This Is Our Doing

Below is a video coming out of Aleppo, Syria, showing the summary execution of alleged loyalists to Syrian leader Bashar Assad. The guy at the beginning of the video--the "prisoner"--is a policeman who was taken from a police station, according to this article. The others, well, who knows what they are supposed to have been doing.

The folks doing the executing are the so-called freedom fighters that our government is bankrolling and supporting. Just to be clear--executing prisoners captured in a 'war' is a WAR CRIME. Ipso facto, our government is assisting war criminals in Syria. Just as we have in Libya. Just as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. They're supposed to be the good guys. Watch the video. Do they look like good guys to you? Or bloodthirsty psychopaths?

This isn't someone else's doing. This is what's done in your name, with your money, maybe by your children if they're in the military. This is OUR doing. And if you can't or won't watch it--or if when you watch it you get sick to your stomach--why would you let it continue?

Do You Smell That?

This morning, much of the alternative media is hair-ablaze because of the "Free Speech is a Felony" law, the "Peacetime Martial Law" order, the deployment of mass assets to the Persian Gulf that may lead to a war with Iran, etc., etc., etc.

Oddly, I'm calm. Eerily calm. I think that's so because in the last couple of weeks, I'm seeing that, try as they might, the powers that be just can't seem to get their narrative to sprout wings and fly. No matter what else is going on, it seems that light is illuminating dark. Here are just some examples:

~Yesterday, Italian Police arrested 16 tax court judges and 31 others who are accused of connections to the Italian Mafia and widespread corruption involving big business and government. Story here.

~The rats seem to be abandoning ship in great numbers. Before stopping tracking the bankster resignations last week, American Kabuki's list reached 358 banksters who resigned since September, with over 200 of those since February 1.

~Other ultra-fat cats seem to be turning on one another. Aussie mining muckety-muck Clive Palmer has accused the Australian Green Party and Queensland environmental campaigners of conspiring with the American CIA to destroy the Australian coal industry. In doing so, he accused the US government and other American interests of meddling in and funding Australian politics through a secret budget. I bet we'll be hearing some more about that.

~Word is leaking out through alternative and foreign media that the recent Afghan massacre in which 16 Afghani civilians including 9 children was not in fact the work of a crazed lone gunman. An Afghan Parliamentary investigation has obtained evidence from witnesses and survivors that point to "two groups" of American soldiers--15 to 20 men--as the perpetrators of the violence. The US media may be complicit with the US government in the pinning of the atrocities on one madman, but doubts about the veracity of that account are creeping into the common consciousness.

~One of the richest organizations on the planet, the Vatican Bank, has recently been named as an entity "at risk" for money laundering, suspected of holding or distributing proceeds of drug trafficking and other organized crime. The Bank has had one of its accounts closed by JPMorgan/Chase for failing to respond to requests for information about suspicious transactions, and has had another account--over $30 million--frozen by an Italian judge. Its president is also under criminal investigation.

~Whistleblowers, both current and former employees of Big Banking and Finance, are coming forward with tales of illegal, unethical, and conspiratorial schemes at some of America's largest financial institutions. From manipulation of markets to scamming of investment clients, the whistleblowers are whistling about it, and some is even making it into mainstream news media.

~The UKs News of the World phone hacking scandal has continued to move, in spite of all Rupert Murdoch's billions. Last week, British police arrested six people, including Murdoch's protege and BFF, Rebecca Brooks, and her hubby, for the British equivalent of obstruction of justice, apparently for covering up evidence of criminal wiretapping, etc.

~The recent Kony 2012 furor was quickly questioned, crashed, and then met a fiery demise, as it became rapidly apparent to most that the film, which rightly brought attention to an awful chapter in recent African unrest, was nonetheless being used as a propaganda tool to justify more American military occupation of African nations who happened to have LOTS of OIL. And then of course there was the interesting exit from public view of the filmmaker, Jason Russell, who is taking a break for some quiet time after running the streets of San Diego naked, raving, vandalizing cars and publicly masturbating. Poor guy.

There are lots of others, including that the public is openly dubious about the government's and media's concerted and continuing efforts to say that the economy is getting better and so we can all go back to our Dancing With the Stars.

I've been saying for months that I predicted the wheels were about to come off the corrupt, slimy and stinking bus that is our government and its big business and big banking puppet-masters. Seems well underway.

So, the smell? I'm thinking that's some nice fat, meeting the fire.

A Light Bulb Moment

This little video pretty well tells us where we are. Pass it on.

How To Be A Thief, For Fun and Profit

The answer is actually surprisingly simple--be rich to start out with. An article on Salon.com yesterday, provides the outline.

