Tag Archives: Economics

G8- Why the protest?

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AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Group of Eight are.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the United States, and it’s actually the corporations within these countries that run it. It’s not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations.

In our own country, we know that the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And that’s not going to come from me and you. Primarily that’s going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. They’re totally beholden to the government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at their behest.

All of commentary at… John Perkins (author of ‘The Secret History of American Empire;…’) interview by Amy Goodman Kind of an ‘Imperialism Made Simple’ for American university miseducated Bachelor Degree dunderheads, perhaps?

RU one of those credentialed? If so, write to us. You can be helped.

American companies busy at work killing the kids daily

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Protests at the G8 economic conference in Europe and Bush and Rice preaching the joys of capitalism to Putin as the Pentagon encircles Russia with new weapons. These are the headlines in the news this week and last.

Most all of us now understand how the US’s military-industrial complex kills children daily around the globe, since one has to be in obtuse and total denial to not know about this. But what about our other industrial giants? Aren’t they helping others out, and most especially helping out the world’s children to live better lives?

George Monbiot has an excellent commentary about this issue titled (at least on their site), G8: Watch What They Do, Not What They Say. A` large part of his article discusses some big American companies involvement in helping kill Philippine children for their stockholders benefit. And how the US government itself steps in to ensure that this be the case.

This is not a situation limited to the Philippines and/ or breastfeeding. American corporations carry out economic policies that kill all around the globe. They are constantly working to sell coca cola, corn syrup, and other expensive food trash to children whose parents have little money. In Mexico and Central America, vending of fruit and licuados is rapidly in decline, while corn tortilla prices skyrocket. Meanwhile, the countryside is turned to desert by American pushed ag policies. Children perish in these conditions, and they are the conditions that US corporations push worldwide.

Yes, American companies are busy at work daily killing kids to make a better profit for themselves. Add that to the policies they push that degrade the world’s ecology, and the kids are in danger everywhere. There has got to be a better way than allowing the ‘free market’ to just run amok.

The Gazette defends the minimum wage earner yet again

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OK, the title to this commentary is so ridiculous that it invites scorn from the word GO. And yet?… this is exactly the refrain that The Gazette seems to constantly revel in.

They like to preposterously present themselves and others in the most reactionary portions of the US business community as defenders of the low income population of our nation. And their absurd thesis is always that we should oppose an increase in the minimum wage because that increase would hurt those it the new legislation would intend to help!

It is such a comical argument and one that nobody with a low income will ever buy. Do they take this sector of the population to be as stupid as the business community is? They are not. So the argument is really intended to persuade the well-to-do themselves that they really are being noble by being the selfish and backward thugs they actually truly are.

The argument really is, that the rich by opposing the increase in minimum wage are not just hoods robbing the poor, but are actually wonderful and decent people trying to help the poor out instead. Don’t laugh, that’s truly how they try to convince themselves to see it! But it makes us in the ordinary population of wage earners roll over laughing in response to the self image that the well-off have of themselves. What a bunch of charlatan clowns, are they not? Taking from the bottom to give to the top is noble endeavor! It’s truly celebrating their supposed virtue in being selfish as their ideologue Queen, Ayn Rand, once proposed in her writings as being the psychological key to supposed capitalist liberty making.

The argument that no minimum wage is freedom for the poor is once again raised as mantra in The Gazette on page 2 of the Business section of the Sunday paper in an article by Fred Crowley, a brainless professor over at the UCCS. He has a young, intense, and portly photo of himself there, too. No doubt that he is fully convinced of his arguments as week as silly as they actually are. No doubt that he also intensely and fully opposes the approach that Hugo Chavez is taking now in Venezuela in regards to increasing the minimum wage there. It just got increased 20%. Oh the horrors, he must be lamenting!

Yes, Dear Professor, the raise of the Venezuelan minimum wage violates all the supposed laws of economics that you and The Gazette preach so without end. How can Hugo Chavez not see that the economy must give profits to the rich and not to the poor? I guess such a nut deserves to be executed, does he not, Professor? He is a totalitarian trying to take liberty away!
Oh the humanity!

Instead of wishing well to Chavez and the poor of Venezuela, we should be listening to the concerns of The Gazette and Professor Crowley here at home. They just want to help the working poor out, by freezing their wages.

It’s nice to know that America is led by such an army of clowns like the editorial staff at The Gazette and the Economics Dept at UCCS when it comes to economic philosophy and economic planning. We should collect them all and shoot them out a giant cannon into areas where ‘The Terrorists’ are hiding! They would then roll over and die laughing. And then we could be nationally secure.

