My Aunt Carlin moved in with us
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Monthly Archives: March 2007
Mini AIPAC- The American Turkish Council and its connections with Lockheed
The story begins with Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish translator fired from the FBI after one year of work. She is now being defended by the American Civil Liberties Union as a whistle blower who was unjustly retaliated against for doing her job. An interesting case for sure. But even more interesting is the peephole that her case has opened into the shady doings of The American Turkish Council which has been termed the ‘Mini AIPAC’ due to its similarities with AIPAC, the Israeli ‘lobbying’ machine.
Here in a long commentary, ‘The Highjacking of a Nation‘, Sibel Edmonds talks the truth about what she call The True Lords of Afghanistan’s Poppy Fields, which would be Turkey. It turns out that Turkey’s government is a key US governmental regional ally, human rights abuser, and world class smuggler in drugs and material for nuclear weaponry, which Edmonds comments on well. The country hosts numerous US military personnel, and sits astride Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of particular interest to the US government, is the opening into regions of the former Soviet Union, where Turkish language group populations predominate, that alliance with a barbaric and corrupt Turkish government provides.
And the story gets worse, when Edmonds connects up The American Turkish Council with American big wigs and companies like Lockheed, whose corporate officers sit on that council. Now we can begin to see why Sibel Edmonds was such an unfortunate worker to have at the FBI in so many eyes. Translate, but shut up is how they wanted it, but she did not oblige. She became a dangerous person to have around, so that most probably got her fired. Corruption does like to work in secret, and Sibel Edmonds was not about to let things just lie.
The Power of Community
The Community Solution is a web site devoted to explaining the world energy crisis we are now in and what can be done to help humankind survive it. The government and economic leaders of our country plan to survive it by seizing control for themselves over the remaining world fossil fuel supplies that the industrial world currently depends on to produce and transport goods. This is a delaying tactic at best, and one that is based on inherent unfairness.
Why does the US have a national right to horde control of world energy resources? The answer is that it doesn’t, and to try to do so in a period of world crisis can only provoke world conflict.
Check out news about The Community Solution’s new documentary, ‘The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil‘. Cost is $20 for a copy.
Clinton’s South American death squads haunt Bush on tour
That other US war is still in the news outside of the US. That war the liberal Democrats want us all to forget about. Colombia.
The Clinton Era foisted off on us more than a few acts of US government military interventionism besides the US War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. The other big one (other than the war waged by the Clinton team against Iraq) was the intervention into the long festering Colombian Civil War. There our government went in big sponsoring and funding military created death squads called paramilitaries.
The big pretense was that these were private Colombian military units ouside of Colombian and American government control, but that lie is coming unglued in a huge scandal now being unfolded in the Latin American press. Bush enters with his LA/ Hollywood propaganda tour in the middle of all this, and Alternet.org has good coverage of this.
US Out of Colombia!
Matt Sanchez, new star of the pornball Right
Liberalism is not the great refuge of the American homosexual, but rather it is the Far Right that is! All one has to do is get too old to sustain a Gay porn career, anounce that you regret your ‘liberal’ hedonistic past, and then it’s welcome open arms a head into a new life style with the nutster Christian Right, as a newly reformed ‘faggot’. God be praised!
Instead of sex with another man, you are now having sex with Ann Coulter and Condi Rice! Still a career whore at least… Check out Salon’s article on Matt Sanchez, new star of the pornball Right.
Now, to be a gay Christian you don’t need to even stay in the closet. In fact, it’s quite welcomed if you parade around town your sinful, and supposedly previous ‘liberalism’, in flamboyant drag. The drag show has never been more popular than it is now with conservatives. In fact, it seems to be the favorite act inside their Big Tent of sinners.
When laws protect the criminals and not the common people
Somebody has just burglarized your place, they get caught, but then the police walk away with them, laughing about the whole ‘misunderstanding’. It’s even worse than that, since while the judge watches, the burglars ‘apologize’ to you for their crimes and then walk out the courtroom door with the loot!
