Subject: Re: US Support for Regime Change in Venezuela Is a Mistake
Marsha,
True enough, but our Ruling Class has been perfecting this meddling for well
over 100 years. Check out Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders and come
forward through the bloody pages of American Imperialism.
What am I saying, go back to the day when Chris Columbus took his first
captives and follow our bloody trail of "divide and conquer" across the
American continent and then across the Pacific.
Have you ever imagined what sort of a mountain would rise above the plains
if all of the bodies of the murdered people who stood in the way of the
American Empire's march were dumped in one spot?
I sometimes think of the great loss to civilization by the unborn babies of
those murdered victims. Babies from which great innovators and inventors
and scientists and teachers and real leaders would have come.
Through the murder of their would be parents, the Empire has assured that
the killing gene is the dominant one in our gene pool. We are now breeding
much finer murderers than back in old Chris Columbus's day.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marsha" <marcatony@yahoo.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 12:45 AM
Subject: Re: US Support for Regime Change in Venezuela Is a Mistake
Hi
As far as I see it, there is never a reason, or should I say an excuse,
for toppling a fairly elected government. The idea that the United States
supports democracies, if it weren't so seriously, would be laughable.
Marsha
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Monday, February 24, 2014
NPR.org Text-Only : The Lives Of Blind Brothers Changed When 'Dad' Came Knocking
Now here's an uplifting tale to warm our hearts on a chilly, damp Winter's
Day.
Carl Jarvis
******
Subject: RE: NPR.org Text-Only : The Lives Of Blind Brothers Changed When
'Dad' Came Knocking
Morning Edition, . Leo, Nick and Steven Argel are 14-year-old triplets, and
they've all been blind since birth.
Growing up in Arlington, Va., their single mother had a hard time caring for
them.
"Every day was like: Wake up, go to school, come back home, and then you
stay there for the rest of the day," Leo recalls in a visit to StoryCorps.
"There were certain things that I wish I could do, like I wish I could go
out and play in the snow like everyone else. 'Cause I've heard kids through
the window - we could hear that they were having fun. The only thing I
remember, when I was 7, we went to McDonald's and we went to the park. We
rarely went outside."
Nick says it got so bad he wanted to die. "But it was one of the decisions
I'm glad I did not make because I would have missed out on everything."
That all changed when they were 10. Ollie Cantos, a blind man in their
community, got word of their situation and knocked on their door. He's now
in the process of formally adopting the brothers.
At first, the brothers didn't believe Cantos was blind, so he demonstrated
that he could read braille.
"It just made me feel like I had a person that I could trust," Nick says.
"Because I didn't trust anyone."
Cantos, like the brothers, had a hard time growing up. He says he didn't
have any friends, and people made fun of him.
He taught the brothers how to use their canes better by taking them to the
corner store. One day, the store clerk asked Cantos if Leo was his son.
Before Cantos could answer, Leo put his arm around him and said, "Yeah,
that's my dad."
As Cantos remembers it, Leo said, "Well, you take us places, you protect us,
you help us with our homework and make us happy. Sounds like a dad to me."
"Whenever I hear you call me 'Dad,' " Cantos tells the three brothers, "it's
the highest compliment to me. You three used to be in the same situation
that I was, and to see you come out of that and to be the way you guys are
now, it's impossible to describe how grateful I am that I get to be your
dad."
Day.
Carl Jarvis
******
Subject: RE: NPR.org Text-Only : The Lives Of Blind Brothers Changed When
'Dad' Came Knocking
Morning Edition, . Leo, Nick and Steven Argel are 14-year-old triplets, and
they've all been blind since birth.
Growing up in Arlington, Va., their single mother had a hard time caring for
them.
"Every day was like: Wake up, go to school, come back home, and then you
stay there for the rest of the day," Leo recalls in a visit to StoryCorps.
"There were certain things that I wish I could do, like I wish I could go
out and play in the snow like everyone else. 'Cause I've heard kids through
the window - we could hear that they were having fun. The only thing I
remember, when I was 7, we went to McDonald's and we went to the park. We
rarely went outside."
Nick says it got so bad he wanted to die. "But it was one of the decisions
I'm glad I did not make because I would have missed out on everything."
That all changed when they were 10. Ollie Cantos, a blind man in their
community, got word of their situation and knocked on their door. He's now
in the process of formally adopting the brothers.
At first, the brothers didn't believe Cantos was blind, so he demonstrated
that he could read braille.
"It just made me feel like I had a person that I could trust," Nick says.
"Because I didn't trust anyone."
Cantos, like the brothers, had a hard time growing up. He says he didn't
have any friends, and people made fun of him.
He taught the brothers how to use their canes better by taking them to the
corner store. One day, the store clerk asked Cantos if Leo was his son.
Before Cantos could answer, Leo put his arm around him and said, "Yeah,
that's my dad."
As Cantos remembers it, Leo said, "Well, you take us places, you protect us,
you help us with our homework and make us happy. Sounds like a dad to me."
"Whenever I hear you call me 'Dad,' " Cantos tells the three brothers, "it's
the highest compliment to me. You three used to be in the same situation
that I was, and to see you come out of that and to be the way you guys are
now, it's impossible to describe how grateful I am that I get to be your
dad."
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
Subject: Re: Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
I can't read this without becoming so enraged that my coffee turns to steam
in my mouth.
Murderers! Violant murderers is what we all are ruled by. And I openly
weep when I hear some Mother, Father or sibling of a dead American declare
how proud they are of the great sacrifice their loved one paid for our
nation.
Not only have we allowed our Murdering Rulers to take the sons and daughters
of our Working Class and Poor Americans and teach them how to murder, but we
send them to their certain death by returning them time and time again to
the battlefield. And if they are not murdered themselves, they are maimed
physically or mentally to the point that their lives are forever ruined.
It doesn't matter what grand reasons or fine names our Greedy Empire gives
it, it is murder pure and simple.
We teach our innocent youth to murder up close and personal, hand to hand in
the desert sands or the steaming jungles. We teach them to play video games
in preparation for murdering from a distance, safe and snug in their little
control room hidden in the middle of the USA. We are now skilled at
murdering from up close or at long range.
And here's the real joke. This great nation, this American Empire that is
fighting a war on Terror, this peace loving nation of laws, has the worlds
greatest number of law breakers behind bars. The Empire is building
prisons, private prisons, at record breaking rates to house even more of our
lawless criminals.
America is probably the most violent nation in history. We can't even begin
to solve our own people's needs. So our corrupt leaders turn to what they
know best. Murder. Mass murder. Keep the cannons rolling and the blood
flowing. And at the helm sits the Two Faced Prince of Peace, with his
forked tongue flicking this way and that.
Murder!
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 7:33 PM
Subject: Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
________________________________________
OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.
In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.
The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.
See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.
In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.
The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.
See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
I can't read this without becoming so enraged that my coffee turns to steam
in my mouth.
Murderers! Violant murderers is what we all are ruled by. And I openly
weep when I hear some Mother, Father or sibling of a dead American declare
how proud they are of the great sacrifice their loved one paid for our
nation.
Not only have we allowed our Murdering Rulers to take the sons and daughters
of our Working Class and Poor Americans and teach them how to murder, but we
send them to their certain death by returning them time and time again to
the battlefield. And if they are not murdered themselves, they are maimed
physically or mentally to the point that their lives are forever ruined.
It doesn't matter what grand reasons or fine names our Greedy Empire gives
it, it is murder pure and simple.
We teach our innocent youth to murder up close and personal, hand to hand in
the desert sands or the steaming jungles. We teach them to play video games
in preparation for murdering from a distance, safe and snug in their little
control room hidden in the middle of the USA. We are now skilled at
murdering from up close or at long range.
And here's the real joke. This great nation, this American Empire that is
fighting a war on Terror, this peace loving nation of laws, has the worlds
greatest number of law breakers behind bars. The Empire is building
prisons, private prisons, at record breaking rates to house even more of our
lawless criminals.
America is probably the most violent nation in history. We can't even begin
to solve our own people's needs. So our corrupt leaders turn to what they
know best. Murder. Mass murder. Keep the cannons rolling and the blood
flowing. And at the helm sits the Two Faced Prince of Peace, with his
forked tongue flicking this way and that.
Murder!
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 7:33 PM
Subject: Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
________________________________________
OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.
In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.
The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.
See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
OpenDemocracy [1] / By Rodric Braithwaite [2]
Wasted Blood and Treasure: The Futility of Invading Afghanistan
February 21, 2014 |
On 16 December 2013 David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, told British
soldiers in Helmand in Afghanistan that they had accomplished their mission,
and that they could come home in 2014 with their heads held high.
He begged an important question: What was that mission? Was it the same as
the mission with which the Americans and their allies had entered
Afghanistan in October 2001? Or the mission with which the British had gone
into Helmand in 2006? Or was it a face-saving reformulation, designed to
demonstrate that the blood and treasure expended in Afghanistan over
thirteen years had not been spent in vain?