Will world agriculture production collapse?

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World agriculture is facing some dire straits ahead. While most scientists have been concentrating their worries about the ability of agriculture to keep up with the growing population consumption needs for some time, they were often worrying most about the spreading scarcity of fresh water, growing desertification of the planet, increasing soil degradation, global warming, peak oil’s effects on fertilizer supplies, etc. They had not been worrying so much about the death of honey bees.

That has now changed, since these bees are necessary for pollination of flowering plants and the bees are disappearing. We need the bees not just for honey, which alone is a relatively minor item, but we need them most for pollination of crops.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and that is simply that consequences of destructive economic activities are often not foreseen in advance. People calculate one thing, but ‘God’, so to speak, calculates another. Nature is not a controlled laboratory in a university lab somewhere, where reductionist thinking can lead only to reductionist results. So it is deadly to just rely on only a micro-management style, ‘environmental impact statement’ sort of plotting of economic planning in the future. That is precisely what our corporate government and the corporations themselves will try to do, and they will call it GREEN to do so. In fact it is not and is a formula for mass human suicide instead.

Let’s hope that the bees can rally and come back next season? But even if they do, we are hardly out of crisis state in the least. We are just beginning to enter into it. The corporate sector alone is not in any way capable of delivering the type of planning of future economic activity that is needed to forestall disaster worldwide. Temporary profit making, which is what the corporate world is all about, can only be destructive to the world environment we all live in. There is not even a seed of real change that can be accomplished when this mindset dominates. A radical shift is totally necessary in how things are done and made.

Leeches

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American contractors are the hidden leeches attached to both the American taxpayer and war torn Iraqi civilians. There are almost an equal number of these leeches in Iraq as there are official American troops! If the Democratic Party cowards in high office can’t cut ‘support’ to ‘our’ troops, then why not just cut support to our leeches? Simple as that. Take a look at the sappy yellow ribbon on this site. Enough to make you throw up.

Algeria, Eritrea, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Chad, Yemen- all pulled into made by US war

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It is no longer even just Iran, Somalia, and Syria that are now being pulled into the vortex of the US government’s mad assault on the Muslim world. The above countries, too, are all being made part of the US grab for declining oil reserves. All are to have their security sacrificed, and all in the name of making the US supposedly more secure!.

This should give some people, who believe that it is total madness for the US to attack Iran therefore it can’t be in the planning, some food for thought? Regionalized warfare is in the planning and is being carried out though, whether we like it or not. It is no longer a matter of when it might occur, simply because it already is occurring.

Algeria is now sinking back into its decades long dirty war between its military and Islamic Rightist forces, as Turkey ‘s millitary is with its newest attacks on its oppressed Kurdish citizens. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, announces that Dick Cheney has begun a covert war against them inside that country, while Chad has now become drawn into conflict with Sudan. And in the Horn of Africa, the US is torturingand murering people alongside allies Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, as Eritrea is being accused newly of supporting ‘terrorism’ because it opposes the US made invasion of Somalia with Ethiopian troops! Even in Thailand, the former government’s persecution of its Muslim community has now rebounded into that country presently being ruled most unstably by a group of coup leaders.

The real threat ahead as the US government moves its troops into line for an assault on Iran, is that the countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Egypt will also have their stability crumble, not to mention other places like Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Nigeria, and the Congo, once again. Meanwhile, our politicians of both parties act as if all this is not all their doing! It is, and just like they don’t give a damn about the destruction they are causing abroad, they don’t give a damn about what they aere doing to the common American, neither.

Are they ‘Green’, or just the same old corporate cons?

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A lot of energy is now being put into painting corporations ‘Green’. Here in Colorado Springs, we have a local daily rag that is so fossilized that it resists doing even that, and instead is still trying to deny that there are any ecological problems at all. But this is a trench (stance) increasingly unable to be adequately defended by corporate America, so mostly they have retreated into a new trench laid a way back from the previous one of pure denial.

The second trench is painted ‘Green’ in a much louder manner than paraders did at the St Pat’s Day events around the globe, but is there anything real about the ‘Green’ of corporate America? Is the leopard really losing its grimey spots, and being turned into a nice green pussy cat of environmental responsibility? Is Dupont going ‘responsible’, say?

Check out what Fidel Castro has to say about American plans for biofuels. It turns out that he is alive after all, so reactionaries everywhere, your tickets to go down to Miami to celebrate his death with the Cuban-CIA rif-raf will just have to be put on hold once again. Maybe you can get your money back still? Oh, but you have waited so long…. for Castro to be murdered, or just expire on his own. Instead, you wake up and find that he is doing the Al Gore Tango instead! And more convincingly than Al himself does, too. How you must weep and wail!