Hey! Maybe these robbers are actually in with the police, you think. What else can one think, when the burglars admit they’re guilty of the crime, apologize to you, and then say they won’t let it happen again and will take measures to make sure you stay safe in the future! And the judge lets them off the hook for the theft! If you had taken $5 of food unauthorized from your local grocery, you might have gotten locked up for life!
How is it that American has come to coddle its criminals in such a manner? I know of more than a few cases, where after the criminals did bodily harm to some of our neighbors, they got off Scot free! Can you believe that? These folk sustained permanent injuries that they will have to suffer with the rest of their now destroyed lives, and the criminals get to go on about their business, laughing and boasting of what they have done!
It seems that there are now 2 sets of laws; one for the decent common fok, and another set of much cushy regulations for the criminals! Hard working people get the shaft while hardened lifetime criminals drive around with their stolen goods and thuimb their noses at the rest of us. Is this really America?
Look at this case from Washington DC for example. The powers that be practically are giving awards out for these crimes and to these criminals. Where is the concern for the victims here? And one of the criminals actually has the gall to say,
‘And it’s frustrating.’
Damn right it is, you need to be in jail, Pal. What has come to America when criminals like these 2 in DC continue to run loose? Doesn’t anybody care about stopping crime any more? Stop coddling these criminals!
Out Whenever?
I got to hand it to liberal Democrats, they are totally behind the idea of ‘Out of Iraq Now!’ That is when Out Now actually means December 31, 2007, almost 10 months away!
It reminds me of the debate about the meaning of the word ‘is’ and if Slick’s Monica blowjob constituted sex, or not. Now, we have the word ‘now’ meaning much later than it is usually meant, it seems? ‘Now’ is now to actually mean …then in 9 and 2/3 months away from today!
Maxine Waters has gotten ‘tough’ with Bush, and says she will not supplement Iraqi War funding (add to it), unless US troops are pulled Out Now (out in 9 2/3 months), that would surely only apply if there is no ’emergency’ with Iran to come along. Oh how very reasonable, Maxine. Certainly there will be no ’emergency’ with Bush and Dick in charge…. lol.
As to our very own Democratic Party Colorado Senator, Kenneth Salazar? He probably is worried still that Iraqi people might get hurt if we leave without removing their oil first? That’s the type of people many of these liberal Demnocrats truly are. Caring and responsible folk. And of course I’m being sarcastic now.
As the Democrats play their word games, the Iraqi and Afghan people continue to have to put up with foreign military occupation of their countries. Shame on these politicians for their continual bullshit. The word now should mean now, not some date in the future contingent on whatever taking place.
Out Whenever! What a catchy slogan NOT.
OUT NOW! and only when NOW! is truly now, not after Christmas.. whenever and whatever.
US troops in African fender benders
Two US troops died in Ethiopia this week. Bush’s soldiers are adrft from their stations in Djibouti a lot these days and we can look for more f’ender benders’ ahead. What with the US Pentagon directing deployment of Ethiopian troops into Somalia and Ugandan troops into Somalia, these traffic accidents will happen.
That last is an interesting item. Ugandan troops are being sent to Somalia as ‘peacekeepers’! Wow, I’m surprised they can find time from fighting the 20 year war taking place n the Northern part of Uganda next to Southern Sudan, all to come across and ‘peacekeep’ for Dubya in Somalia.
Holy Warriors and African Crusades! That’s all Africa needs now, a ‘clash of civilizations’, Christians vs Muslims. Meanwhile, uranium kleeps coming up missing from the Congo (1oo bars or so). Oh well, it’s not really all that radioactive, is it?
What’s Australia doing occupying East Timor?
East Timor, remember it? It was the cause celebre of liberal minded world imperialist do-gooders for quite some time, and now much forgotten. Liberals in the English speaking world demanded that East Timor be split off from West Timor and the rest of Indonesia, and then established as a new ‘nation’.
Never mind that the off shore oil under the poor Third World nation of Indonesia’s control would then go into the hands of Australia. Never mind that this tiny new political structure would not be independently viable or sustainable, economically, politically, or socially outside of Austrlain government directive.
