Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
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a middle-aged George Washington
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Wednesday, 24 August 2005 at 18h 55m 47s | The lie behind the push to repeal the estate tax | You need to get nervous when the corporatist monarchist Rethuglican's talk
reform. Calling the "estate tax" a "death tax" the attempt has been to make
this tax seem an onerous burden to hard-working middle-class families who
scraped their way to little piece of economic pie. Although possible in rare
cases, the estate tax only affects 1 to 2 percent of all estates. This tax can
easily be adjusted to affect an exemption beneath a reasonable level (currently
1.5 million) to ensure against encroachment on the middle class -- rather than
eliminating the tax entirely.
But elements of the spoiled vile aristocracy (and their groveling minions)
don't care. Either through ignorance, pompous insular arrogance, or borderline
misanthropic apathy, the result of eliminating the estate tax will only shift
the costs of government onto the wage and sales taxes paid predominantly by the
very middle classes the "death tax" is supposed to be damaging -- according to
the lies of the orchestrated false (heavily-financed) grass roots campaign.
Here is a snippet from a recent New York Times article:
"But despite the populist rhetoric and oft-repeated horror stories about
families being forced to sell their farms in order to pay estate taxes, the
battle is over a very large amount of money held by a very small number of
families. A report last month by the Congressional Budget Office found that in
2000 only 2 percent of all estates - about 52,000 - were subject to any estate
tax. At that point, taxes were imposed only on estates worth $675,000 or more.
The limit rose to $1.5 million in 2004, and if that limit had been in effect in
2000, only 13,771 estates - fewer than 1 percent - would have been subject to
the tax. All but 740 of them would have had enough in liquid assets to cover
estate tax liabilities, the office estimated."
"At the moment, taxes are imposed only on estates worth more than $1.5 million.
Under Mr. Bush's tax cut of 2001, the estate tax is set to shrink steadily over
this decade and disappear in 2010. But the 2001 bill called for the estate tax
to reappear in full force in 2011."
New York Times, 14 August 2005 LINK
| Tuesday, 23 August 2005 at 2h 27m 56s | Comparing the war on Iraq to World War Two | One of the matters that bothers me most is when I hear
historical
ignorance,
especially when this ignorance is used to further the justification of lies and
stupidity. Or as the late Patrick Moynihan (the Senator from New York who's
seat Mrs. Clinton now holds) has said, "Everyone is entitled to his own
opinion, but not his own facts." (source)
Another quote by Moynihan:"The central conservative truth is that it is
culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central
liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. "
So yeah,when I hear "the war on terror" and "iraq" compared to
World War Two, I go completely stark raving mad -- and not just because I am
psychologically unbalanced. That's another matter.
No. Where are the tanks, planes, and armies of terrorists that are taking over
the world? Hitler invaded Austria,
Czechoslovakia,Poland,Denmark,Norway,Belgium,the Netherlands,France,all of East
Europe, and then Russia. Where are the tanks threatening our civilization?
Where are the planes dropping bombs on our cities like it was London in 1940 -
1941?
Don't try to tell me we are invading nations and toppling governments because
there might be another criminal syndicate that could cause a "terrorist"
activity. Don't do it. Because in the last 3 years, virtually nothing has
been spent defending ourselves from just such attacks whatsoever. No
vulnerable nuclear reactors and chemical plants. No upgrade of the Coast Guard
and National Guard units here at home -- they went to Iraq.
Most of the money
the "department" of homeland security spends is spent on advertising (recall
the Tom Ridge commercials, and the kids asking "mommy" what to do) and
suspicious contracts to defense contracting firms, a lot of whom involve
lobbyists and well-connected contractors.
And when America was attacked by Japan's bombing, there never was a recruitment
issue. Sending a fleet of ships that were created by a national governement is
100,000 percent different than a saudi-Mafia operation that stole 4 planes and
flew into buildings. Especially considering the degree of apathy and
incompetitence which enabled the saudi-mafia operation to occur. And then, why
was Cheney looking at oil maps of Iraq in Spring 2001 with energy and oil
conglomerates when they were putatively discussing Energy Policy? Why did the
August 6th memo of 11 pages get ignored by our President? Was Crawford, Texas
more important, or did Mr. Bush really get that memo?