It is a mistake to draw historical parallels too closely, or to seek
unambiguous lessons. But looking at the past can clarify the present, even
if it offers no secure guide for the future.
The British invasions of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, the Soviet
invasion in 1979, and the American led invasion of 2001, all have one thing
in common. By a narrow definition, all the armies won their wars, though the
British suffered some humiliating defeats on the battlefield. But neither
the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans achieved, at least through
military means, the objectives they had set themselves. All scaled their
ambitions down to aims that they could probably have achieved earlier and at
less cost. All seriously damaged their own prestige. And all wreaked havoc
on the country they claimed to have come to help.
The British invasions
A good deal of myth surrounds the three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919). The first two ended with British armies defeating the
Afghan armies in the field and burning down Kabul. The third ended when the
British drove an invading Afghan army out of India. The aim of the first two
wars was to ensure British control over Afghan foreign policy, above all to
prevent the Russians getting a menacing foothold on the border of the Indian
empire.
Among British policymakers there were two schools of thought. One held that
success could only be achieved by reducing Afghanistan to a protectorate
under a British puppet, as the British had already done in so many parts of
India. The other held that it would be enough to secure Afghan cooperation
through diplomacy, subsidies, and the occasional threat of military action.
The 'forward policy' proved unsustainable: the Afghans made life intolerable
for the British occupiers. But the alternative was a success. The British
effectively controlled Afghan foreign policy for eighty years, bribing and
persuading even the formidable Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman [3] to match their
wishes. Today some Afghans regard Abdur Rahman as a traitor, though he was
probably their most effective ruler in the last three hundred years.
Thus the British very soon abandoned any idea of imposing a political
solution on Afghanistan, still less of trying to rule it in their own image.
Their Russian and American successors, however, made the mistake of
believing that they had not only the need, but the duty, to re-engineer
Afghanistan's political and social system, to bring the country, as the
Russians said, from the fourteenth into the twentieth century.
The Soviet invasion
Both the Soviet and the American invasions began with a stunning military
success. The Russians did not go in, as Western propaganda held at the time,
to threaten Western oil supplies, to secure a warm water port, or to
incorporate Afghanistan into the Soviet Union. On the contrary, they feared
that a country which bordered on their vulnerable Southern frontier was
falling into chaos under its murderous and dysfunctional Communist leaders,
a situation that would be exploited against them by the Americans.
They therefore decided to get rid of the Afghan leader Amin [4]. In December
1979, in a brilliant special forces operation, they killed Amin and replaced
him with a puppet. Their plan was then to train up the Afghan army and
police, put the political and social system on to a sound basis, and leave a
stabilised country behind them after perhaps a year. They hoped to create a
political and economic system on broadly 'socialist' principles, thus
ensuring that Afghanistan would automatically remain a reliable friend of
the Soviet Union.
The Afghan people had a different idea. Many of them had originally welcomed
the removal of Amin. But they deeply resented the presence of foreign
occupiers, infidels who tried to change their age-old ways. Resistance
spread and the Russians were sucked into a quagmire from which they
extracted themselves with much difficulty nine years later.
In putting the case for an early Soviet withdrawal to his colleagues in the
Politburo, Gorbachev said: 'We could leave quickly, without worrying about
the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we
cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A
million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. And it looks as if
they did so in vain. So why did those people die?' Gorbachev, in fact, found
himself in much the same place as Cameron a quarter of a century later. He
no longer hoped to achieve the broader ambitions the Russians had set
themselves of re-engineering Afghan society in the interests of progress and
stability. Instead he needed to find a way of declaring 'mission
accomplished' without repudiating the sacrifices that had been made by the
Soviet soldiers.
In one sense, Gorbachev had a surprising success. The Americans, the
Pakistanis, and the Afghan guerrilla fighters, the mujahedin, had all been
determined that the Russians should be humiliated. In addition, the
Pakistanis and the mujahedin aimed to set up an Islamic government in Kabul
to replace the Communists. But in protracted negotiations in Geneva in 1988,
the Russians managed to secure a deal which allowed them to withdrew their
forces in good order, leaving behind their own man, Najibullah [5], and an
Afghan army capable of defending him.
It was a short lived triumph. Najibullah and his army were almost completely
dependent on Russian supplies of fuel, food, weapons, and ammunition. When
Russia went bankrupt at the end of 1991 and cut off supply, the army split
and Najibullah's regime collapsed in a welter of intrigue. There followed a
vicious civil war and the victory of the Taliban.
The American invasion
In 2001 the Americans also went into Afghanistan with a simple and
achievable aim: to destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation
which had master-minded the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, and
to overthrow the Taliban regime which had given him comfort.
In this limited objective they were almost completely successful, though
Osama escaped to Pakistan. But, like the Russians before them, they then
expanded their aims. They proceeded from an entirely flawed premise - that
Al Qaeda could not regroup outside Afghanistan and that the Taliban too were
terrorists (though they had never planted a bomb outside their own
territory). Another British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, caricatured the
proposition thus: British soldiers were fighting the Taliban in Helmand
because plots against targets in Britain were being elaborated in the
mountains of Pakistan. So indeed they were: and they were countered by good
cooperation with Pakistani intelligence and good police work in Britain. The
fighting in Helmand was almost wholly irrelevant.
Like the Russians before them, the Americans concluded that the best way to
stabilise Afghanistan in the longer term, and to prevent it once again
becoming a terrorist haven, was to re-engineer its politics and society,
though this time the principles were to be those of Western democracy,
rather than those of Soviet socialism.
This time too the Afghan people begged to differ. Ordinary Afghans were
little more interested in the ideas promoted by Western unbelievers than
they were in the ideas of the Russian infidels who had preceded them. The
Taliban regrouped. The Americans, too, were sucked into a quagmire. But this
time the war lasted even longer.
This time too the invaders successfully cleared the way for their withdrawal
by setting in place a friendly regime with an army and police force capable
of defending itself. This time too they promised to support the regime with
military and economic advice and assistance for as long as it took. This
time too there was an inevitable doubt about how long the foreigners would
retain the political will to go on supporting their friends in Afghanistan
once they were no longer present there.
The mission
So what next?
First, Afghanistan. It is hard to establish what is really happening there
amid the competing claims of optimists who say that the country has made
significant strides in political and military organisation, women's rights,
education, and the economy, and pessimists who say that the present regime
is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly inefficient. One possibility is that,
once the Americans and their allies have left, the country will once again
be torn apart by civil war, and most of the economic and social progress
made in the last decade will be nullified. Another is that the Afghans'
immediate neighbours will be unable to refrain from meddling in Afghan
affairs, and will keep the country in turmoil. A third is that enough has
been done to ensure at least a kind of stability and a modicum of social and
economic progress. What is certain is that however much outsiders may talk
of the blood and treasure they have poured out in Afghanistan, it is the
Afghans who have suffered most in the last thirty five years. Only they will
be able to find solutions that endure.
But what about 'the mission', the latest British experience in Afghanistan
and its implications? It was a long war, painful and expensive; but it was
not, by the standards of the past, a very substantial one. It demonstrated
that the British soldier is still very good at his job. But the people of
Britain came to the view that the 'mission' had little to do with their real
interests. Their scepticism about the government's wider 'strategy' was
reinforced. They were not impressed by the pouring out of scarce resources
on powerful aircraft carriers and nuclear missile submarines for which no
serious strategic need has been advanced except, perhaps, that we need these
gadgets to help us stay up there with the Americans. Meanwhile there is no
sign that the dismal experience of Afghanistan and of Iraq is pushing the
British government and military into hammering out a genuine strategy of the
kind the country really needs. Perhaps they are not wholly to be blamed,
because it is no longer clear which country we are are talking about. A
'strategy' that is ill-adapted to the Britain of today may be even less
adapted to the Britain of 2020, when the Scots may have voted to leave the
Union and the English may have voted to leave Europe. By then the British
'mission' in Afghanistan may have paled into insignificance as the English
wrestle with the problems of defining and negotiating a sober and affordable
strategy which adequately covers their new political and military
relationships with their neighbours, their allies, and their enemies.
See more stories tagged with:
Afghanistan [6]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/wasted-blood-and-treasure-afghanistan
Links:
[1] http://opendemocracy.net
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rodric-braithwaite
[3] http://www.afghan-web.com/bios/yest/abdur.html
[4] http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html
[5]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-dr-najibullah-1365378.
html
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/afghanistan-pakistan-relations
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Friday, February 21, 2014
back to the Garden of Eden
The theory of the wealthy being anointed could go back to the Garden of
Eden.
God created Adam and gave him the Garden. To Punish Adam for his
disobedience, God did not smack his butt, nor stand him in a corner, He took
away the Garden He had given Adam, setting the example of the importance of
possessions.
And as far as women's rights? God took from Adam a rib and created for Adam
an Help Mate.