Homocidal Economy

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Capitalism is a homocidal economy. Beyond global warming, fossil fuel depletion (Peak Oil), genocidal and constant warfare by the strong and well positioned against the weak, rampant pollution of our habitat, etc., the greatest threat we all face is that capitalism is exterminating other species, both plant and animal. In fact, many scientists predict that the economic system imposed on us by the corporations will kill off over 50% of current species alive in this century. It is being called the Sixth Great Extinction. Check out the film and also the long list of articles linked to at Mass Extinction Underway.

Tears fail me.

From Dallas to Dubai, Oh Why?

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How was it that my former employer, Halliburton, has floated from Dallas to Houston to now, Dubai? JR, where are you? You left the ranch!

Youngsters might not have ever seen the US’s favorite soap opera of all time, ‘Dallas’, where JR Ewing was owner of Ewing Oil? For years fans made pilgrimage’s to the ranch, Southfork (read South forked tongue), where JR reigned supreme in this sappy TeleFantasy. JR is now our vice presdent (in real life) and his company is called Halliburton, a major source of corruption throughout the world as well as in the White House.

When Dick Cheney was getting his start, it consisted of buying up Dresser Industries in Dallas, where I worked as a production machinist way back in the early ’80s. The company made oil field equipment and used a lot of asbestos in its production. Cheney gobbled up the company for Halliburton at cut rate prices, thinking for sure that his high connections would get the company off very easy from all the workers and their families suing the outfit for exposing them to this deadly substance. He was right, the injured workers had to settle for pennies as they begin to die off. Halliburton had filed for bankruptcy!

As we all well know, this evil company headed by Satan (Dick Cheney) has risen from Hell to infect the world once again with its sin. Most notably in Iraq, where it has taken the US tax payer to the cleaners, as literally billions have disappeared under its watch. Might there be liability of some form ahead? Plus, the company has ripped off various cleanup funds for hurricane hit areas, most notably Katrina, but also including other storms. Halliburton is corruption personified.

But wait! This All American company has just relocated to Dubai, one of the 9 emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. You might think this all logical, as so the company maintians due to Dubai being the center of the world’s major oil producing region? But only about 7% of the economic activity of Dubai is related to oil. The main source of income is from tourism! Yes, tourism.

I know, I know. You are probably sick of visitng Disneyland and Las Vegas, and have suggested to yoour husband or wife or Significant Other,

‘Hey, why don’t we vacation in Dubai this year?’

And they might have whined n response. ‘Dubai?’

Yes, Dubai. Let us tell you why, Dubai!

You see, Dubai is about 1 million population, making it 1/3 of the population of the UAE’s 9 emirates. But there are 3 times more men than women living there. What gives? And who are these folk?

Well, only less than 20% of them have citizenship. Huh? Well, basically Dubai’s small citizenry live in a gated community like those gated communities found in upper class enclaves in Dallas and Houston. The 80% plus of other residents are ‘servants’. Or to be more exact, many of them are basically slaves. It’s kind of like Texas, but even more Texas than the original.

Dick Cheney and his cohorts at Halliburton will feel just fine there. English is the language of the schools, and also the language of business. It’s a dictatorship, theocracy, and a Kingdom. Plus, the banking laws are just right! What liability?

But most of all, it is the sex capital of the region! Non citizen ‘guest workers’ automatically have their passports confiscated by the police upon entering The Emirate. That includes female ‘guest workers’ especially. That’s what makes tourism supreem in Dubai! ‘Businessmen’ come from worldwide for Dubai’s beaches and its uh?, nightlife. Got the picture?

Check out this documentary on Dubai’s trade in slave flesh. Made by concerned Armenians, no less.
‘Desert Nights‘. It is 45 minutes long, more or less, and gets more interesting as it goes. Perhaps you wanted to visit Bangcock? But why not follow the Halliburton executive crowd and get to know the slaves of Dubai instead?

The Power of Community

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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.

Shallowest Ecology

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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.

AFRICOM and the US/ European drive to control Africa’s oil

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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.)

Pueblo police steal baby from immigrant mom

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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.