Now where are some of the liberals today? Do they support Australian troops out of East Timor? No. In fact most have totally forgotten about East Timor after it got captured as a new satellite of Australian imperialism, a junior imperialism tied in with British and American imperialisms in their region. People in East Timor are half starved and unemployed, and have their Lilliputian pseudo ‘nation’ occupied now with Australians, and not Indonesians as before. And the Australian liberal socialist group called Democratic Socialist Party that campaigned for Australian imperialism to ‘liberate’ the 1/2 of an island from Indonesia is not pressing for Australian troops to come home from East Timor now, but rather is pressing for more ‘humanitarian’ interventionism into other parts of Indonesia, to split yet more islands away from that country into Australian government control.
What’s Austrlalia doing occupying East Timor? Under the pretense of peacekeeping, they are supporting one side against another in a civil war there. Time to get these Australian troops out and back home where they belonged all along.
Vets have to battle nasty US medical system like the rest of us
The bad conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center has brought many US soldiers from killing Iraqis into a new battle with their own US government. Now they and their families are not waving US flags so much as they discover what many of the elderly and sick amongst us already knew. The US government doesn’t give much a damn about Afghans, Iraqis, nor the majority of US citizens either.
Did the youngsters signing up for the US killing machine think they would get something special? Some sort of privileged status for themselves for being hired killers for Dubya, Cheney, or whomever might come along whenever as their top officers?
The whole military medical system has big nasty holes in it much as does the civilian medical system does, too. When you sign up and go abroad to fight people you haven’t a clue about you might want to think you are a big hero/ heroine, but you are not. You are somebody looking to get special treatment, that’s all. You want that spiffy uniform, the perks, the respect by the people in power and their suck ass supporters at the lower economic levels. But once you get hurt all that fades into the background. Now you become much more like the rest of us, and the rest of us have to deal with sorry, don’t give a damn, medical care. So tell any younger sisters and brothers, to deal with the real problems back home, before getting all psyched up to supposedly go solve the world’s problmes by high tech killing. Didn’t make any sense to begin with, but you let yourself get suckered, didn’ you?And now the chickens perhaps have come home to roost, right on top of your own lonesome shoulders?
When somebody tells you to jump off a cliff by joining up as hired killer, you don’t have to go along smirking and thinking how smart you are. Yes, many vets that previously played the fool have to eventually battle the nasty US for-private-don’t-give-a-damn- except-about profits medical system like the rest of us. You’ll not get quality care like the top dogs are sure to give themselves.
It was a dummy thing you did joining up, and we wish you now the best, just like we wish all of us the best in getting the decent medical care that is our human right…. one that our rulers ignore all the time. How many of the wounded vets wish they could frag the same people they signed up to blindly follow? After all, they fragged you did they not? If not yet, then you are one of the more fortunate. Thank your lucky stars up to now. Because the nasty sorry ass US medical system is more likely to kill you in the long run, far more likely than any ol’ Osama. That’s whether you or vet, or not? What you heroes going to do about it? When you fight back (if you do?), at least you’ll be on the right side this time.
Shallowest Ecology
We live in wonderland times. Many might have heard about deep ecology and might even be supporters of it. But what about shallow ecology? Well it turns out that both terms were founded by the same man, Arne Naess, and despite the greater familiarity with the term ‘deep ecology’, there are many more advocates of ‘environmentalism’ that are into shallow ecology, than deep.
And to be even more comprehensive, we are also into having a plethora of what should be called shallowest ecology advocates. These are kind of like the plethora of anti Iraq War peace folk we have, who are noteven really shallow peace in their views, but shallowest peace. People like Hillary and Wesley (Clark) for examples. But who are the shallowest ecology advocates amongst us? In Colorado Springs, we might say that Richard Skorman is, the former vice mayor of the city.
I did not attend, but word has it that Poor Richard’s owned by Skorman, actually last week invited a Dupont exec up to us as ‘green’ and envormental friendly! To attend, one would have had to plump down some $10 I believe? to hear such nonsense espoused. Did anybody actually go? Please write if you did. As Steve Martin once said, ‘comedy is never pretty’ and this event must of been truly ugly. Wish I had made it for the laughs, if nothing else.