Adam possessed Eve, just as he had possessed his own rib. Just as Adam had
come from God, so Eve came from Adam. She could cleave unto him, but never
be equal to him.
While these stories have mostly fallen into the realm of Parables in today's
religions, back in Calvin's day they were still believed to be actual
historical events. Besides, the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is
filled with examples of God favoring certain chosen children with riches and
power.
As long as we humans continue to choose to believe in such rubbish, we will
be controlled by the possessors of material wealth, and the power that it
brings.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 8:55 AM
Subject: Re: Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
The theory of the wealthy being anointed can be traced back to John Calvin,
the father of Calvinism (which was later known as Puritanism) who once
argued in writing that you could tell how much in favor with God a specific
human being was by how much wealth he (the female of the species never
entered Mr. Calvin's mind) had.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile
back, ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It
sits on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making
a killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with
some recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
http://www.reddit.com/submit http://www.reddit.com/submit
. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile back,
ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It sits
on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making a
killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with some
recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Eden.
God created Adam and gave him the Garden. To Punish Adam for his
disobedience, God did not smack his butt, nor stand him in a corner, He took
away the Garden He had given Adam, setting the example of the importance of
possessions.
And as far as women's rights? God took from Adam a rib and created for Adam
an Help Mate.
Adam possessed Eve, just as he had possessed his own rib. Just as Adam had
come from God, so Eve came from Adam. She could cleave unto him, but never
be equal to him.
While these stories have mostly fallen into the realm of Parables in today's
religions, back in Calvin's day they were still believed to be actual
historical events. Besides, the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is
filled with examples of God favoring certain chosen children with riches and
power.
As long as we humans continue to choose to believe in such rubbish, we will
be controlled by the possessors of material wealth, and the power that it
brings.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 8:55 AM
Subject: Re: Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
The theory of the wealthy being anointed can be traced back to John Calvin,
the father of Calvinism (which was later known as Puritanism) who once
argued in writing that you could tell how much in favor with God a specific
human being was by how much wealth he (the female of the species never
entered Mr. Calvin's mind) had.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile
back, ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It
sits on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making
a killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with
some recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
http://www.reddit.com/submit http://www.reddit.com/submit
. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile back,
ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It sits
on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making a
killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with some
recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
Subject: Re: Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics
Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
It's pretty clear that the one accomplishment of the NSA's "information
gathering", is that it proves that snooping breeds paranoia.
The more they pry into people's private business, the more they fear they
are missing something important...something about them.
I see a day in the not too distant future when science has developed a
device that reads a person's mind. People in that day will look back on
these times and wonder why we didn't stop the snooping before it became
impossible to stop.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "S. Kashdan" <skashdan@scn.org>
To: "Blind Democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:37 AM
Subject: Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at
WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at
WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
By Alex Kane [2]
AlterNet [1], February 18, 2014 |
http://www.alternet.org/print/world/snowden-files-reveal-nsa-and-gchq-targeting-wikileaks
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has long been in the crosshairs of the
U.S. government. Now, more details exposed by The Intercept [3]reveal that
the National Security Agency (NSA)'s British counterpart, GCHQ, monitored
Internet users who visited the WikiLeaks website and that the Obama
administration urged allies to file charges against WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange, the site's founder.
The article was written by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher [3], and is
the latest piece on The Intercept based off documents Edward Snowden leaked
to Greenwald and other journalists.
WikiLeaks is a target of a U.S. grand jury case, though the Washington Post
reported [4]last November that the Justice Department has indicated no
charges would be filed since they couldn't prosecute without targeting other
media organizations and journalists. But the grand jury is not the only way
the U.S. set its sight on WikiLeaks, which rose to prominence after they
published hundreds of thousands of secret documents exposing the U.S. wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq and U.S. diplomatic dealings.
Greenwald and Gallagher report on three documents that show the extent of
U.S. and British targeting of WikiLeaks. They contradict the U.S. government's
insistence that they only target "terrorists" for surveillance.
One document shows that the GCHQ used its surveillance system to sweep up
the IP addresses of those visiting the WikiLeaks website and the search
terms people used to reach the site. These included Americans. "How could
targeting an entire website's user base be necessary or proportionate?"
asked Gus Hosein, the head of Privacy International, in an interview with
The Intercept. "These are innocent people who are turned into suspects based
on their reading habits. Surely becoming a target of a state's intelligence
and security apparatus should require more than a mere click on a link."
A separate file reveals how the Obama administration wanted allies like
Australia and Germany to file charges against WikiLeaks for publishing the
Afghan war logs, which detailed civilian deaths caused by soldiers and other
aspects of the war.
A third document shows that the NSA considered designating WikiLeaks a
"malicious foreign actor." According to The Intercept, such a designation
would "have significantly expanded the agency's ability to subject the group's
officials and supporters to extensive surveillance.
Such a designation would allow WikiLeaks to be targeted with surveillance
without the use of 'defeats'--an agency term for technical mechanisms to
shield the communications of U.S. persons from getting caught in the
dragnet." There is no confirmation that the NSA did decide to use the
designation, though.
See more stories tagged with:
wikileaks [5],
nsa [6],
Snowden [7]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/snowden-files-reveal-nsa-and-gchq-targeting-wikileaks
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-kane
[3]
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/
[4]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julian-assange-unlikely-to-face-us-charges-over-publishing-classified-documents/2013/11/25/dd27decc-55f1-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wikileaks-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/nsa
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/snowden
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
It's pretty clear that the one accomplishment of the NSA's "information
gathering", is that it proves that snooping breeds paranoia.
The more they pry into people's private business, the more they fear they
are missing something important...something about them.
I see a day in the not too distant future when science has developed a
device that reads a person's mind. People in that day will look back on
these times and wonder why we didn't stop the snooping before it became
impossible to stop.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "S. Kashdan" <skashdan@scn.org>
To: "Blind Democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:37 AM
Subject: Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at
WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
Snowden Documents Reveal Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at
WikiLeaks and Its Visitors
By Alex Kane [2]
AlterNet [1], February 18, 2014 |
http://www.alternet.org/print/world/snowden-files-reveal-nsa-and-gchq-targeting-wikileaks
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has long been in the crosshairs of the
U.S. government. Now, more details exposed by The Intercept [3]reveal that
the National Security Agency (NSA)'s British counterpart, GCHQ, monitored
Internet users who visited the WikiLeaks website and that the Obama
administration urged allies to file charges against WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange, the site's founder.
The article was written by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher [3], and is
the latest piece on The Intercept based off documents Edward Snowden leaked
to Greenwald and other journalists.
WikiLeaks is a target of a U.S. grand jury case, though the Washington Post
reported [4]last November that the Justice Department has indicated no
charges would be filed since they couldn't prosecute without targeting other
media organizations and journalists. But the grand jury is not the only way
the U.S. set its sight on WikiLeaks, which rose to prominence after they
published hundreds of thousands of secret documents exposing the U.S. wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq and U.S. diplomatic dealings.
Greenwald and Gallagher report on three documents that show the extent of
U.S. and British targeting of WikiLeaks. They contradict the U.S. government's
insistence that they only target "terrorists" for surveillance.
One document shows that the GCHQ used its surveillance system to sweep up
the IP addresses of those visiting the WikiLeaks website and the search
terms people used to reach the site. These included Americans. "How could
targeting an entire website's user base be necessary or proportionate?"
asked Gus Hosein, the head of Privacy International, in an interview with
The Intercept. "These are innocent people who are turned into suspects based
on their reading habits. Surely becoming a target of a state's intelligence
and security apparatus should require more than a mere click on a link."
A separate file reveals how the Obama administration wanted allies like
Australia and Germany to file charges against WikiLeaks for publishing the
Afghan war logs, which detailed civilian deaths caused by soldiers and other
aspects of the war.
A third document shows that the NSA considered designating WikiLeaks a
"malicious foreign actor." According to The Intercept, such a designation
would "have significantly expanded the agency's ability to subject the group's
officials and supporters to extensive surveillance.
Such a designation would allow WikiLeaks to be targeted with surveillance
without the use of 'defeats'--an agency term for technical mechanisms to
shield the communications of U.S. persons from getting caught in the
dragnet." There is no confirmation that the NSA did decide to use the
designation, though.
See more stories tagged with:
wikileaks [5],
nsa [6],
Snowden [7]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/snowden-files-reveal-nsa-and-gchq-targeting-wikileaks
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-kane
[3]
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/
[4]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julian-assange-unlikely-to-face-us-charges-over-publishing-classified-documents/2013/11/25/dd27decc-55f1-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wikileaks-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/nsa
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/snowden
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
Subject: Re: Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
626 workers understand the value of a united front.
712 workers have chosen to look out for #1, and to Hell with their fellow
workers. And to Hell with those future workers who will be paid lower wages
and fewer benefits because 712 workers chose job security over collective
bargaining.