America government offers up capitalist corruption to replace Islam

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As most all of America sits passively waiting for the ‘surge’ to be officially declared as a new war, this time against Iran and Syria, it is a nice time to reflect on what DC is offering all these countries it ‘surges’ into? Why not look at other countries that the US has ‘surged’ against already? How about Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Somalia for example? All ‘threatened’ by Islamic extremists as US imperialist propaganda has continually sung? All needing ‘liberation’ by Christian capitalists coming from abroad, solely to rescue Muslims from Islamic thugs? Isn’t that the diet of nonsense that our idiotic media feeds us night and day?

So what do we have to offer in exchange? Real simple. Crony capitalism, where some tiny grupito of national elite is given billions to cooperate with our US/ European based international monopoly corporations. Then the paper money is thrown out into the wind, where it then trickles down into countrywide heroin production (Afghanistan), European vacations for a cabal of fascist minded Christian Lebanese political thugs, and in Somalia, trips to educations in the US, where warlords’ sons can join the Marine Corp, and then go back as possible US backed heads of state! See Son of Aideed That’s where the money is!

Can you imagine if some foreign power was to invade the US and destroy all the Christian churches here replaceing it only with crony capitalism allied with the occupying powers? We would be home growing a whole plethora of home grown Osama bin Washingtons and Osama bin Jeffersons, all crazy as hell Christian fanatics! Oily Dick and Dumb Dubya would be the far secular Left at that time. Religion will trump total ‘free market’ corruption tied to imperialism any day. It’s like the Pentagon is handing out grow your own Muslim fanatics chia kits everywhere they are being sent! All at the bargain basement price of trillions to American citizens. What a deal we’re getting!

New Iraqi oil laws made in USA

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There is since the days of legal slavery, probably no worse example of theft written into law than the proposed new Iraqi oil laws will be when passed. Written first in English by the US oil companies and their US government co-conspirators, they were recently re-translated back into our home tongue from Arabic by an Iraqi blogger, Raed Jarrar. Key word here is PRIVATIZATION, and it won’t be for the benefit of any minuscule Iraqi companies still in existence.

To the hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars already robbed from the US treasury for the benefit of the US armament crowd, like CS homey company Lockheed et al, now will be added hundreds of billions of dollars to be robbed by corporations like Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil from the decimated people of Iraq. A perfect picture of modern predatory capitalism in action. Sick. See Democracy Now- New Iraqi Oil Law to Open Iraq’s Oil Reserves to Western Companies

Private insurance leads to less security, not more

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If you are like most of us, you hate the insurance racket. It is like a giant cancer that is thoroughly capitalist in nature, yet is so destructive that it actually undermines and erodes the entire structure of the economic system that lets it proliferate. Everywhere, privatized insurance is eating away at any government social nets that have been established. It feeds on government social programs like a shark feeds on smaller fish.

Do you feel secure with the insurance companies ripping into your wallets on a monthly basis? I bet not. Most of what we pay for is so thoroughly hole ridden as to make our policies next to worthless. Lawyers and insurance companies go together, with insurance employed lawyers constantly creating bigger gaps in coverage that might make these companies have to pay out some small fraction of what they take in. This symbiotic relationship between these 2 groups is why we hate the corporate lawyers so much, yet find these crooks growing in number and influence by the second. Conservative, venal, vicious, arrogant, ignorant, and servile, these corporate lawyers fueled by insurance often fall later in their careers into government office, where they corrupt the government down into the sewer, too, alongside themselves and the insurance companies.

Wikipedia lists some interesting facts about the global insurance rip off. For example, that global insurance premiums have increased by more than 1/2 in just the last decade alone. Plus, that Japan and the US account for 1/2 of the insurance premiums paid in the world, though together our 2 countries only have 5% of world population! Do you feel all that secure now? Or less?

We have the worst medical system in the industrialized world and it’s the one disrupted the most by the insurance business. So if insurance is supposed to deliver security, it fails miserably to do so. Instead, the insurance business destroys overall social security, as it rips to shreds government and even religion based services to the community. That hospital might have a Catholic cross and pictures of nuns everywhere, but in truth, it is insurance agents running your medical care, not some benign (or not so benign) church.

Consider this too, that the $3.3 trillion global insurance business is quite connected to the directly financial sector, which is connected to those who would destroy government run social security everywhere, and replace it with private pension plans full of holes throughout. Private pensions, in fact, are nothing more than insurance plans for covering what will not exist anymore if the government run systems of caring for the elderly and infirm get totally closed down, as the super rich are constantly working to do.

