Tag Archives: Debt

What Bush and Osama together have taught the world

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September 11 was important in world history, because Osama bin Laden taught the world that resistance to US domination was most effectively fought on US soil, and not the soil of the world’s oppressed nations.

Seems simple enough, but most victims of US foreign policy up to then had fought back directly against their own US propped-up puppet governments. Osama bin Laden globalized the resistance to US imperial policies by taking the fight to US soil. His message? Not to let D.C. fight the war solely on your home territories.

The 9/11 attacks might have not alone taught the world much of anything, if there had not been the Bush Adminstration team in office. That was the genius of Osama. He knew how elite American arrogance would most likely respond, being of elite lineage himself. He knew that the US ruling class would tend to try to destroy this new resistance against their world domination by using pure and total violence, much as the ruling class in Osama’s native Saudi Arabia does when threatened. But pure violence is dangerous since it tends to overheat like a nuclear meltdown occurring within the core of a reactor.

At present glance, it appears that nothing much has changed. The response of the Bush Administration to 9/11 was to up the level of violence against the peoples of the Third World states of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and next Lebanon No new attacks have occurred on American soil meanwhile. And as usual, there have been yet new hundreds of thousands of victims of the US military and its ME Frankenstein, the state of Israel’s IDF. The European governments have done their part, as junior cheerleaders of the US mandated blood bath outside their own continent.

But what will be the ultimate cost that the American people will eventually pay for sitting by and silently allowing its corporate-run government to go bezerk after 9/11? I talk not of the trillions of dollars in national debt that is being run off, but rather of the fact that the Bush Adminstration has practically guaranteed that Osama’s message did take root in the populations of the world.

Osama said let’s start a dirty war of attrition against the US rulers on their home soil. Osama had the ability to give the lesson that this was the Achille’s heel of US imperialism, but he didn’t have the organization to do much more than just explode one big bonfire or two for the passive and impoverished crowd he was trying to wake up to see. Bush has now given this previously dormant crowd the knowledge of the technique to create one, two, a thousand mini or maximum 9/11s in the years ahead.

It does not involve airports nor planes, And the world is more awake now. It is probably only a matter of weeks, or months at best, before the war stirs once again on the US mainland soil, but this time with newer techniques learned on Afghan and Iraqi soil. The ultimate price to be paid by Americans for their acceptance of this carnage, is that the carnage will most likely hit our soil once again, just like it hit New York previously.

So let’s look some at the new techniques to wage war on American soil. Let’s look at the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), which is close cousin to the cluster bomb. The IED has accounted for about 1/3 of the US casualties in Iraq. The components of an IED are cheap and its materials easily found. And let us not think that only Muslims can use these devices within the US. Anybody can.

Ex- US soldiers can come back and construct them. Hispanics tired of the US messing with their countries can put them together. Gang members trafficking in illegal substances and human flesh can do the same. That’s what a dirty war is all about. The weak use weaker weapons against the more powerful, but weapons they do begin to use. Iraq plus 9/11 = the ability and desire by yet more people, to use cheap weapons against the US government on US soil. Bush has given that little shove that was needed to make Osama’s lesson to the world more effective.

These IEDs are what has been giving the Iraqi resistance its sharpening edge. But where might this dirty war of attrition begin to play out in yet another battlefield? See William S. Lind’s commentary, The Boomerang Effect that shows how one scenario most likely might occur.

Osama taught us that what goes around comes around. Americans have just yet to learn that lesson, though the Bush Klan is determined that we certainly will. Dubya, Dick, and Donald helped the world find the most hard to stop weapon that could be used against the American people. The IED. The lesson was learned in Iraq, but the whole world has been watching.

Lockheed and Bush are LunarTicks

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I just love this new Bush plan to militarize green cheese! It’s all very Ray Bradbury even. Let’s put the Pentagon on the moon!
 
The way this is announced is to try to convince people that all their tax payer money is not going for warfare from way up high, but will just be an innocent little moon rock expedition. Of course, none of this will actually go as scheduled. By the time 2020 Space Odyssey roles around, the US will have a national debt of about a google’s google of dollars.