626 workers can hold their heads high. 712 workers can say, "What, me
worry?"
Alfred E. Newman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Loran Bailey" <rogerbailey81@aol.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:35 PM
Subject: Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
http://socialistaction.org/2014/02/chattanooga-shoo-shoo/
Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
Published February 18, 2014. | By Socialist Action.
March 2014 UAW 2
By BILL ONASCH
In a stunning setback for labor, workers at a Volkswagen assembly plant
in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted 712 to 626 this month to reject affiliation
with the United Auto Workers.
It was supposed to be a lead pipe cinch. United Auto Workers President
Bob King, with the backing of fellow union bureaucrats in Germany,
convinced Volkswagen America that it would be in their interest to have
a German-style works council in their Chattanooga plant.
A works council requires a union. Today's UAW is not the same union VW
dealt with when they built Rabbits in Pennsylvania 35 years ago. No more
confrontation, King's UAW is all about the shared interests of partnership.
VW couldn't simply designate the UAW as the union participant in the new
council. Since the Obama administration never delivered on their 2008
card-check pledge, the union needed to be certified as a bargaining
agent through an NLRB election. In preparation for this process the
company and union negotiated a Neutrality Agreement that granted the UAW
access to VW workers while management refrained from th anti-union
captive audience meetings that have become the norm in representation
elections. VW issued a public neutrality declaration as well and asked
outside third parties to mind their own business.
The Agreement also contained commitments from the union about bargaining
for a contract if they won Labor Board certification—which I'll come
back to.
This was as good a scenario as union organizers could hope for, and they
quickly signed up a majority of VW workers. Most experts expected the
union would win and started speculating about the prospects of the UAW's
organizing Mercedes and BMW plants in the South along the same lines.
But, as should have been anticipated, there were powerful outside third
parties who considered the encroachment of even meek unionism in the
Volunteer State to be their business. Prominent Republican office
holders, assisted by a billboard campaign furnished by Carl Rove, warned
that the UAW would bankrupt Chattanooga just as they had Detroit.
Convincing threats of denying future government incentives for expansion
to a unionized VW plant also had a chilling effect. Undoubtedly, some
votes were swayed by this last-minute fear mongering.
But that alone wasn't what sunk the UAW boat. In my opinion, the union
bureaucracy had sewn their own seeds of failure. Historically, workers
seek unions to better their wages, benefits, and working conditions. The
UAW for decades was the pace setter for what came to be called
middle-class jobs—but those days are long gone. Especially since the
historic 2007 Big Three contract surrender—later enhanced by bankruptcy
terms imposed by President Obama at General Motors and
Chrysler—Solidarity House has focused on just the opposite.
Through big concessions, the UAW has succeeded in making their core
employers competitive with transplant rivals. But the flip side of these
give-backs is that the workers in the transplants now get wages and
benefits competitive with UAW workers—in fact, sometimes better.
One of the conditions of the Neutrality Agreement committed the UAW to
"maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other
competitive advantages," that the company "enjoys relative to its
competitors in the United States and North America, including but not
limited to legacy automobile manufacturers." Legacy refers to the
UAW-organized Big Three.
This commitment to the company to make competitive advantage supreme law
was made by King without any consultation with VW workers. It is little
different than the sweetheart deals former SEIU President Andy Stern
used to cook up with CEOs. It became the main issue of the in-plant
"vote no" forces and had more impact on votes than any politicians' threats.
The inconvenient truth is that the UAW, under its present
mis-leadership's helping the boss to hold down labor costs, has little
to offer to the unorganized. I'm frankly surprised there were so many
votes for the union (626 for, 712 against, 89 percent voting). The only
hopeful sign in this disaster is that so many had the foresight to
recognize that a bad union that can be changed for the good is better
than no union at all.
This humiliating defeat in Chattanooga is a fresh confirmation that
give-backs to the boss not only fail to maintain existing jobs; they can
also doom efforts to organize what is now an unorganized majority in a
once virtually all-union industry.
Photo: UAW President Bob King — By Carlos Osorio / AP
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626 workers understand the value of a united front.
712 workers have chosen to look out for #1, and to Hell with their fellow
workers. And to Hell with those future workers who will be paid lower wages
and fewer benefits because 712 workers chose job security over collective
bargaining.
626 workers can hold their heads high. 712 workers can say, "What, me
worry?"
Alfred E. Newman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Loran Bailey" <rogerbailey81@aol.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:35 PM
Subject: Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
http://socialistaction.org/2014/02/chattanooga-shoo-shoo/
Chattanooga Shoo-Shoo
Published February 18, 2014. | By Socialist Action.
March 2014 UAW 2
By BILL ONASCH
In a stunning setback for labor, workers at a Volkswagen assembly plant
in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted 712 to 626 this month to reject affiliation
with the United Auto Workers.
It was supposed to be a lead pipe cinch. United Auto Workers President
Bob King, with the backing of fellow union bureaucrats in Germany,
convinced Volkswagen America that it would be in their interest to have
a German-style works council in their Chattanooga plant.
A works council requires a union. Today's UAW is not the same union VW
dealt with when they built Rabbits in Pennsylvania 35 years ago. No more
confrontation, King's UAW is all about the shared interests of partnership.
VW couldn't simply designate the UAW as the union participant in the new
council. Since the Obama administration never delivered on their 2008
card-check pledge, the union needed to be certified as a bargaining
agent through an NLRB election. In preparation for this process the
company and union negotiated a Neutrality Agreement that granted the UAW
access to VW workers while management refrained from th anti-union
captive audience meetings that have become the norm in representation
elections. VW issued a public neutrality declaration as well and asked
outside third parties to mind their own business.
The Agreement also contained commitments from the union about bargaining
for a contract if they won Labor Board certification—which I'll come
back to.
This was as good a scenario as union organizers could hope for, and they
quickly signed up a majority of VW workers. Most experts expected the
union would win and started speculating about the prospects of the UAW's
organizing Mercedes and BMW plants in the South along the same lines.
But, as should have been anticipated, there were powerful outside third
parties who considered the encroachment of even meek unionism in the
Volunteer State to be their business. Prominent Republican office
holders, assisted by a billboard campaign furnished by Carl Rove, warned
that the UAW would bankrupt Chattanooga just as they had Detroit.
Convincing threats of denying future government incentives for expansion
to a unionized VW plant also had a chilling effect. Undoubtedly, some
votes were swayed by this last-minute fear mongering.
But that alone wasn't what sunk the UAW boat. In my opinion, the union
bureaucracy had sewn their own seeds of failure. Historically, workers
seek unions to better their wages, benefits, and working conditions. The
UAW for decades was the pace setter for what came to be called
middle-class jobs—but those days are long gone. Especially since the
historic 2007 Big Three contract surrender—later enhanced by bankruptcy
terms imposed by President Obama at General Motors and
Chrysler—Solidarity House has focused on just the opposite.
Through big concessions, the UAW has succeeded in making their core
employers competitive with transplant rivals. But the flip side of these
give-backs is that the workers in the transplants now get wages and
benefits competitive with UAW workers—in fact, sometimes better.
One of the conditions of the Neutrality Agreement committed the UAW to
"maintaining and where possible enhancing the cost advantages and other
competitive advantages," that the company "enjoys relative to its
competitors in the United States and North America, including but not
limited to legacy automobile manufacturers." Legacy refers to the
UAW-organized Big Three.
This commitment to the company to make competitive advantage supreme law
was made by King without any consultation with VW workers. It is little
different than the sweetheart deals former SEIU President Andy Stern
used to cook up with CEOs. It became the main issue of the in-plant
"vote no" forces and had more impact on votes than any politicians' threats.
The inconvenient truth is that the UAW, under its present
mis-leadership's helping the boss to hold down labor costs, has little
to offer to the unorganized. I'm frankly surprised there were so many
votes for the union (626 for, 712 against, 89 percent voting). The only
hopeful sign in this disaster is that so many had the foresight to
recognize that a bad union that can be changed for the good is better
than no union at all.
This humiliating defeat in Chattanooga is a fresh confirmation that
give-backs to the boss not only fail to maintain existing jobs; they can
also doom efforts to organize what is now an unorganized majority in a
once virtually all-union industry.
Photo: UAW President Bob King — By Carlos Osorio / AP
Share this:
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Posted in Labor.
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other subjects.
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Socialist Action (U.S.): socialistaction@lmi.net | (510) 268-9429
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Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
Subject: Re: Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
Five reasons?
One reason!
It's called, Capitalism American Empire Style.
Capitalism demands a reserve of cheap labor. Cheap labor is achieved by not
only lowering wages, but through mass unemployment.
And make no mistake about it, Cheap Labor means that what you and I produce
does not return to us a fair market profit. The market is controlled by the
Capitalists, and their bottom line is all the profit they can squeeze.