To even relate this invasion of Iraq to the war against fascism is facile at
best, and sinister at the worst. We didn't have to "make-up" a threat of "WMD"
or use forged documents to justify the war against Japanese and German
aggression. We didn't have to justify the D-Day Invasion by saying that German
industry (in lieu of Iraqi oil) will pay for the invasion. And we had a Harry
Truman commission which ferreted out procurement corruption in the military
contractors that put people in jail, cancelled contracts, and impounded bank
accounts.
Saddam Hussein was abetted and carried to power by the Reagan administration
and petroleum interests infested defense industry. United States chemical
companies sold Saddam his chemicals and the sales were permitted by the Reagan
administration to destabalize the region into competing nations. Democracy and
freedom were always secondary, if they were ever a consideration.
"Freedom is on the march" according to George Bush.
Hmmm....
"By the most brutal methods of terrorism, a regime sought to maintain an
existence that was condemned by the overwhelming majority of its people...I
have tried to persuade the responsible authorities that it is impossible for a
great nation ... to stand by and watch millions belonging to a great, an
ancient civilized people be denied rights by their government... I have
endeavoured to find some way to alleviate a tragic fate. One agreement was
signed only to be broken. I then tried a second time to bring about an
understanding. A few weeks later, we were forced to the conclusion that the
government [of Austria] had no intention of carrying out this agreement in the
spirit that had inspired it, but in order to create an excuse. I have
determined, therefore, to place the help of our country at the service of these
millions. Since this morning, our soldiers are on the march across all
of
Austria's frontiers."
--Adolf Hitler, March 12, 1938, justifying the German invasion of
Austria.
There's more here.
| Sunday, 21 August 2005 at 21h 34m 51s | Opinion Drive-by |
This announcer gets paid way too much to scream, holler, and get excited about
absolutely nothing.
Oh my God, I have no life and must buy this product so I can be somebody and
start smiling intensely like a schizophrenic on speed.
You pay what we pay, just listen to all of the air-brushed sales
representatives of every ethnicity tell you so,
and then run out and buy a piece of shit car for less money then all of the
exorbitant maintanence costs and repairs over the next
five years.
How many stories of corruption does it take to topple a Presidency? None. All
you need is one blow-job from a willing press secretary flusie.
Lets create a television mini-series, label
it "shocking","profound","provocative", and "informative" -- rather
than "propaganda".
When you need unbiased information, make sure you listen to convicted felons
like Gordon Liddy. His expertise at breaking into the offices
of political opponents and setting wire taps make his opinions about the
political opposition absolutely reliable and sacrosanct. Indeed,
the news organizations that allow him to speak publically should be applauded
for their integrity.
How many hatchet men and women called "news analysts" or "news personalities"
are there in the news media? If you did an autopsy of every one
of their brains, inside their craniums you would find a huge stash of money.
"I'd like to teach the world to ...chill"??? That verb used to be sing, if you
have a memory that goes back to the early 80's when Coca-cola taught the world
to sing.
Chill is like a voiceless grinning lump of thoughtlessness,
whereas sing indicates active mental and spiritual participation. How do
you "teach" someone to "chill" anyway? Are their classes you can take?
And how does a bunch of generation x-ers on a roof-top equate to the whole
world holding hands singing about a big ideal?
The more I hear the expression "for real real" celebrated in hollywood and
advertizing, the more I recall George Orwell and "double plus plus."
So, it is now groovy-coolistic to be unable to articulate or express one-self
beyond a three-word idiom.
Boy scouts or not, the Midas touch will still pick your pocket and prey on your
automotive ignorance. That's why the corporation franchise's
itself.