Mob rule

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Not mob rule as in democracy gone awry. Not lynch mob. The mob mob. To borrow what Serbs used to say about their country:
 

Many countries have their own mobsters. America is the only place where mobsters have their own country.

While the television public is fascinated by the stereotype Italian Mafioso, the real mob is comprised of corporate dons who enforce their capitalist tyranny on anyone worth squeezing, turnups included.

The poor are starving, falling victim to plagues, genocide, war and catastrophe. The middle classes are falling into debt, soon to be poor, meanwhile the rich are hording more and more. Instead of caring for their indentured subjects, the rich build their castle walls ever higher.

Organic, range-fed, non-toxic food? Not for us. Reserved for their progeny. Instead of ameliorating the plight of the serf by sharing the bounty of the land, we get mad-cow infested gruel.

How to tell the media is lying, the deficit

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Pie chart.
Since Bush has been in office, a half trillion dollars was added to our nation’s deficit. How much of that was due to our disastrous and costly war? A third. How much for our social welfare, including for Katrina? A sixth.

That leaves half, more precisely 48%. Where did that half of the additional deficit come from? It came from the TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH. Half. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the tax cuts, experts say we could be running a surplus.

Those figures come from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, if you’d like to check them.

The deficit is one of the biggest misrepresentations ever perpetrated by our media. What is it? A debt we’re passing on to our children and grandchildren? Yes, but hardly just that.

Think of it in terms of your credit card bill. The balance keeps getting bigger, you watch that balance, and perhaps you fantasize that maybe you’ll just never pay it off, so who cares.

But then you look at the interest you’re paying. You look at the payment you have to make every month just to pay that interest, then your stomach feels sick. You resolve to pay off the balance so that you don’t have to keep paying that interest. You may have bought an appliance with that credit, but the interest buys you nothing.

Does the credit card company care whether you pay off the balance or not? Not at all. As long as you owe the balance, they get to collect your interest. You could owe forever as far as they care.

The deficit is like that balance. Sure we don’t have to pay the balance, but we certainly pay the interest. Big financial institutions love to keep America in debt because they collect the interest. The more debt the better.

That’s the wickedness of the tax cuts for the rich. We give money to the rich, only to have to borrow a quarter trillion more to do it, which just means more interest we have to pay to the same rich people who got the tax cuts.

That’s like borrowing a hundred dollars from your friend, to give to him for whatever odd reason, maybe you think he’ll jump-start the economy with it, except now you owe him a hundred dollars, plus ten percent interest. In the end, he gets the one hundred, (he’ll get his one hundred back eventually), plus he gets ten dollars a year until you pay him back in full. Sweet deal, some friend.

And that guy owns the media. He has no interest in the media spelling out for you what an unfortunately bad deal you just made. You gave him a tax cut, and borrowed from him to do it. With interest.

Enron blaming the victims

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Enron super-con man, alleged, Jeff Skilling, explained today that the Enron bubble need never have burst if only investors had held their confidence in Enron’s outrageous marketplace success. On paper.

I recently saw a presentation by one of the authors of ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM. While this journalist did not mince words regarding the criminality of those “smarts,” there did seem to be an underlying appreciation that Enron’s market innovations were “marvelous and novel” methods of trading energy stocks. Never mind that the only function that Enron served was to squeeze more money from between the supply and the demand.

So the world at large is responsible for bringing Enron crashing down? That is the Neocon economic M.O. isn’t it? Hold up the economy on purely the fumes of consumer confidence. If the economy falters, it’s the fault of consumers too afraid to shoulder more credit card debt.

Isn’t this like the bank-robber saying that if only no-one would call the cops, the robbery would be ongoing?

Or isn’t this quite like the Emperor’s New Clothes? So long as no one tells the emperor he has no clothes, the Emperial procession could still be processing forward, albeit naked.

Some Colorado labor history

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Labor day. It commemorates the likes of Samuel Gompers, Big Bob Haywood and Mother Jones and their efforts to unite working class peoples. They met great resistance from gullible populations of consumers and business owners who weren’t going to give anything unless they were forced.

Child labor laws, five day work weeks, eight hour days, overtime pay, work breaks, retirement, benefits, sick days, vacation days, we owe all these to the might of collective bargaining.