Remember MFGlobal? That's the big trading firm who went belly up a few months ago after supposedly making a real lot of really really bad bets on the value of foreign currencies. When the piper came to the door to be paid on these bad bets, MFGlobal didn't have enough money to pay their pals at other big financial firms, so they took it from their customer accounts--$1.6 BILLION worth of money that belonged to someone else. Most of this money, the bankruptcy trustee says, will never be recovered. Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs fat cat and Democratic party fat cat, was boss man there at the time.

Neither Corzine nor anyone else from MFGlobal is in jail, or has been charged with any crime, even though it is "illegal" to use segregated client funds except as directed by the client. You know how they're thwarting the supposed efforts of prosecutors to hold someone accountable. They said they didn't mean to. Yep. That's their story. You can't make this up. It was apparently an "accident" that they took money out of customer accounts--those dang accounts, always slipping in there and tossing money onto your computer screens when you least expect it!

Now, it seems, MFGlobal executives are going to get BONUSES for being so clever as to get away with taking $1.6 billion of other people's money. Three of the fattest cats from MFGlobal are slated for bonuses of six figures each!

So, there you go. Make lots of money and cultivate lots of political connections. Take other people's money without their permission (most of us call that stealing, but apparently not the federal authorities). Get paid a big bonus. Cool.

Makes you wonder why anyone actually works for a living, doesn't it?

A Quick "To Do"

After my last post, if you're looking for something to "do," here's a thought for you. A woman has started a petition on Change.org to demand the USDA stop the purchase of pink slime (see the post, It's What's for Dinner) for American kids' school lunches.

So, if you think it's a bad idea to use taxpayer money to fund the practice of feeding children garbage treated with ammonia for lunch, go here and sign the petition.

See? Wasn't that easy?

Agenda Item One

This morning, I happened upon an essay by iconic journalist Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, President of the Writers' Guild of America. It set my mind ablaze again with the thought that, politically speaking, absolutely nothing else matters--not abortion, not gay rights, not tax rates, not environmental regulation, not 'saving social security'--nothing else matters until we wrest control of our political and social systems away from the moneyed interests who have hijacked them for personal and financial gain.

The last paragraph of the essay fairly sums it up (but read the whole thing anyway):

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed. (emphasis mine)

Almost poetically, Moyers and Winship have set the agenda for anyone who cares about our world not becoming even more harsh, unfair, skewed, corrupt, and evil than it already is: we must break the cycle of governments' sale to the highest bidder and restore control of the world's resources and of society to the people. Everything else is secondary. Everything.

If This Don't Beat All

In our latest example of a government gone wild: it seems we now have sack lunch police.

From an article in the Carolina Journal:


RAEFORD - A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl's mother - who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation - said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a "healthy lunch" would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

If it isn't bad enough that the government presumes to tell us that we must serve meat and dairy to our children, even if we don't believe that's appropriate, here we have the case of their not even following their own rules. Notice the "rules:" One meat, one dairy, one grain, two fruit or vegetable. Turkey (meat) and cheese (dairy) sandwich, presumably using bread (grain), a banana and apple juice (two fruits), and then potato chips (not really a vegetable, but the USDA uses french fries as a vegetable for school lunch counting, so why not?)

And notice what they served the kid to make her nutrition 'better.' Chicken nuggets. You ever see how chicken nuggets are made? (Ditto processed chicken patties and McRibs and the like). They are literally made of all the garbage they're left over with when they've taken out all the parts people will knowingly eat. Veins. Tendons and ligaments. Et cetera. Really. Don't believe it? Check out the article and video here, or lots of other places on the web.

Aren't you happy we have the USDA on the job to make sure four year olds don't miss out on their required servings of chicken veins? God Bless America.

The Beat Goes On

In my post of a couple of days ago, On Today's Episode... I opined that we would be in for an escalation of rhetoric drumming up animosity toward Iran with the "Iran is trying to destroy our friends in Israel" meme, in order to justify the government's desired attack on that country.

Well, here's the next measure in that song. The dust had barely cleared from the explosion before Thai officials blamed Iran for a failed bombing in Bangkok yesterday. Apparently, the would-be bombers blew the roof off the house they were staying in, and then one of them, covered in blood, tried to hail a cab, who wouldn't take him. Just to make sure to attract more attention, the thrwarted bomber threw a grenade at the cab, injuring the driver, and ran.

When police tried to apprehend him, the hapless bomber tried to escape by throwing a grenade at police. It bounced off a tree and rebounded on him, blowing his own legs off. These bombers really need some explosives training.