Some brewers look outside their windows and see smoke-stacks, some travel far
away from factories to stand in front of snow-capped mountains
and act like they don't have factories with smoke-stacks. It's called the
Coors silver bullet, because all of the arsenic dumped in the Colorado
water by Colorado mining companies.
| Thursday, 4 August 2005 at 0h 37m 31s | Back from Vacation | Okay, I'm back from indolence and lethargy, but I'm also so depressed about the
spiraling mendacity of the current Presidential administration and the noted
gang of thugs. We are in deep deep doo-doo folks.
Air force and military personnel are being asked to plan for a full scale war
with Iran, according to another recent expose by the indomitable Seymour
Hersch. Bush installs Bolton as a recess appointment to the United Nations --
a man who is belligerent, pompous, and narcissistic ( and undiplomatic). The
UN boo's him on his first day. Yes, it's true.
War with Iran is part of the plan folks. Something will happen when Bush
returns from his 50th vacation this summer, you watch. It's all in the plan,
and the hope is that the "incident" will carry over into the 2006 elections so
that the Rabid gangsters can beat any opposition over the head with the stick
of Patriotism.
Speaking of Patriot, the Patriot Act was renewed. The Blacklists are being
drawn up and soon the "Night of Long Knives" will be implemented to take out
the opposition.
No I'm not insane, I'm going crazy. Is my country really slowly becoming a
fascist state? How else can you explain the corporate media disconnection with
reality and the permissivity of lies in the "public forum" ? A student of
History knows the wickedness of men. You fill a bureaucracy full of
sychophants and put a lot of money in their pocket and you get the corporate
media. Then you need to consider that 90 percent of all printed, heard, and
visualized media is owned by 12 interconnected companies with similar big
investors. These people are in the background that you never see who own 5
percent of this, 12 percent of that for 500 large corporations and holding
companies. They fund political campaigns and political schemes. They hire
scores of lawyers to interpret and change the law in their favor.
Come on, you didn't think the history of Aristocracy is only a thing of the
past, did you? Power corrupts, and those who seek to gain power and become
powerful are by nature corrupted with power.
I see these "Proud to Be American" stickers and "GW BUSH 2004" stickers on the
backs of suvees and mini-vans and I just want to throw up -- or scream, but
that would be a waste of energy. By now, you can't reach the brainwashed and
slavish followers of the daily Republican lies.
Proud believers of lies in defense of absolute corruption, certain of their
patriotic duty and so woefully ill-informed. I'm sure most of these folks are
sincerely thinking they are correct about what they believe to be facts, but
their are a minority who care little about facts. They just "believe
differently" period, and no tabulation of facts or details will shake their
belief system.
| Thursday, 30 June 2005 at 16h 50m 43s | Scientology | This comes from a posting a baseball fantasy league from someone in the
league. I thought it was right on the mark, so I will post it here.
Ever since this whole Tom Cruise fiasco I became interested in what scientology
was all about.
Apparently this fucked up "religon" is based on some story about an alien named
Xenu who ruled a group of over-populated planets. In order to cut down the
population of earth, or teegeean as it was once called, he gathered all the
aliens around the base of a volcano and placed a nuclear bomb inside killing
them all. Once the body was killed it released the soul which Xenu captured and
forced into a theater to watch movies about God and Jesus, therefore creating
belief in christianty. All of the aliens souls wandered the earth attaching
themselves to humans.
Now what scientology supposedly does is rid your body of all these extra souls,
or tethans as they are called and allow you to live a happier life. It is said
to even get this information you have to pay thousands of dollars for
ridiculous seminars. To complete the program you have to pay upwards of
$400,000. L. Ron Hubbard, who created the program, was a science fiction writer
and appearently a real piece of shit who truly considered himself the lord of
darkness. Most who try to leave the church either wind up dead or in serious
legal troubles.