I did attend another shallowest ecology event, though, that was the free talk last night at Colorado College by Matthew Simmons, who I discovered afterward, was energy advisor to Bush at one time. Heck, ignorant me. I thought of him as just being an author who wrote some about Peak Oil Theory, not as exec and Bushie. And that’s why I attended the talk.
Simnmons gave a pretty good brief overview of Peak Oil theory to an audience of quite a few doubters. A radicalizing topic when the subject is actually understood, but that was what wierd about the meeting; there was no sense of energy, no sense of rage, no sense of realization that the world is facing a catastrophe in the near future. It was a shallow ecologist preaching to an audience full of more than a few far shallowest ecology people.
Peak Oil theory posits that cheap and available world oil is peaking at this point, and the world is going to face an increasingly tight cut off of energy resource flow in the years ahead. This will happen while we are all currently having our needs poorly met, through a capitalist production and distribution economy based on high energy resource waste and continual anarchist expansion. In other words, we are coming upon tight times ahead, while our world economy is a waste,toss, and run one. We’re running towards a brick wall.
My announcement to the audience about the March 17-18 antiwar activities ahead in our city, was followed by a further brief comment about how the US military was a major waster of energy and was acting as pirates around the globe looking to loot remaining energy supplies. Matthew Simmons then instead of addressing what I had just said, only commented that the military leaders were now beginning to show interest in the Peak Oil ‘question’, and that he was happy by that. Well, la-de-la-da! It was Peak Oil turned into shallowest ecology like gold turned to lead in front of my very own eyes. Peak Oil in a puff.
So I now have an energy formula to produce new critical masses of Shallowest Ecology? Just put Colorado Springs local Richard Skorman, any Dupont exec (preferably racial minoprity or woman), Matthew Simmons in his Twilight (partial name of his book, Twilight in the Desert), Dick Cheney, and Al Gore all together into a giant green bag. And then shake hard! Then listen to whatever pops out of their mouths. That is Shallowest Ecology in its purest essence. We’re in big trouble.
Cuban doctors vs Bush’s US floating militaristic showtime
The bankruptcy of US foreign politcy in Latin America will become highlighted later this week when Bush deploy’s himself into Latin America with a Navy ‘floating hospital’ in tow. What the world will see is Top Gun military doctor Dubya diplomat in action, and it is assured ahead of time, to underwhelm rather than ‘shock and awe’.
The gigantic US navy war vessel accompanying the donkey is to perform surgeries at high cost to the US taxpayer, and minimal real long term medical value (if any) to the chronically malnourished and ill of Latin America.
Meanwhile, Cuban doctors quietly and with little fanfare continue to run medical clinics in country after country when allowed to do so, and Hugo Chavez continues to offer low cost fuel supplies to the not so well off, in addition. The main tool the dumbest ass neo-con gringo rulers have to provide in response, is an creased militarization everywhere in the region using the drug war as excuse. Cops, soldiers, prisons, death squads, and neo-liberal imperialist inforced privatization is DC’s way to winning ‘hearts and minds’! What a formula for success!
Eventually Washington’s war on many fronts will turn into defeat on many fronts. Nowhere is that day nearing faster than in Latin America. Imagine the ridicule that this Pentagon ‘floating hospital’ will arouse. The US is widely known as providing inadequate medical care to its own population(to children in Texas, for just one example), let alone to other nations. While the Pentagon is most noted for its constant ‘collateral damage’ to innocents, not being any angel of mercy.
Latin America will watch as Bush hobnobs with ruling elites that the mass of people despise rather than considering them as potential saviours from their economic insecurity. People need help, and America offers up a clown and a media circus. What a contrast to the Cuban doctors doing real work. US elite intellectual bankruptcy at its finest.
Same bait, same switch
Well looky who’s used the protect the border bait and switch before! Ninety years ago, same illegal immigration scare, same perp.