Thai officials claim the bomber, and another man later apprehended at the airport trying to flee to Malasya had Iranian passports.

Per the ABC News Article,

Israeli officials told ABC News "we don't know" what Moradi's intended target was "because he was caught." A spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry has said there is no sign yet that Moradi's alleged targets were Jewish or Israel.

Wait a minute! Israeli officials? One wonders, why is it that both these major news sources are talking to Israeli officials? If you don't know the target, wouldn't it seem likely it's the country where the bombing occurred?

Apparently, not if you're drumming. You see, in the articles linked, there is no reaction of outrage from high level officials in Thailand--barely any reaction at all--but we did get to hear paragraphs worth from everyone's favorite Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and his minions.

Stay tuned to hear soon which low level Israeli diplomat these keystone bombers were after this time. Don't worry, I'm SURE it will be ISRAELI diplomats.

These Are the People We Trust

So, recently we've been told that we have to trust the Executive Branch of the Federal Government with the vast, unconstitutional power in the recently-enacted NDAA to call someone a terrorist and toss them in jail forever without charge or trial.

Here's the people we're supposed to trust:

In a city near Boston recently, the FBI concluded a two-year drug 'investigation' with a bust. They chainsawed through the door of the apartment, and held a woman at gunpoint facedown on the floor for over half an hour while her toddler screamed for her mommy from the next room.

The problem? Well, they'd chainsawed through the door of Apartment 2R. The target of their supposed "investigation" lived in 2F.

When all was said and done, after brutalizing an innocent woman, terrorizing a baby, destroying property, and all---how did they handle it? With a perfunctory, "routine" apology for the inconvenience, and a phone number the landlord could call to get reimbursed for the door.

Yeah, let's be sure and let these guys decide who to torture and indefinitely 'detain.'

Couldn't Have Said It Better

Yesterday, there was a gathering in Annapolis, Maryland. A group of people gathered to support an action by the General Assembly of the State of Maryland demanding that Congress introduce an Amendment to the US Constititution overturning the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court.

In that decision, a majority of the Supremes thumbed their blue-blooded noses at the people of the United States and said that it is perfectly legal--no, actually "Constitutionally required" that for-profit corporations and unions be allowed to buy our government out from under us, rendering our votes meaningless and our freedom up for sale to the highest bidder, which of course is never going to be us.

They said it so well in a letter to Congress, that I'll shut up now, except to say that every American citizen who wants there to be an America ten years from now should be writing to their Representatives and Senators to demand the same. Here's their letter:

We the undersigned members of the Maryland General Assembly call upon you to pass a constitutional amendment to reverse the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which declared that corporations enjoy the First Amendment political rights of the people and toppled dozens of state and federal laws and many decades of judicial precedent preventing corporations (and unions) from spending corporate (and union) treasury funds in political campaigns.

This radical departure from judicial precedent and democratic values has already brought a torrent of corporate money directly, much of it secret, into American politics, fundamentally distorting public elections and campaigns for public office. The decision poses a direct and dramatic threat to government “of the people, by the people and for the people”.

By bringing corporations into the heart of the political process, Citizens United changes the character of democracy. For-profit corporations (except benefit corporations) are legally bound to pursue the maximization of profits and economic advantage in all their endeavors. This is one reason why most United States Supreme Court Justices, from Chief Justice John Marshall to Chief Justice William Rehnquist to Justice Byron White to the four dissenting justices in Citizens United v. FEC, have rejected the claim that corporations have political rights.

Corporations enjoy special state-conferred economic and legal advantages not enjoyed by natural persons, including limited liability of the shareholders, perpetual life of the corporation itself, and favorable treatment of the accumulation and distribution of assets. These advantages permit corporations to amass vast sums of money that are spent properly for economic purposes but not for the purposes of intervening in democratic politics and entrenching corporate power.

Article V of the United States Constitution empowers the people, the states and the Congress to use the constitutional amending process to protect republican self-government. This power has repeatedly been used by the people when the Supreme Court has undermined the progress of popular democracy.
As members of the Maryland General Assembly, we sharply disagree with the majority decision in Citizens United v. Federal election Commission and call upon the United States Congress to propose and send to the states for ratification as soon as practicable a constitutional amendment to reverse this decision and restore fair elections and democratic sovereignty to the states and to the people.
Needless to say, if members of the U.S. Congress fail to act responsibly (as requested by this letter) and forward an amendment to the Constitution for the states to ratify, the legislatures of 34 states could act independently and pass resolutions in their respective states calling for an amendment to the Constitution.

Ending the corporate takeover of our electoral process and repeal of Citizens United by a constitutional amendment is absolutely necessary to restore our democracy.