Take any product. Natural gas. Right now it is in short demand due to the
harsh winter. The price goes up, and we say that this is the natural result
of supply and demand. But then, why do the Corporate Bosses go about the
burning off of excess natural gas instead of laying in a surplus during warm
weather?
But that is only one item. The market in this Capitalistic Empire is
tightly controlled. And we who believe that Capitalism is good for the
People, have allowed ourselves to be schmoozed by the Corporate Pied Pipers.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 6:56 PM
Subject: Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile
back, ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It
sits on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making
a killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with
some recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
http://www.reddit.com/submit http://www.reddit.com/submit
. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
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reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile back,
ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It sits
on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making a
killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with some
recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Five reasons?
One reason!
It's called, Capitalism American Empire Style.
Capitalism demands a reserve of cheap labor. Cheap labor is achieved by not
only lowering wages, but through mass unemployment.
And make no mistake about it, Cheap Labor means that what you and I produce
does not return to us a fair market profit. The market is controlled by the
Capitalists, and their bottom line is all the profit they can squeeze.
Take any product. Natural gas. Right now it is in short demand due to the
harsh winter. The price goes up, and we say that this is the natural result
of supply and demand. But then, why do the Corporate Bosses go about the
burning off of excess natural gas instead of laying in a surplus during warm
weather?
But that is only one item. The market in this Capitalistic Empire is
tightly controlled. And we who believe that Capitalism is good for the
People, have allowed ourselves to be schmoozed by the Corporate Pied Pipers.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 6:56 PM
Subject: Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile
back, ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It
sits on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making
a killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with
some recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
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Wednesday, 19 February 2014 08:28
Five Reasons the 1% Do Not Want Unemployment to Decrease
http://www.reddit.com/submit http://www.reddit.com/submit
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valid.
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reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
(Photo: Jobs With Justice)BuzzFlash at Truthout isn't breaking any new
economic theory in stating that corporations and the 1% -- incuding the
increasingly dominant Wall Street financial stranglehold on the economy --
are actually quite happy with permanently high (as long as it doesn't cause
political de-stabilization) unemployment.
1) The most important value to high unemployment to the 1% is in the
ever-increasing profit margin that comes from lowering the cost of labor by
decreasing salaries and benefits. This result from competition for jobs
among a group of desperate employment seekers is that they have no choice
but to accept low-paying jobs.
Therefore, while the media likes to use the benchmark unemployment
statistics as a sign of the economy "improving" if the government figure
goes down, the 1% actually sees its lopsided share of US assets increase
when the unemployment figures are higher and wages lower.
This reality, largely ignored by the mainstream media, is of course
facilitated by the globalization of jobs to lower cost (often slave wage)
settings, devaluing the US labor market even further.
A corporation that may best illustrate this is the favorite of many
progressives: Apple. Apple, as a New York Times series revealed awhile back,
ruthleslly contracts overseas for labor at the lowest possible cost.
According to Robert Reich, only 6% of the cost of IPhone production
expenditures is spent in the US.
Apple doesn't lower its prices to reflect lower labor costs, either. It sits
on tens of billions of dollars in cash profit, while selling overpriced
trendy, innovative hi-tech products, relying on the consumer to pay the
higher prices due to its brand identity.
2) By forcing US laborers into lower-paying jobs with reduced benefits, the
1% profiteers are forcing an increase in debt among the working class and
unemployed. This debt is then charged at interest rates such as credit
cards, which can easily reach around 30%. This is one of the fundamental
Wall Street financial expectations: there will be increasing workers who
need to debt at usorious interest rates to survive.
Of course, the debt servicers make millions of dollars in bonuses at the
expense of the decreasingly paid worker. (The salary of American workers has
been stagnant for decades, adjusted for inflation.)
3) Living paycheck to paycheck -- and if a worker has any spare money,
receiving literally .01 interest in a savings account -- laborers have
virtually no funds to support political candidates of their choice. This
leaves the campaign finance arena mostly to the likes of the Koch brothers
and other billionaires. Given that national and most statewide (and even
congressional) elections are hashed out over television and radio, the men
and women with the million and billion dollar bottom lines can write the
checks that pull the strings on what has largely become the appearance of a
democratic process -- but is in actuality a blended oligarchy.
4) Higher unemployment and lower wages means that corporations can "re-tool"
their products to a more affluent market that further increases their profit
margin, since the wealthy tend not to be bargain shoppers.
5) Over the years, we have read how some 1% figures, such as Steve
Schwarzman (who threw a 60th birthday party in the New York Armory in which
he reportedly paid Rod Stewart $1 million to sing for him and his
well-heeled) pals, bemoan their critics.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins doubled down on a recent tasteless and
alternative reality claim that the wealthy were being persecuted as the Jews
were by Hitler (Schwarzman, who is Jewish, made a similar remark a couple
years back) with the notion that people should be allowed an increase in the
number of political votes based on the size of their humongous cash hordes
and financial holdings:
And, just as everyone was thinking that Perkins was a tiny bit off his
rocker, he suggested that he had the solution to America's problems. In
order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in
taxes.
"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should
have a million votes."
Later, he walked back the comment made at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, by claiming, "I intended to be outrageous."
There's a theory that the wealthy do believe that they are anointed. This
speculation about their world view is not that different from the monarchies
that democracies revolted against. It presupposes that the people of the
world are set in sort of a pre-determined caste system. In this world view,
those who inherit wealth (which is a high percentage of the super rich --
just look at the Walton and Koch heirs) are inherently more deserving of
their billions. Those persons who ruthlessly claw their way to the top --
with money appearing to be their ultimate criteria for the value of their
lives -- have been chosen to acquire fortunes because of their basic
worthiness, this theory argues.
So, there you have it, five reasons the 1% do not really want unemployment
to decrease. They are in a gilded stratosphere of wealth right now, making a
killing with low labor costs and a generally soaring stock market (with some
recent readjustment).
Their economy is soaring to the heavens -- and for it to continue to reach
new unprecedented heights of opulence, it is essential -- in their thinking
-- that the cost of labor continue to be pushed down, further and further.
That can most easily be accomplished if there are a surplus of workers and a
scarcity of jobs.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
Obama is not going to change his spots. Or maybe I should say that Obama is
a Horse of a different Color. And that horse, the Democratic Party, is a
dead horse. Why do we keep playing, Let's Pretend? The Working Class has
no Dog in this Political fight. The Democratic Party kicked the Working
Class to the curb when they caved in and began sucking at the Corporate
Teats. How many times must we repeat, Man Cannot Serve Two Masters!!!
And neither can the so called Democratic Party. A political party will
either serve a certain group of people, or it will oppose them. It cannot
represent them and serve their opponents. How silly is that?
"Here, let me help you find a decent paying job. But it will have to be in
a non-union shop in a Right to Work State".
Ho Hum.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:15 PM
Subject: How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 15:10 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann
Program | Op-Ed
If President Obama doesn't watch out, he could shoot Santa Claus. And if he
does go ahead and shoot Santa Claus, that will mean the end of the
Democratic Party.
In the coming weeks, the president is expected to announce his new budget
plan for fiscal year 2015. And while more than a year into his second term
in office, when he should have the Democratic Party behind him, many
progressives are worried.
That's because the last time President Obama put forward a budget proposal,
it included a plan to use the so-called "Chained CPI" to calculate Social
Security cost of living increase that account for inflation.
According to budget hawks, Chained CPI more accurately takes how seniors in
response to inflation, and therefore saves the government money. If the
price of hamburger goes up, and seniors start eating chicken, then the
government stops measuring the price of hamburger and instead starts
measuring the price of chicken, thus avoiding having to help seniors keep up
with inflation. In reality, this a sneaky way to cut Social Security
benefits over time.
When President Obama first proposed using Chained CPI last April,
progressives were outraged, and rightly so. The idea that a Democratic
president - a president from the party of Roosevelt, who invented Social
Security - could become the first chief executive ever to cut Social
Security is unacceptable.
That's why this time progressives aren't messing around. Last Friday, a
group of 16 senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote a letter to
President Obama urging him not to propose cuts to Social Security or any
other social safety net programs in his fiscal year 2015 budget.
Let's hope President Obama listens to those 16 senators. Because if he
doesn't, and goes ahead and cuts Social Security, that would kill the
Democratic Party.
Let me explain.
At its core, the Democratic Party has always been party of "Santa Claus." It
has been the party that gives you stuff, namely Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, free public schools,
Head Start, food stamps, school lunch - the list goes on.
Acting like Santa Claus is, of course, the right thing to do for the general
welfare of "We the People," and fulfilling the general welfare is a
requirement of government, at least according to the Constitution.
But acting like Santa Claus isn't just the right thing to do, it's also how
politics are supposed to work in a democratic republic. Giving people what
they want and need made the Democratic Party successful in election after
election in the twentieth century. It won Roosevelt four terms in office, it
won Lyndon Johnson his massive victory in the 1964 presidential race, and it
kept Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives from 1955
until 1995.