Don’t mistake those hard working clerks everywhere in insurance selling offices for the crooks making the money, personally hidden away from your view. This is a business whose main work is simply in destroying the work of others out there actually helping deliver real services to those in need. The real owners are leeches on society, who drain off available funds to their own portfolios yachts,mansions, and golf club memberships. They are profiteers and pirates, not nuns, not government workers trying hard to deliver a service, not neighbors, family, and friends who might help you out in time of need. They are not providing you with a service, but rather ripping service you need away from you.

The insurance scams epitomize all that is going wrong with modern American society. Their leaders are running our government, and ruining it. They are the epitome of corruption, and today we are in a sea of that, largely because of their increasing influence on our daily affairs. It’s time to knock these companies way back down to size. It’s time for the public to make the laws, not insurance barons.

The Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability

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There are 15 Departments of the federal government, but there is no Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability. We do without, but the question is WHY? Both our national and planetary environment are headed towards providing only a hellish future for our children, even as we run into the advancing depletion of the world fossil fuel deposits that have been so central to the development of industrialized society.

Plus, our corporate and government misleaders are bankrupting our country in pursuit of a war to seize major world oil supplies, yet we have no Federal Executive Department that would or could formulate a strategy to deal with these related problems in any coordinated and purposeful manner other than war, and erecting a police state worldwide.

We do have a Department of Energy, and there are several other semi-related Federal Executive Departments, too. All are run by the corporate section of our society, and conservation is a minimal concern to these folk. Making profits is what gets them motivated. For example, Mobil Exxon is a big player with the Department of Energy bureaucracy, and as we all know by now, this huge company has been spending a small fortune in trying to misinform the public about the reality that humans are heating the planet up. We just cannot expect a government strategy that mandates less use of gas and petroleum coming from these people.

A simple strategy to reduce energy consumption in the US is simply to lower the speed limits. Yet neither the Departments of ‘Defense’, National Security, Energy, nor Transportation seem to have the willpower to come up with this simple energy saving remedy! These are not stupid people, so it is not brain power that is lacking, but willpower.

Similarly, there is no willpower to zone and design our streets and thoroughfares in a more energy efficient manner. How many times do we enter into neighborhoods, shopping malls, and highways that are so designed to make us drive many extra miles than what is actually necessary? Everywhere we drive, it seems, incomprehensibly bad planning and zoning by developers has put into place cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac that force us into wasting energy. Nobody cares. especially not the corporate sector of our wasteful capitalist world. Would it take so much effort to achieve savings of energy by having a federal department in charge of enforcing some much needed planning and zoning regulations? The answer is NO.

How about a simple regulation requiring fast food places to serve the food in less than one minute while the cars idle, or have their customers come inside and order? Millions of barrels of oil could be saved easily enough by such a simple measure, but the political willpower is not there by the corporate sector. The government can make individuals do all sorts of burdensome measures, but when it comes to asking for some small changes from the corporations, the government is paralyzed. Look at the lack of implementation, by the corporate and government sectors, of bottle laws and paper recycling projects for examples of their behavior. But now, we are actually struggling for survival of the human race when it comes to energy conservation worldwide.

Much stricter measures of conservation are actually needed, and this is what paralyzes the corporate controlled governmental sections from blocking even the most easily done and painless measures from being proposed and started. To implement them would alert the public to how much more is actually necessary to do to deal with these major problems that are beginning to crush world civilization at this moment. So instead of doing at least a little, they do nothing.

Energy and environment conservation now combine with pure support for justice for the working class to be reasons to look for something other than a capitalist society in the future. Profit making and corporate greed are just not going to get the jobs done that the world needs done. Meanwhile, we at least need to push out American government to add a 16 th Federal Executive Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Or better yet, defund and eliminate entirely the Department of Homeland Stupidity and Hysteria, and replace it with what is actually needed, a Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability.

Mexico’s oil is running out so up goes the Border Wall

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Americans are under the impression that Mexico is an extremely poor country. It is not. It is the world’s 5th largest oil producer, and the US economy’s 2nd largest foreign supplier of oil. Canada is #1, while Saudi Arabia comes in at #3. It’s per capita income is significantly higher than that of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina. China is considered an economic super power, yet Mexico has 4 times the per capita income of that country. Mexico even has the world’s 2nd largest oil field. There is only one problem though. Mexico’s oil reserves are running out.

Yes, it is predicted that Mexico may only have about 10 more years before its 2 major oil fields go dry. What then? It is a country of over 100,000,000 people, and its government gets over half of what it spends from its oil revenues. As a result, the national oil company, PEMEX, is billions upon billions in dept, even as it funds the nation. Mexico wants to join up with US prosperity, even as the US itself is running into problems finding new sources of cheap oil to float its own economy. And Mexico is in much worse shape in that regard.