I happened across some posters used to recruit soldiers during WWI. Here they raise the Mexico bugaboo to ease worries that enlistment into the military would automatically mean duty in the trenches. “No More Men Are Needed” at the western front. Oh really?! It reminds me of something Air Force recruiters were telling Colorado College students on Thanksgiving 2005. US troops would be out of Iraq by Christmas. Potential enlistees need not fear being sent to Iraq because America was already pulling out. Public opinion had already forced their hand, they said, and we were pulling out.
AFRICOM and the US/ European drive to control Africa’s oil
The Center for International Policy has an excellent report about the newest US push to further militarize the continent of Africa and control the oil supplies located there. All of this is to be done under the propaganda cover of fighting terrorism, and through the establishment of the new African command operation center (AFRICOM) of the US military, which is already the military coordinator of US interventions into Somalia, into Chad and Sudan, and into Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, and where much of the African oil is located.
No area of Africa will actually be free from US military control when these plans are fully put into place, and antiwar activists should be pushing to oppose the expansions of US and European military organizations into the African continent now. That includes opposing the further deployments of African Union and United Nations Security Council troops as well, since these groups are not autonomous or free of Pentagon control. Not in the least.
After literally killing hundreds of millions of Africans through decades and centuries of European/ US colonialism and imperialism on the continent, the new push to control and loot African oil for the industrialized countries promises much more suffering to come to Africa in the years ahead. The real genocide that is taking place throughout Africa has been in march for a very long time through the entire continent, and can only be ended by giving the boot to the US and Europe and their imperialist armies out of the region altogether. African oil for Africans and not for imperialist based multinational oil companies backed up by the Pentagon! Stop AFRICOM now. We need to stop the genocide across the entire African continent, and that can only be done by getting our own US government’s military demobilized.
(You might want to read the entire CIP report and not just the link I provided to the summary of that report. The link to the entire PDF shown article, if you missed it, is at the bottom of the introduction itself. Very interesting material.)
Democracy Now’s adulatory interview with Gen. Wesley Clark, war criminal
America’s ruling elite have split about whether Bush’s decision to expand the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil into the neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran is likely to succeed or not. Wesley Clark, Clinton’s mad war criminal bomber of Yugoslavia, certainly is on the side that fears future failure by the Bush Administration.
He even has his own website dedicated to trying to stop the expansion of US government started warfare into Iran. But in the Amy Goodman interview, it appears that he actually wanted to attack Iran, and not Iraq, first. Now he feels that it is a mistaken strategy to do this attack he previously supported, after 6 years of Bush’s bungling, incompetence, and failure.
Amy Goodman all but begged Wesley Clark to run for president, echoing the incomprehensible stupidity of Michael Moore in the previous election. These liberals seem to be looking for some Dwight Eisenhower type to latch on to? How pathetic, since Wesley Clark is absolutely nothing more than a war criminal who started a war with a sovereign country illegally, and sat quiet as Clinton/ Gore killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents through economic sanctions and continual bombings of Iraq during the 8 years of that Administration. These are the type of imperialist liberals who now talk of helping citizens of Sudan out, when during their time in office they were bombing illegally targets in that country, specifically one of Africa’s largest pharmaceutical factories. Clark, and his Slick Commander Clinton, sat and twiddled their thumbs, while hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were cut down. The US and French could easily have stopped that slaughte, but they were occupied with ‘stopping the Serbs’.
After much of the interview with Clark by Goodman conducted on a chit-chat friendly level, Goodman eventually felt the need to let Clark pretend to respond somewhat adequately to his record of continually bombing Yugoslav civilian infrastructure when he was top general in command of the Clinton war of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. This record includes the deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, also bombing the Serbian television station in that city killing journalists and and other civilians at work there, and bombing various factories along the Danube River, thereby contaminating that important waterway for years afterwards with toxic chemicals, as well as killing workers and neighborhood residents. The few parts of his miserable terrorist record Clark was asked to account for by Goodman, was predictably blamed on Milosevic and the Serbs themselves. Goodman made no effort to illustrate the dishonesty of his responses.