This is one fucked up, wacky-ass cult with a bunch of ignorant retards
following. I think they all need to drink the kool-aid and just get it over
with.
| Monday, 27 June 2005 at 19h 37m 0s | Real versus illusionary economic democracy | The idea of laissez-faire, free-market driven economic democracy is founded
upon two assumptions : that the workers and
middle class majority will have and use surplus funds, and that the use of the
surplus funds of the very wealthy will not
exacerbate or diminish over time the surplus funds of the majority.
Where there is a revenue stream, there is a potential for an entrepreneur to
come up with a way to divert some of these
funds into an attempt at profit. Simply put, if you have access to a large
amount of people or businesses who will spend
some of their surplus or operating funds, you will have a potential to profit
off of these funds. This can be a
service-based or a merchant-based operation. A hairstylist who sets up shop in
an area with no other competition will
probably do well. A supermarket chain with minimal competition will be able to
do the same. This supermarket may have
access to many or few wholesalers. The wholesalers are themselves in contact
with the many different suppliers : farmers,
canned-goods companies, and manufacturing. Each of these suppliers themselves
make purchases, involving further other
anonymous wholesalers, distributers, and manufacturers in a complex interaction
of circles. Everyone is a consumer AND part
of a larger network of market and societal forces at the same time.
Large aggregations of this process form the local economy of a region or
nation. In a very large nation (such as the United
States) there can be many local economies within the rubric of the national
economy. Thus a very large nation will have a
tendency to divergent local economies underneath the roof top of the nation
that can simmer and possibly even erupt into
large-scale civil strife, because sometimes the interests of one or groups of
local economies will get a better
representation in the halls of the government that is meant to discuss the
interests of the nation.
However, the networks of economic linkage have become shrunken and concentrated
by large corporate forms of monetary
accumulation. They are not the profuse diffusion of numerous entrepreneurial
enterprises that the theory insists. There
are instances of non-corporate wealth and no dampening of entrepreneurial
spirit in the land, however the shrinkage is
extant nevertheless. Large corporate forms thus become the main agents of
profit-accumulation on the economic revenue
stream. In this way the creation of a supra-aristocracy is less visible,
because the family trusts that own small
percentages of the stock of hundreds of companies is not as obvious as the
family that runs Walmart -- the family which is
itself also accumulating portfolio's of stock ownership.
This division of society into 2 classes gets created because the uses of
surplus funds by the upper versus lower classes are
very different. A very wealthy individual or corporate form can accumulate
more of the available funds at an accelerating
rate, whereas for most of the middle to lower class, the rate is barely above
constant because the scale of funds is not
large enough to see the exponential growth in 30 or 40 years. This is just
simple mathematics.
Here goes. A man saves 10,000 a year for 40 years and gets a 5% increase per
year. Using the sum of a geometric sequence
with a 1.05 growth factor 10,000 x (1.05^40 - 1)/.05 = 1,207,997.742, which 1.2
million dollars. Now that is very nice
assuming the person spends 10,000 for the entire 40 years and also gets the 5%
increase every year. More likely the
increase of 3% is more reasonable, which would yield a smaller 452,407.55.
This is only a 52,407.55 increase over the
10,000 x 40 ( The larger 1.2 million would be an 800,000 yield.)
Now an institution or individual that has 10,000,000 a year for 40 years would
accrue @ 3% , 452,407,550 which is a
difference of 52 million dollars.
A difference of 52 thousand versus 52 million dollars indicates the inherent
imbalance in capital accumulation. If the pool
of capital formation is a constant or barely increasing, this ratio of 52
million versus 52 thousand means 100 times more,
or more accurately eventually 1% of the entire wealth of the country will be
owned by the 90% of the country which has only
10,000 surplus funds per year with which to accumulate capital.
That ought to destroy the myth that the ideas alone of a laissez-faire, free-
market create economic democracy. The voices
which pronounce these ideas as the sole bearer of democratic individualism are
thinking in a vacuum, rather than a
historical continuum. Because after the new economic frontiers get swamped,
the concentration into larger formations of
wealth occurs. The only events that have inhibited or ceased this inevitable
concentration were revolutions, formation of
community social institutions(church, unions, non-profit hospitals,...) and
wise government involvement.