As long as the Democratic Party acts like Santa Claus it will win elections
because Republicans, who at their core oppose the social safety net, will
look like Scrooge in comparison. That's just a fact.
Republicans know this. That's why they came up with a Santa Claus strategy
of their own. First outlined in a 1976 article by conservative strategist
Jude Wanniski, the Republican Santa Claus strategy is simple: instead of
giving people the "gift" of healthcare or the "gift" of retirement savings,
Republicans should give them the "gift" of tax cuts.
If the Republican Party could successfully become the "Santa Claus of Tax
Reduction," Wanniski argued, it could shrug off the Scrooge reputation that
had haunted it since the Roosevelt days and start winning elections again.
Today, it's obvious that Republicans have read their Wanniski. Since he
wrote his influential article, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush have signed massive tax cuts and, except for a brief period
between 2007 and 2011, the GOP has retaken control of the House of
Representatives.
In other words, the Republican Santa Claus strategy has worked. And it's
worked in two ways. One, as I just mentioned, is to be the tax cut Santa
Claus.
The other is by starving the government of revenues. Look at history and
you'll see this: when the Republicans are in power they run up huge national
debts and people like Dick Cheney say things like, "Reagan taught us
deficits don't matter." The day a Democrat becomes president, suddenly the
Republicans all start screaming about the national debt and pushing the
Democrats to shoot their benefits-based Santa Claus.
That's why Republicans have been whining about the debt and the deficit
since day one of the Obama presidency. Reagan almost tripled the national
debt, with nary a peep from Republicans. Clinton came into office, and
Republicans started screaming about the national debt, forcing Clinton to
"end welfare as we know it," something that is hurting a lot of families
during this recession. Similarly, George W. Bush rang up the bill with his
massive tax cuts and two wars, and now Republicans are yelling that
Democratic President Obama should privatize Medicare and cut Social Security
with a Chained CPI.
And in the bizzaro world of today's politics, it looks like Republicans
might have succeeded in convincing the President that he should shoot the
Democrats' best-ever-in-history Santa Claus program, Social Security.
Make no mistake about it. President Obama's decision to include Chained CPI
in his budget plan last year wasn't a fluke. He'd just won a huge election
victory, and there was no need to cut Social Security. But he still talked
about the "Chained CPI."
That's why progressives have every right to worry that he might do the same
thing this year and call for Chained CPI in his 2015 budget.
And if the president does go ahead and do that it, it would be game over for
the Democratic Party. If he cuts Social Security or even just calls for a
cut in Social Security, Democrats, not Republicans will become the party of
Scrooge. And no one, let me repeat, no one wants to vote for Scrooge.
Democrats have won election after election with their Santa Claus strategy,
and in the process, have made America a much better country.
Let's hope that President Obama recognizes this and takes his hand off the
trigger.
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction
on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of
publication.
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________________________________________
Show Comments
Hide Comments
<a href="http://truthout.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion
thread.</a>
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How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 15:10 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann
Program | Op-Ed
. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
If President Obama doesn't watch out, he could shoot Santa Claus. And if he
does go ahead and shoot Santa Claus, that will mean the end of the
Democratic Party.
In the coming weeks, the president is expected to announce his new budget
plan for fiscal year 2015. And while more than a year into his second term
in office, when he should have the Democratic Party behind him, many
progressives are worried.
That's because the last time President Obama put forward a budget proposal,
it included a plan to use the so-called "Chained CPI" to calculate Social
Security cost of living increase that account for inflation.
According to budget hawks, Chained CPI more accurately takes how seniors in
response to inflation, and therefore saves the government money. If the
price of hamburger goes up, and seniors start eating chicken, then the
government stops measuring the price of hamburger and instead starts
measuring the price of chicken, thus avoiding having to help seniors keep up
with inflation. In reality, this a sneaky way to cut Social Security
benefits over time.
When President Obama first proposed using Chained CPI last April,
progressives were outraged, and rightly so. The idea that a Democratic
president - a president from the party of Roosevelt, who invented Social
Security - could become the first chief executive ever to cut Social
Security is unacceptable.
That's why this time progressives aren't messing around. Last Friday, a
group of 16 senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote a letter to
President Obama urging him not to propose cuts to Social Security or any
other social safety net programs in his fiscal year 2015 budget.
Let's hope President Obama listens to those 16 senators. Because if he
doesn't, and goes ahead and cuts Social Security, that would kill the
Democratic Party.
Let me explain.
At its core, the Democratic Party has always been party of "Santa Claus." It
has been the party that gives you stuff, namely Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, free public schools,
Head Start, food stamps, school lunch - the list goes on.
Acting like Santa Claus is, of course, the right thing to do for the general
welfare of "We the People," and fulfilling the general welfare is a
requirement of government, at least according to the Constitution.
But acting like Santa Claus isn't just the right thing to do, it's also how
politics are supposed to work in a democratic republic. Giving people what
they want and need made the Democratic Party successful in election after
election in the twentieth century. It won Roosevelt four terms in office, it
won Lyndon Johnson his massive victory in the 1964 presidential race, and it
kept Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives from 1955
until 1995.
As long as the Democratic Party acts like Santa Claus it will win elections
because Republicans, who at their core oppose the social safety net, will
look like Scrooge in comparison. That's just a fact.
Republicans know this. That's why they came up with a Santa Claus strategy
of their own. First outlined in a 1976 article by conservative strategist
Jude Wanniski, the Republican Santa Claus strategy is simple: instead of
giving people the "gift" of healthcare or the "gift" of retirement savings,
Republicans should give them the "gift" of tax cuts.
If the Republican Party could successfully become the "Santa Claus of Tax
Reduction," Wanniski argued, it could shrug off the Scrooge reputation that
had haunted it since the Roosevelt days and start winning elections again.
Today, it's obvious that Republicans have read their Wanniski. Since he
wrote his influential article, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush have signed massive tax cuts and, except for a brief period
between 2007 and 2011, the GOP has retaken control of the House of
Representatives.
In other words, the Republican Santa Claus strategy has worked. And it's
worked in two ways. One, as I just mentioned, is to be the tax cut Santa
Claus.
The other is by starving the government of revenues. Look at history and
you'll see this: when the Republicans are in power they run up huge national
debts and people like Dick Cheney say things like, "Reagan taught us
deficits don't matter." The day a Democrat becomes president, suddenly the
Republicans all start screaming about the national debt and pushing the
Democrats to shoot their benefits-based Santa Claus.
That's why Republicans have been whining about the debt and the deficit
since day one of the Obama presidency. Reagan almost tripled the national
debt, with nary a peep from Republicans. Clinton came into office, and
Republicans started screaming about the national debt, forcing Clinton to
"end welfare as we know it," something that is hurting a lot of families
during this recession. Similarly, George W. Bush rang up the bill with his
massive tax cuts and two wars, and now Republicans are yelling that
Democratic President Obama should privatize Medicare and cut Social Security
with a Chained CPI.
And in the bizzaro world of today's politics, it looks like Republicans
might have succeeded in convincing the President that he should shoot the
Democrats' best-ever-in-history Santa Claus program, Social Security.
Make no mistake about it. President Obama's decision to include Chained CPI
in his budget plan last year wasn't a fluke. He'd just won a huge election
victory, and there was no need to cut Social Security. But he still talked
about the "Chained CPI."
That's why progressives have every right to worry that he might do the same
thing this year and call for Chained CPI in his 2015 budget.
And if the president does go ahead and do that it, it would be game over for
the Democratic Party. If he cuts Social Security or even just calls for a
cut in Social Security, Democrats, not Republicans will become the party of
Scrooge. And no one, let me repeat, no one wants to vote for Scrooge.
Democrats have won election after election with their Santa Claus strategy,
and in the process, have made America a much better country.
Let's hope that President Obama recognizes this and takes his hand off the
trigger.
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction
on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of
publication.
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addthis_sendto('email');
Related Stories
Time to End the Cheney/Halliburton Loophole
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-EdAre We Going to Be the
Flintstones or the Jetsons?
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-EdThe New Fascism: Terms
and Conditions
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed
Show Comments
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
a Horse of a different Color. And that horse, the Democratic Party, is a
dead horse. Why do we keep playing, Let's Pretend? The Working Class has
no Dog in this Political fight. The Democratic Party kicked the Working
Class to the curb when they caved in and began sucking at the Corporate
Teats. How many times must we repeat, Man Cannot Serve Two Masters!!!
And neither can the so called Democratic Party. A political party will
either serve a certain group of people, or it will oppose them. It cannot
represent them and serve their opponents. How silly is that?
"Here, let me help you find a decent paying job. But it will have to be in
a non-union shop in a Right to Work State".
Ho Hum.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:15 PM
Subject: How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 15:10 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann
Program | Op-Ed
If President Obama doesn't watch out, he could shoot Santa Claus. And if he
does go ahead and shoot Santa Claus, that will mean the end of the
Democratic Party.