Further, Clark went on to support the continued US use of nuclear weapons and cluster bombs in US war making. Amy Goodwin let him walk on all of this, absolutely free as a breeze. How very sad to see this desperate desire for allies against the neocons turned into Goodman’s covert prompting of Clark towards a run for US presidency by this war criminal. Shame on you, Amy. I respect your show immensely but felt ashamed for you Friday night. Don’t let these rats off the hook when they try to desert the ship that Bush is trying to run aground. These imperialist just want a better vessel at hand to continue their imperialist aggressions against other countries. Certainly everything about Wesley Clark points towards continued disaster if he were actually to gain the presidency in 2008. Why prompt for more capable imperialists to regain command? Wesley Clark couldn’t even muster up a call for the impeachment of Bush or a description of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as being illegal. I guess not, since that would have been to illustrate how he himself had carried out and commanded an illegal war against Yugoslavia.
Pueblo police steal baby from immigrant mom
One of the most unreported aspect of US immigration policy is how it breaks up immigrant families, oftentimes under the guise of saving children from abuse. The recent case of a undocumented mother in Pueblo accused of ‘selling’ her baby is case in point.
This young woman came to the US trying to find money to feed her 2 children left behind in Mexico with her grandmother. Instead, she ends up arrested on felony charges and her third child is taken away from her and put into Child Protective Service’s control. There it may well end up being put up for permanent adoption while the mother may end up behind bars for years unable to help provide for the other 2 children in Mexico!
In addition, a couple who tried to assist her, themselves were arrested and put into jail under felony charges! This couple has 4 kids that are also possibly up for grabs by the police, if there would be no other relatives to help to care for them.
What a total mess the police have made out of this situation. It’s not like any US government agency cares one wit about the children Involved. For all the US authorities care, this mother’s 2 children in Mexico could be allowed to starve to death. All the time mothers giving up their children to adoption in the US are offered financial incentives to do so. They are not charged with ‘selling’ their babies. But when an ‘illegal alien’ mother tries the best she can to work things out while being considered an animal that needs to be hunted down and deported, suddenly the terms of US law are altered. She is accused of traffic in babies, her own no less! If she had just handed it over to an adoption agency forever and away from her ever seeing the baby again, all would have been sweet and legal! Instead, she wanted to hold on the best she could to that baby.
The Pueblo police need to get their butts out of the baby theft business, and free this mother and the couple that she was living with that befriended her. What a travesty the US law is when it steals babies from their mothers, while accusing the mothers of ‘selling’ their own flesh and blood. Immigrants are human beings, and the US law degrades them instead of helping them. It is disgusting how the victims are blamed of crimes, while the government authorities are always hailed as being the decent folk involved. They most certainly are not. They are the real traffickers in human flesh.
One might want to think that this case is an exceptional mess up, and that it is not typical of how the US law is applied against the interests of undocumented parents and their children. However that is not the case, and this abuse of police power happens all the time, yet most cases never make it into the news. Immigrant children are constantly taken away form their parents while the parents are jailed and ultimately deported, leaving their children in protective custody within the US and placed into foster families.
Many top Democrats echo Bushies in call to attack Iran and Syria
The top leadership of the Democratic Party is every bit as pro-continual war as Bush and Cheney are, and supports spreading the Iraqi war throughout the entire region. Antiwar.com highlights this reality by showing video of the testimony of Michigan Democratic Party Senator Carl Levin yesterday in front of the Senate Armed Service Committee. The Democrats are leading us alongside the Republicans into a war with Syria and Iran.
House of Bush, House of Saud
‘The Angry Arab’ and Craig Unger, author of the book ‘House of Bush, House of Saud’ team up for a great radio program about the Saud family and Saudi Arabia, the American government’s favorite Arab oil whore. Sell the oil cheap for foreign benefit, make a sweetheart deal for one’s own relatives, shaft the Arab people as a whole. So much for the US bringing democracy to the Arabs. What the US corporations and government want is for Arabs to bring cheap oil to America, peacefully or by force. The main Arab ally of the US is a brutal monarchy based on a fundamentalist Muslim theocracy. Check the program out- almost an hour long.