These myths have gotten a voice because there are short-sighted extremely-
wealthy individuals who permit and promote its
dispersal. There are speakers who attend conferences that are funded by
corporate institutions. There are lobbyist and
legal organizations dedicated to the publishing of pamplets, press releases,
and books.
| Monday, 20 June 2005 at 19h 8m 55s | Social Security : da FACTz!!! | Go here and read a well-organized, easy to understand,
complete and utter refutation of all the lies that have come from those who
think that Social Security is in trouble and that private accounts are better
for workers than the Social Security system.
The study comes from the Directors of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research (or CEPR). These are statisticians and economic researchers who
analyze and crunch data to provide accurate financial assessments of government
policy and economic trends. They are well-respected by everyone because they
know what they are doing and can be relied upon for the straight facts.
You expect your sportscaster to give you the straight talk about the game or
the seasonal stats. The same is true about economic data and cost-benefit
analysis. This is the service the CEPR provides for entrepreneurs, government
policy analysts, and businesses in general who need the hard facts without the
political hyperbole.
| Saturday, 18 June 2005 at 1h 14m 59s | Newsworthy? | What is news? Is it the front pages of the local newspaper? Is it the events
that are discussed on the television during the anointed time that we decide to
pay attention?
According to my favorite abridged dictionary, American Heritage, news is "1.
Recent events and happenings. 2. Written or broadcast information about recent
events. 3. Newsworthy material." Newsworthy by the way means "Interesting or
signifigant enough to be included in a news report."
In other words, if we want to tell it to you we will, but don't expect to be
informed because we intend to tell it in a perspective we consider the most
beneficial, using whatever standard we deem to be proper.
| Wednesday, 15 June 2005 at 0h 0m 53s | In case you didn't understand the issue about Guantanamo | Don't listen to Donald Rumsfeld. [source]
Rumsfeld Obscures Facts About Gitmo
At yesterday’s press briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used selective
memory to retell the story of how combatant status review tribunals in Gitmo
came about and just how “appropriate” such hearings are.
Rumsfeld’s claim: After deciding that the enemy combatants were not
covered by the Geneva Conventions, the administration “established procedures
that would provide appropriate legal process” to enemy combatants. These
included combatant status review tribunals.
The full story: Actually, after September 11th President Bush tried to
hold combatants indefinitely, without giving them access to court systems where
they could challenge their detention. In Rasul v Bush, the Supreme Court
rebuffed the administration: “both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals seized
as potential terrorists can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.” The
ruling forced the administration to create “procedures that would provide
appropriate legal process” to enemy combatants. But, instead of using already
established and internationally recognized legal procedures for detained
persons – the Article 5 hearings of the Geneva Convention – the administration
stubbornly created combatant status review tribunals.
Rumsfeld’s claim: The procedures, which include the combatant status
review tribunals, “go beyond what is required even under the Geneva
Conventions.”
The full story: The tribunals are an illegal and unconstitutional
alternative to the process which the Supreme Court determined detainees are
entitled. Earlier this year, federal Judge Joyce Hens Green echoed the Supreme
Court ruling by declaring that “the Bush administration must allow [Guantanamo]
prisoners…to contest their detention in U.S. courts.” Green was forced to
return to the issue because the special tribunals established by the Pentagon
as an alternative were “illegal” and unconstitutional. Far from going “beyond
what is required even under the Geneva Conventions,” the hearings had denied
detainees the “most basic fundamental rights.”
It is called dissembling -- or dis-assembling, as Mr. Bush says (listen here.) -- and
Bush knows that word very well. That's what these people do, lie to manipulate
the gullible and the weak-minded.
Well, I may be gullible sometimes Meister Bush, but I am not weak-minded. Your
time will come.
| Wednesday, 15 June 2005 at 23h 20m 54s | The generals speak to the public |
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