Today’s labor organizers are seen more as standing in the way of productivity. We think of union workers as lazy and greedy, corrupt and undeserving. How is it the labor unions have fallen so low in our sentiments? Probably because businesses have public relations budgets which advance the corporate view, and labor unions, well, do not.

Was this always so? Actually, yes.

The Gold Miner’s Strike, 1894
Colorado Springs citizens themselves figured prominently in an early and notorious labor conflict: the Cripple Creek Miner’s Strike of 1894. Miners united by the Western Federation of Miners were fighting for the three dollar, eight hour day. This was a high wage at the time, but the gold mining business was a veritable bonanza and mine owners were building huge homes on Wood Avenue, “Millionaire’s row.”

Up on the mountain the miners seized and shut down the mines. From their exclusive hang out, the El Paso Club, the mine owners complained about the evils of socialism and the populist leanings of the governor.

When underhanded attempts to dislodge the strikers failed, the mine owners, with the assistance of the Gazette, convinced the population of Colorado Springs to rise up in arms against the miners, lest the miners descend from the mountain and attack them. Twelve hundred men were deputized and led on a march to defeat the seven hundred miners. Luckily the 1,200-strong Colorado Springs volunteer posse was outwitted and the miners achieved their demands.

The struggle was long and bitter and makes an amusing story now. We can be happy that the miners prevailed but let us not today be mistaken about which side most of Colorado Springs was on.

Breaking the union, 1904
By 1904, miners had lost the eight hour day. The Mine Owner’s Association issued work permits only to miners who would renounce their union memberships. As the owners shipped in scab labor to substitute for the union holdouts, the conflict grew bloody. The state militia was called in to close the Victor Record, a newspaper sympathetic to the W. F. M. The union was silenced.

On June 6, 1904, a lunatic fighting on the side of the miners, but for motives of his own, blew up a train platform, killing 21 nonunion workers. Though it was not then established who had done it, the W. F. M. was immediately blamed and routed. 225 union miners, a number of whom had families in Cripple Creek, were boarded unto trains and deported from Teller County.

One group was sent to the Kansas border, marched across, and abandoned. The other was dropped off in a desolate part of New Mexico. All were threatened with dire consequences should they return. The mine owners responsible have names which any Colorado Springs resident can recognize today: Carlton, MacNeill, Penrose, and Tutt.

The Ludlow Massacre, 1914
Who hasn’t heard of the “Ludlow Massacre?” The Ludlow Massacre put Colorado on the map. Do you know what for?

In 1913, the coal miners of Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation in Trinidad were protesting against poor wages, unsafe conditions, and struggling with debt in towns owned entirely by their employer. Naturally when the workers went on strike they were immediately evicted from their shacks.

With help from the United Mine Workers Union the striking workers were able to set up tents in the nearby hills and continue their protest. The Rockefellers hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to snipe at them and fire into their camps with Gatling guns. The National Guard was brought in to further harass the striking workers, the justification given to the public being the interrupted supply of coal.

When the miners were able to keep up their strike through the harsh winter that year, the Rockefellers had the Governor of Colorado order an all out attack. The National Guard encircled the largest of the tent settlements at Ludlow, inhabited by approximately one thousand men, women and children, and commenced firing.

Thirteen people were killed in the shoot out before the soldiers set fire to the tents and forced the families to flee. After the fire, someone discovered eleven burned corpses, most of them children. They’d been hiding in a shelter dug to escape the incessant gunfire.

News of the “Ludlow Massacre” spread fast. Working class people came from the surrounding areas to avenge the massacre. Mine shafts were exploded, mine guards were shot, anarchy reigned in the hills, and this time President Wilson sent in the Federal troops.

In the end, 66 people were killed. Not a single mine operator or soldier was indicted of a crime. The press announced the attack on the union stronghold and the burning of the sheltered children to have been “a tactical blunder.”

Should such accounts be taught in our schools? The next time we’re told that a union’s demands are unreasonable, let’s remember to look who’s doing the telling.

(This article is reprinted from CRANK MAGAZINE, vol I, number 7)