In this desperate world of energy depletion we are now entering into, it’s all for one’s self, so up goes The Wall. A decade ago, the promises were made that all would enter into a new world of prosperity through NAFTA. Free flow of everything! But how quickly dreams built on mirages can fall. We are now in a war to steal the energy resources away from the people of Iraq and Iran, and there is not about to be any US elite misgivings, if they have to screw over the Mexicans in a few short years ahead. A brave new world awaits us.

A small note… wikipedia states that with current rates of consumption, the world’s oil reserves will run out in 32 years. Be sure to check your tire pressures .

Also of interest… Mexicans stage tortilla protest

US out to control Iran’s natural gas

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Most thinking people in the world now realize that the US invaded and occupies Iraq in order to control the oil underground there. While other oil producing countries were rapidly depleting their major oil fields of the precious natural resource that lay underground, that was not the case with Iraq. The country lagged far behind in developing their oil fields due to its disastrous war with Iran and the economic sanctions that the US later initiated against them. The oil largely stayed in the ground for about a 20 year period of time. But what about Iran? Why is the US government on the move to try to regime change there?

Iran at first seems to be not as worthy of Iraq to fall victim to a US energy grab. Their reserves of oil are in decline, and that is one reason that the government seeks to develop nuclear energy. However, there are 2 other carbon energy forms that are also of vast importance besides oil. Natural gas and coal. Iran has three and one half times the reserves of the US in natural gas, and is only behind one much larger country, Russia, in underground stocks of that commodity.

As we know, much of Europe is dependent on Russia’s natural gas to get their communities heated each Winter. This is an extremely important fuel resource even if it is not as central to the world’s growing energy crisis as oil is. And just like oil, both India and China are looking to increase their imports of natural gas, too. Being Number 2 in reserves of natural gas in the world is no small matter. And world natural gas supplies are due to peak in several decades, all the more to make Iran’s naturla gas a very important target for other’s greed.

It is true, that the American government’s political desire to destroy Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf is probably as large a factor to the US drive to engage in war against Iran as just the desire to commit outright theft.. But the drive to rob and control this huge reservoir of natural gas plays almost as prominent a part in the neocon ‘surge’ to fuck Iran over, as does the desire to only politically neutralize/neuter them. Excuse the bad language. But when I discuss the American mafia imperialist strategy, for some reason I begin to talk like Richard Nixon?

Natural Gas. All cause for more war profiteering.

We are weeks, and maybe just days before the US assault on Iran begins. No Blood for Oil! No blood for Natural Gas! This is not the way to begin to deal with the world’s energy crisis. A continued world wide resource war will only make the transition away from the unsustainable excessive misuse of carbon energy forms, even more painful and disastrous than it has to be.

Gas goes below $2

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This is insane! We are in a global war to secure energy supplies under US control, and all is justified with a mountain of lies. Meanwhile, the price of oil sinks below $2 a gallon! How delusional is all of this?

The US corporate world is completely unable to deal rationally with any social or environmental problems. The same as with energy, so goes our health care. Diseases are exploding forth, more and more with total resistance to antibiotic treatment. And the leading caste of America cannot even arrange minimal coverage for the population! One factor in the proliferation of these resistant diseases is global warming’s effect on the overall environment, and that is in turn caused by the overburning of fossil fuels.

We need conservation and not deadly wars to try to temporarily keep gas below $2 for Americans when its real worth is far, far higher. It’s the healthy thing to do, anyway you look at it to conserve the use of gas. Healthy for the environment, and healthy for your own personal health and that of your family.

This has got to be the most delusional epoch in the history of mankind. Our energy companies should be nationalized and removed from influencing further the absurd political life of our nation. Yes, and a few of those energy executives already deserve to hang for what they have done to America and the world. Pretending that we do not have an energy crisis when in fact we do, is has set us back from dealing with a crisis that can kill us all quite shortly down the road.

If we don’t run out of the oil to keep the world economy moving, the bacteria will get us as they thrive in our overheated world minus much of its ozone. Many of the indigenous tribes predicted that such poor stewards of nature would eventually destroy themselves, even as they themselves got slaughtered off. It appears to be coming to pass as tribal elders once claimed it would,

Capitalism has become exactly like a societal cancer that is now being fed on gas at $2 a gallon. Don’t celebrate this price. Cry.

