. Not only will we continue to send money to Egypt, the government is mulling whether or not to supply the Syrian rebels with weapons funneled through the CIA. How do we know those weapons won’t be used against our troops in the future? That would damage national security and our troops on the ground a lot more then Snowden has.

US meddling in the Middle East is a greater threat to national security than either one of these people whose sole purpose of risking their future was to generate discussion amongst the American public as to what our government is doing behind our backs.

Bradley Manning has been tortured and held in a brig since his arrest, and Snowden is being called a criminal and a traitor before he’s even been tried in a court of law. Which just goes to show that when anyone dares to tell the American public what their government is doing to them behind their backs, they will pay a hefty price, with their lives and fortunes.

Hmm, I seem to remember that there were others who risked their lives and fortunes for our country once upon a time. Didn’t England declare Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock, all the men who signed our Declaration of Independence, and all the forgotten names of their compatriots were traitors? Where would we be now if they hadn’t risked everything, even death, for the rights of their fellow man?

Spying is Security

Big Brother is here in the from of corporatism, which is when government and corporations combine as a means of providing services. The NSA, a secret government agency has combined with telecommunications corporations as a means of providing services, in this case, “security from terrorist attacks.”

The NSA employs 700,000 contractors. For those who want to reduce the size of the federal government, not hiring federal employees looks good, but tax payer dollars are funding these NSA contractors, meaning we’re indirectly paying contractors six figure salaries to spy on us.

Corporations like Verizon will store this data forever. Dana Priest explains the danger in the data storage, “…what privacy advocates are most worried about is the storage of this data. So I may not be under suspicion right now; 10 years from now, you know, they're looking at three parts -- three different sets of my digital exhaust, and they may decide something is suspicious.” “And so they can go back and mine the data that they have from 10 years ago. And that's what causes privacy advocates most concern, is that you are going to have this giant database of information about Americans in the Verizon phone records…”

The power of the executive office has been expanded to include the president having the power to label a citizen a terrorist and without due process, throw that person in jail. Add to that the fact that Verizon sent their information directly to the executive office and what do we have? A new ‘label’ that says Spying is now ‘security.’

According to Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, “The president says, I welcome this debate. That's healthy for democracy.” Mark Shields reminds us, “there wouldn't be a debate if we didn't have this disclosure.” and we’d still be in ignorance of the fact.

Thomas Jefferson said: “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people…They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

A majority of elected representatives want to see Edward Snowden punished for informing the whole mass of the people about what our government is doing to our privacy and liberties, all funded by tax payer dollars.

Which just goes to show that no matter what comes out of the politician’s mouth, they are all on the band wagon for the corporatism of Big Brother. It all “step-by-step, inch by inch“, adds up to enhance the government’s control over the masses, and the politicians, being the ego of the government, will exercise their ego and new found controls to enhance their own power. Don’t believe the ‘double-speak’ message that spying is security and ignorance is protection. Doing so would be a terrible fate to impose upon yourself and future generations.

Who benefits from a negative tax rate?

From the Nation magazine: “Randolph Paul, Wall Street tax lawyer and FDR’s point man on taxes during WWll said in 1947 “If the nation’s wealth flows into the hands of too few rather than into the hands of the many, the resulting amount of saving will be greater than can be absorbed. Our economy can take only so much of this sort of thing before it has a violent conclusion.” In 1947 the long and bloody labor movement could be seen as a “violent conclusion”. “… President Eisenhower saw high taxes on high incomes as an antidote to the “opulence” that inexorably leads a nation to “depravity and ultimate destruction.”

In other words, the richest just pull the money out of the economy and lock it away, never to see it in circulation again, ultimately destroying the economy for all of us. That’s why in the past, tax rates were a lot higher than today. In 1955, the IRS took 51.2 percent of America’s top 400 incomes.” “Tax rates would top off at 94 percent during WW ll and hover around 90 percent for the next two decades.” By doing this Eisenhower led America to the biggest and longest lasting economic boom in history, which all Americans were able to take part in.

Now, from the Nation magazine, “In 2007, America’s top 400 had an average tax bill after loopholes, of just 16.6 percent” but rather than broadcast this information, we get alarmist headlines from newspapers such as the March 4 headline “Tax bills reach 30-year high” with the caption: “Wealthy face another potential tax hike while already paying high tax bills”. According to articles in the Nation magazine, those companies who presently have negative tax rates include “Honeywell, which has a negative tax rate of -0.7 percent.” other “firms that pay a negative tax rate, are GE, Boeing and Verizon, ” to name just a few.

Here’s the AP report: “The average family in the bottom 20 percent of households won’t pay any federal taxes. Instead, many families in this group will get payments from the federal government by claiming more in credit than they owe in taxes, including payroll taxes. That will give them a negative tax rate.” Aren’t “credits” and negative tax rates similar? When it’s global conglomerates paying negative tax rates, it’s neither paid or reported on, however, when it’s poor people paying negative tax rates, well now, that’s front page news!

The top twenty percent, with their media; news, and information distribution syndicates and connections have convinced, by using propaganda; disinformation, and outright lies, a large number of ‘fact deprived; financially, and economically ignorant and truly gullible Americans, that it’s the bottom twenty percent causing all of our economic debt that future generations will get “stuck” paying off, and that all the threats of a “violent conclusion” and “ultimate destruction” don‘t really exist.

Unfortunately, history shows us otherwise. Eventually, when the richest have taken all the money out of and destroyed our economy, the other 90%: the suffering population, will have no choice but to react by ultimately taking desperate measures in self defense, as seen throughout recorded history.

America may have been initially settled for religious freedom concerns, but 200 years later it was intolerable taxes that led to our revolution. Ten years later France followed our lead for the same reasons: the few rich took and kept all the money. “Let them eat cake!” Look at Russia before that and continuing back throughout recorded history of civilized countries. When the money’s gone, it usually continues with the people in power building more prisons and taking the means of self-defense, guns in our case, away from the population. If people would just look to the facts and not the lies put out by the medias which are owned and controlled by the richest, they’ll see there’s a lesson to be learned here, and to ignore it would be to our own inevitable peril.