In the coming weeks, the president is expected to announce his new budget
plan for fiscal year 2015. And while more than a year into his second term
in office, when he should have the Democratic Party behind him, many
progressives are worried.
That's because the last time President Obama put forward a budget proposal,
it included a plan to use the so-called "Chained CPI" to calculate Social
Security cost of living increase that account for inflation.
According to budget hawks, Chained CPI more accurately takes how seniors in
response to inflation, and therefore saves the government money. If the
price of hamburger goes up, and seniors start eating chicken, then the
government stops measuring the price of hamburger and instead starts
measuring the price of chicken, thus avoiding having to help seniors keep up
with inflation. In reality, this a sneaky way to cut Social Security
benefits over time.
When President Obama first proposed using Chained CPI last April,
progressives were outraged, and rightly so. The idea that a Democratic
president - a president from the party of Roosevelt, who invented Social
Security - could become the first chief executive ever to cut Social
Security is unacceptable.
That's why this time progressives aren't messing around. Last Friday, a
group of 16 senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote a letter to
President Obama urging him not to propose cuts to Social Security or any
other social safety net programs in his fiscal year 2015 budget.
Let's hope President Obama listens to those 16 senators. Because if he
doesn't, and goes ahead and cuts Social Security, that would kill the
Democratic Party.
Let me explain.
At its core, the Democratic Party has always been party of "Santa Claus." It
has been the party that gives you stuff, namely Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, free public schools,
Head Start, food stamps, school lunch - the list goes on.
Acting like Santa Claus is, of course, the right thing to do for the general
welfare of "We the People," and fulfilling the general welfare is a
requirement of government, at least according to the Constitution.
But acting like Santa Claus isn't just the right thing to do, it's also how
politics are supposed to work in a democratic republic. Giving people what
they want and need made the Democratic Party successful in election after
election in the twentieth century. It won Roosevelt four terms in office, it
won Lyndon Johnson his massive victory in the 1964 presidential race, and it
kept Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives from 1955
until 1995.
As long as the Democratic Party acts like Santa Claus it will win elections
because Republicans, who at their core oppose the social safety net, will
look like Scrooge in comparison. That's just a fact.
Republicans know this. That's why they came up with a Santa Claus strategy
of their own. First outlined in a 1976 article by conservative strategist
Jude Wanniski, the Republican Santa Claus strategy is simple: instead of
giving people the "gift" of healthcare or the "gift" of retirement savings,
Republicans should give them the "gift" of tax cuts.
If the Republican Party could successfully become the "Santa Claus of Tax
Reduction," Wanniski argued, it could shrug off the Scrooge reputation that
had haunted it since the Roosevelt days and start winning elections again.
Today, it's obvious that Republicans have read their Wanniski. Since he
wrote his influential article, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush have signed massive tax cuts and, except for a brief period
between 2007 and 2011, the GOP has retaken control of the House of
Representatives.
In other words, the Republican Santa Claus strategy has worked. And it's
worked in two ways. One, as I just mentioned, is to be the tax cut Santa
Claus.
The other is by starving the government of revenues. Look at history and
you'll see this: when the Republicans are in power they run up huge national
debts and people like Dick Cheney say things like, "Reagan taught us
deficits don't matter." The day a Democrat becomes president, suddenly the
Republicans all start screaming about the national debt and pushing the
Democrats to shoot their benefits-based Santa Claus.
That's why Republicans have been whining about the debt and the deficit
since day one of the Obama presidency. Reagan almost tripled the national
debt, with nary a peep from Republicans. Clinton came into office, and
Republicans started screaming about the national debt, forcing Clinton to
"end welfare as we know it," something that is hurting a lot of families
during this recession. Similarly, George W. Bush rang up the bill with his
massive tax cuts and two wars, and now Republicans are yelling that
Democratic President Obama should privatize Medicare and cut Social Security
with a Chained CPI.
And in the bizzaro world of today's politics, it looks like Republicans
might have succeeded in convincing the President that he should shoot the
Democrats' best-ever-in-history Santa Claus program, Social Security.
Make no mistake about it. President Obama's decision to include Chained CPI
in his budget plan last year wasn't a fluke. He'd just won a huge election
victory, and there was no need to cut Social Security. But he still talked
about the "Chained CPI."
That's why progressives have every right to worry that he might do the same
thing this year and call for Chained CPI in his 2015 budget.
And if the president does go ahead and do that it, it would be game over for
the Democratic Party. If he cuts Social Security or even just calls for a
cut in Social Security, Democrats, not Republicans will become the party of
Scrooge. And no one, let me repeat, no one wants to vote for Scrooge.
Democrats have won election after election with their Santa Claus strategy,
and in the process, have made America a much better country.
Let's hope that President Obama recognizes this and takes his hand off the
trigger.
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction
on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of
publication.
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How Obama Could Kill the Democratic Party
Wednesday, 19 February 2014 15:10 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann
Program | Op-Ed
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If President Obama doesn't watch out, he could shoot Santa Claus. And if he
does go ahead and shoot Santa Claus, that will mean the end of the
Democratic Party.
In the coming weeks, the president is expected to announce his new budget
plan for fiscal year 2015. And while more than a year into his second term
in office, when he should have the Democratic Party behind him, many
progressives are worried.
That's because the last time President Obama put forward a budget proposal,
it included a plan to use the so-called "Chained CPI" to calculate Social
Security cost of living increase that account for inflation.
According to budget hawks, Chained CPI more accurately takes how seniors in
response to inflation, and therefore saves the government money. If the
price of hamburger goes up, and seniors start eating chicken, then the
government stops measuring the price of hamburger and instead starts
measuring the price of chicken, thus avoiding having to help seniors keep up
with inflation. In reality, this a sneaky way to cut Social Security
benefits over time.
When President Obama first proposed using Chained CPI last April,
progressives were outraged, and rightly so. The idea that a Democratic
president - a president from the party of Roosevelt, who invented Social
Security - could become the first chief executive ever to cut Social
Security is unacceptable.
That's why this time progressives aren't messing around. Last Friday, a
group of 16 senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote a letter to
President Obama urging him not to propose cuts to Social Security or any
other social safety net programs in his fiscal year 2015 budget.
Let's hope President Obama listens to those 16 senators. Because if he
doesn't, and goes ahead and cuts Social Security, that would kill the
Democratic Party.
Let me explain.
At its core, the Democratic Party has always been party of "Santa Claus." It
has been the party that gives you stuff, namely Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, free public schools,
Head Start, food stamps, school lunch - the list goes on.
Acting like Santa Claus is, of course, the right thing to do for the general
welfare of "We the People," and fulfilling the general welfare is a
requirement of government, at least according to the Constitution.
But acting like Santa Claus isn't just the right thing to do, it's also how
politics are supposed to work in a democratic republic. Giving people what
they want and need made the Democratic Party successful in election after
election in the twentieth century. It won Roosevelt four terms in office, it
won Lyndon Johnson his massive victory in the 1964 presidential race, and it
kept Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives from 1955
until 1995.
As long as the Democratic Party acts like Santa Claus it will win elections
because Republicans, who at their core oppose the social safety net, will
look like Scrooge in comparison. That's just a fact.
Republicans know this. That's why they came up with a Santa Claus strategy
of their own. First outlined in a 1976 article by conservative strategist
Jude Wanniski, the Republican Santa Claus strategy is simple: instead of
giving people the "gift" of healthcare or the "gift" of retirement savings,
Republicans should give them the "gift" of tax cuts.
If the Republican Party could successfully become the "Santa Claus of Tax
Reduction," Wanniski argued, it could shrug off the Scrooge reputation that
had haunted it since the Roosevelt days and start winning elections again.
Today, it's obvious that Republicans have read their Wanniski. Since he
wrote his influential article, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush have signed massive tax cuts and, except for a brief period
between 2007 and 2011, the GOP has retaken control of the House of
Representatives.
In other words, the Republican Santa Claus strategy has worked. And it's
worked in two ways. One, as I just mentioned, is to be the tax cut Santa
Claus.
The other is by starving the government of revenues. Look at history and
you'll see this: when the Republicans are in power they run up huge national
debts and people like Dick Cheney say things like, "Reagan taught us
deficits don't matter." The day a Democrat becomes president, suddenly the
Republicans all start screaming about the national debt and pushing the
Democrats to shoot their benefits-based Santa Claus.
That's why Republicans have been whining about the debt and the deficit
since day one of the Obama presidency. Reagan almost tripled the national
debt, with nary a peep from Republicans. Clinton came into office, and
Republicans started screaming about the national debt, forcing Clinton to
"end welfare as we know it," something that is hurting a lot of families
during this recession. Similarly, George W. Bush rang up the bill with his
massive tax cuts and two wars, and now Republicans are yelling that
Democratic President Obama should privatize Medicare and cut Social Security
with a Chained CPI.