Chavez & capitalism

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“I believe that capitalism is the road to destruction of the world.” That was Chavez’s message last Friday to South American leaders convening at the Mercosur summit, a trade bloc in opposition to NAFTA. To those that think that Hugo Chavez is undemocratic, here is a film, The Revolution, about the US coup attempt against him in 2002, filmed by an Irish TV crew. One hour long, it is an incredible film, that filmed both the coup ringleaders in action alongside of the people they attempted to take power away from. A free documentary on your computer, and a great one at that!

Intel Corporation

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If we were ever to see PEACE, most of America would be in the unemployment line. The whole US economy would crash and unemployment would shoot up to 50-60-70-80% of us.

That’s how grounded in war we have become. Just this week this was driven home in Colorado Springs, as the local media announced that the local Intel Corporation plant here might well close down, and 1,000 would lose their employment soon afterward. Actually, another 4,500 jobs would fall alongside the loss of those Intel positions, too. Total hit on the local economy? Over 5,000 jobs!

What does Intel corporation produce? It is the world’s largest superconductor producer. What does the Pentagon use a lot of? Superconductors. Imagine if the Pentagon-White House-Halliburden maniacs weren’t spending a trillion or two on the ridiculously named, ‘War on Terrorism’? Most of America’s economy is actually spent on producing terrorism, and without that, we’d most all be out of work. Isn’t capitalism fabulous?! Big bang for the buck!

Over the Hubbert Peak into war

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Most Colorado citizens probably think that Hubbert Peak might be a fourteener somewhere, and not the reason our country is at war. Fact is, the US led the rush to overmine the world’s most precious resource which is petroleum, so there actually is an oil shortage now. And certainly both Oily Dick and Dubya the Dummy are well aware of that, even if most liberals seem often not to be.
Mount Hubbert

And this shortage is not a temporary one but is becoming most permanent. A shortage that can only worsen, so off to war they took us, all to grab that precious and declining resource. What does the Hubbert Peak mean? It means for one thing, that the Iraqi War is not Vietnam all over again. Vietnam had no important resources, but was a war for political influence and control of a region. It also means that occupying Iraq is not just a ‘clash of civilizations’.

What it does mean, is that those who have taken America into this war feel that they are fighting for their very lives. Yes, Dick and Dubya are fighting for the continuation of profit-making as they know it, and that is their life. With declining world stocks of oil, that means declining possiblities of keeping oil cheap, and declining standards of life for both them, and for us, because of that. That’s why the Republicans, and most of their Democratic Party friends and enablers, are so very hesitant and reluctant to back up and get out of Iraq. If corporations cannot deliver the goods, even the dumbest of ‘We, the People’ will begin to grow dissatisfied with them our supposed leaders. Osama is not the real terrorist for us, it is the lack of oil that is.

Why do the liberal religious peacenics fetish solely focus on American troops dead? That’s not the main point to the Oilies running the show. Cheap oil is. Heck, just having some oil around is most important to them, and really to us too, even if the oil becomes not so cheap. Dick and Dubya think it can only be gotten continually by war, for conservation is off the books for them. That’s an effort they don’t want to make even though it is completely necessary to do so. No Blood for War, should have an additional line to it. Conservation, not Devastation! It is about much more than just the direct killing, as awful as that might be. This war is to maintain our oily way of life.

Exxon-Mobil might pretend that there is no such thing as Global Warming and a Hubbert’s Peak, but that’s all it is really. Pretense. They are not as stupid as they pretend, and are way ahead of most of American society in thinking about the consequences of running short with their precious resource. They are in serious trouble, and so are we, as supplies have begun to dwindle.

If you are reading this commentary and haven’t figured out yet just what I am talking about, then Google ‘Peak Oil’ or ‘Hubbert’s Peak’ on over at Wikipedia, and do yourself a favor and read about it some. Good luck, and try not to get too depressed. Our lives are going to change, and it won’t be much fun at all.

Your deadly news

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Polls show that more and more world citizens are relying on their computers to stay informed. If one watches TV, Murdoch and Turner have got your brain in their hands. And just imagine trying to stay informed through our local ‘Gazette’? It’s less informative than a roll of toilet paper. So we become forced into this option of relying on our computers to be in anyway informed.

People are turning to the computer and the semiconductor industry to stay on top of things. We’re forced to do so just as most of us are forced equally to have a car, telephone, refrigerators, and washing machines to stay alive these days. But each new technological gadget we have to have to manage modern life, just keeps getting more and more toxic. Bad as the car is to the environment, the computer is even worse.

All sorts of deadly compounds go into making the computer, and the computer is certainly dangerous to our health even when running. But as a discard? Well that’s just much worse. Some states have bottle laws to help preserve the environment, and that’s way too little and too late, but it’s just a glass bottle after all. But think about this. The government and the corporations running it, don’t give a damn enough about your health or the environment’s to put a functioning recycling program into place regarding computers!

Go and educate yourself and see what sorts of metals are in your computer. And then think about breathing this stuff? Think about it in your bloodstream? And then ponder the fact that in 5 years alone, 250,000,000 computers in the US alone are discarded, with next to no supervision or recycling at all!

Personal computers are just one element of semiconductor use, too. They are used in other forms of communication systems as well as in pcs. For example, they are the glue that holds most modern weaponry systems together. Semiconductors are now all over the place. Lead, cadmium, mercury, and much more, with none of it good for your life or that of other species as well.

When a computer is produced, is that a production of value or a destruction of life on this planet? How sad that the most common of items these days, is actually leading to Earth becoming a planet that will be fit only for the cockroach in a few years. All because the capitalist drive for constant increase in their profits, mandates this sort of increasingly toxic production of increasingly toxic products.

Computers and the military? In fact, the military’s drive for more destructive weaponry is what developed the computer in the first place, just as their need to increase speed of travel with their weapons is what had them pushing for the car, and the development of the interstate freeway system back in the late ’40s and through the ’50s. Military and capitalist enterprise, together in a mad rush to destroy life on the planet. The computer is their latest mechanical advance to their creating a toxic earth, all in the name of ‘defense’ and ‘freedom’!

To paraphrase the famous line by Calvin Coolidge, ‘The business of America is business’…. and YES, the business of America’s business is making war against Mother Earth. The computer is now our favorite toy behind the car and telephone, tv and our groins (sex and porn). Out of all of those though, it may well be the computer that ecologically sinks the planet for good. Man, done in by ‘artificial intelligence’….done in by one of man’s own machines.

Capitalists demand that we try to turn our lives into being their little machines, but as flesh and blood we can never fit their deadly ideal for us. The machine world is just too toxic for us. That’s the deadly news your computer will let you in on.

Texas football

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The Park Cities, University Park and Highland Park, get Dallas city services, water supply, at no city tax cost to the residents. Super rich neighborhood, one of the richest in America. To add insult to injury, the Dallas Police department routinely patrols the “border” of these neighborhoods, to keep out the riffraff from the surrounding townships of Dallas, Oak Cliff, DeSoto and South Oak Cliff. Some of the most dirt poor areas of Dallas County. But the people and businesses in these townships, even though they also have the distinction of being separate municipalities, DO pay Dallas municipal taxes.
 
In Texas, Football is worshipped. It is their lower case g god. They sold the design to the State Legislature, which has to approve taxpayer subsidized business deals such as the New Improved cowboys stadium in Arlington, with a sliding roof over the hole , so God could still look down and watch His team play. One democratic legislator said quote “Well, if God approves of it, who are we to say different?” and voted yes to the proposition.

So now the Cowboys are no longer not in Dallas, they aren’t even in Dallas County, they are across the county line in Arlington, Tarrant Co. Texas. Just south of the Ballpark which his royal dumbness forced the City of Arlington to buy. For his team.

And the College football teams, and the high school teams, and even the Middle School teams, are considered a farm where the NFL gets to hand raise its candidates for the pro teams. Where one high school team star in a thousand gets a chance to even try out for a professional slot.

They worship the oblong ball. There was one Governor, Mark White. He was Attorney General under Republican Bill Clements, until Bush the most active death penalty freak governor in Texas, (mark white helped him along) then lost the next election to Bill Clements. One of the few powers the Governor of Texas actually has is in deciding the school curriculum. What lost Mark White the Job wasn’t his Zero Tolerance, wiretapping, warrantless searches, death death kill them all bwaaahaaahaaahaaa attitude, and laws, no sir. It was football. Specifically the No Pass, No Play law. Which is as simple as it sounds, failing grades, no extracurricular activities.

Whut do you-all mean Bubba cain’t play no more football jes cause he’s dumb as a sack of dirt? That’s downright on-American!

One thing they used to protest the law was suspending the star player of the Chess Club for failing PE at one middle school. That’ll larn them sissy-boy eggheads not to fuck with our football.

But there is one and only one good thing about the way the laws are set up.

You know the difference between an Air Force recruiter and a NCAA recruiter? The NCAA recruiter isn’t allowed on high school campuses.

The good thing is I get to use that as an example for arguing with people like our good friend Ray. Whoever he is.