And in the bizzaro world of today's politics, it looks like Republicans
might have succeeded in convincing the President that he should shoot the
Democrats' best-ever-in-history Santa Claus program, Social Security.
Make no mistake about it. President Obama's decision to include Chained CPI
in his budget plan last year wasn't a fluke. He'd just won a huge election
victory, and there was no need to cut Social Security. But he still talked
about the "Chained CPI."
That's why progressives have every right to worry that he might do the same
thing this year and call for Chained CPI in his 2015 budget.
And if the president does go ahead and do that it, it would be game over for
the Democratic Party. If he cuts Social Security or even just calls for a
cut in Social Security, Democrats, not Republicans will become the party of
Scrooge. And no one, let me repeat, no one wants to vote for Scrooge.
Democrats have won election after election with their Santa Claus strategy,
and in the process, have made America a much better country.
Let's hope that President Obama recognizes this and takes his hand off the
trigger.
This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction
on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of
publication.
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addthis_sendto('email');
Related Stories
Time to End the Cheney/Halliburton Loophole
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-EdAre We Going to Be the
Flintstones or the Jetsons?
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-EdThe New Fascism: Terms
and Conditions
By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed
Show Comments
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
'I believed he was guilty' -Juror No. 4
Juror #4 is wrong in believing the jury was influenced by the "Stand your
Ground" Law. Prejudice was the factor in the inability of three jurors
being unable to bring in a verdict of murder.
Whether it was prejudice toward a Black youth, or prejudice toward a bunch
of young people playing loud music, it was prejudice and nothing else.
Our Leaders, led by our Prince of Peace, set the tone for Americans to
become gun slinging Mavericks, acting as judge, jury and executioner.
Is this the way we are keeping our citizens safe from Terror? Fighting
Terror around the world, everywhere it threatens our Corporation's safety,
while allowing gun toting, self-appointed killers to gun down anyone the do
not approve of?
Welcome to Obama Land!
Carl Jarvis
****
Dear Carl,
"I believed he was guilty." --Juror No.4 ("Valerie")
This past weekend a Florida jury failed to convict Michael Dunn for the
murder of Jordan Davis. Now, juror No.4 has broken her silence and
confirmed that it was the issue of self-defense that lead some jurors to
detract from the overwhelming majority who wanted to convict Dunn of
first-degree murder.^1 Florida's so-called "Stand Your Ground" law was
mentioned to the jury during their instructions when Dunn's defense
lawyer
said his client had a right to "stand his ground and meet force with
force, including deadly force."^2
Anywhere there is a so-called "Stand Your Ground" or "Shoot First" law we
are poised to see miscarriages of justice like we have witnessed in
Florida. These laws provide immunity for vigilantes who neglected their
duty to retreat. And when you add deep-rooted racial prejudice like
Dunn's,^3 they become even more dangerous as a threat to Black youth, who
these shooters profile as "thugs" and criminals.
[3]Can you pitch in $10 or more today to make sure ColorOfChange has the
resources to fight and win repeal of "Shoot First" across the country?
Because of "Shoot First" we saw a jury fail to convict Dunn for the
murder
he actually committed just a day before what would've been the 19th
birthday of his victim, Jordan. Had it not been for "Shoot
First"-influenced instructions in Dunn's trial, we might have seen
justice
completely carried out for all of the charges against Dunn and not a
select few.^4
Florida's "Shoot First" law is the product of an obsessed right-wing gun
industry lobby -- those who have no actual concern about public safety or
self defense. It's because of their work to increase profits for this
industry that "Shoot First" is becoming a refuge for shooters in states
with susceptible political leadership across the country.^5
We have to demand accountability from our elected officials around the
dangers of "Shoot First": we're urging elected officials to repeal these
dangerous laws that put everyone at risk. We will provide support to the
officials that have the courage to fight for us and we will increase
pressure on those that don't.
[4]Help stop the next Michael Dunn: please make a contribution of $10 or
more today.
Thanks and Peace,
--Rashad, Matt, Arisha, Aimee, William, Johnny and the rest of the
ColorOfChange.org team
February 20th, 2014
References
1. "Florida 'loud music' trial juror: 'I believed he was guilty'," CNN,
02-19-14
[5]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3300?t=1001&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
2. "How To Make Sense Of The Michael Dunn Verdict,'" ThinkProgress,
02-15-14
[6]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3299?t=1002&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
3. "Michael Dunn Takes Stand, Racist Letters Take Center Stage Online,"
The Root, 02-11-14
[7]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3301?t=1003&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
4. "Fla. man faces 60 years for shooting at teens," USA Today, 02-16-14
[8]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3302?t=1004&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
5. "ALEC and the NRA: Profiting from gun violence," ColorOfChange
campaign, 01-04-13
[9]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/2834?t=1005&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
References
Visible links
1. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1006&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
2. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1007&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
3. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1008&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
4. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1009&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
5. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3300?t=1010&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
6. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3299?t=1011&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
7. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3301?t=1012&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
8. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3302?t=1013&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
9. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/2834?t=1014&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
Ground" Law. Prejudice was the factor in the inability of three jurors
being unable to bring in a verdict of murder.
Whether it was prejudice toward a Black youth, or prejudice toward a bunch
of young people playing loud music, it was prejudice and nothing else.
Our Leaders, led by our Prince of Peace, set the tone for Americans to
become gun slinging Mavericks, acting as judge, jury and executioner.
Is this the way we are keeping our citizens safe from Terror? Fighting
Terror around the world, everywhere it threatens our Corporation's safety,
while allowing gun toting, self-appointed killers to gun down anyone the do
not approve of?
Welcome to Obama Land!
Carl Jarvis
****
Dear Carl,
"I believed he was guilty." --Juror No.4 ("Valerie")
This past weekend a Florida jury failed to convict Michael Dunn for the
murder of Jordan Davis. Now, juror No.4 has broken her silence and
confirmed that it was the issue of self-defense that lead some jurors to
detract from the overwhelming majority who wanted to convict Dunn of
first-degree murder.^1 Florida's so-called "Stand Your Ground" law was
mentioned to the jury during their instructions when Dunn's defense
lawyer
said his client had a right to "stand his ground and meet force with
force, including deadly force."^2
Anywhere there is a so-called "Stand Your Ground" or "Shoot First" law we
are poised to see miscarriages of justice like we have witnessed in
Florida. These laws provide immunity for vigilantes who neglected their
duty to retreat. And when you add deep-rooted racial prejudice like
Dunn's,^3 they become even more dangerous as a threat to Black youth, who
these shooters profile as "thugs" and criminals.
[3]Can you pitch in $10 or more today to make sure ColorOfChange has the
resources to fight and win repeal of "Shoot First" across the country?
Because of "Shoot First" we saw a jury fail to convict Dunn for the
murder
he actually committed just a day before what would've been the 19th
birthday of his victim, Jordan. Had it not been for "Shoot
First"-influenced instructions in Dunn's trial, we might have seen
justice
completely carried out for all of the charges against Dunn and not a
select few.^4
Florida's "Shoot First" law is the product of an obsessed right-wing gun
industry lobby -- those who have no actual concern about public safety or
self defense. It's because of their work to increase profits for this
industry that "Shoot First" is becoming a refuge for shooters in states
with susceptible political leadership across the country.^5
We have to demand accountability from our elected officials around the
dangers of "Shoot First": we're urging elected officials to repeal these
dangerous laws that put everyone at risk. We will provide support to the
officials that have the courage to fight for us and we will increase
pressure on those that don't.
[4]Help stop the next Michael Dunn: please make a contribution of $10 or
more today.
Thanks and Peace,
--Rashad, Matt, Arisha, Aimee, William, Johnny and the rest of the
ColorOfChange.org team
February 20th, 2014
References
1. "Florida 'loud music' trial juror: 'I believed he was guilty'," CNN,
02-19-14
[5]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3300?t=1001&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
2. "How To Make Sense Of The Michael Dunn Verdict,'" ThinkProgress,
02-15-14
[6]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3299?t=1002&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
3. "Michael Dunn Takes Stand, Racist Letters Take Center Stage Online,"
The Root, 02-11-14
[7]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3301?t=1003&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
4. "Fla. man faces 60 years for shooting at teens," USA Today, 02-16-14
[8]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3302?t=1004&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
5. "ALEC and the NRA: Profiting from gun violence," ColorOfChange
campaign, 01-04-13
[9]http://act.colorofchange.org/go/2834?t=1005&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
References
Visible links
1. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1006&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
2. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1007&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
3. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1008&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
4. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3306?t=1009&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
5. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3300?t=1010&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
6. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3299?t=1011&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
7. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3301?t=1012&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
8. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/3302?t=1013&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
9. http://act.colorofchange.org/go/2834?t=1014&akid=3303.1048765.y4BrR2
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