Tag Archives: Union

The price of militarism on the militarists

Posted on by
Reply

What is the price of militarism on the militarists themselves? In the case of Pat Tillman it was death instead of wealth, yet others live and still pay a price. In ‘Torturers Toll‘, another Tony other than myself tells the story of how his torturing of innocent people in Iraq, has essentially destroyed his entire self respect for the duration of his life. How can he ever forgive himself for the cruelty he dealt others, all dictated by picking a ‘career’ inside the US military? He can’t, and many other Americans are also in his shoes, too.

These dehumanized participants in mayhem and abuse of their fellow humans reside throughout our super militarized society now. Take the most interesting case of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former cohort of our peanut farmer pastor President, Jimmy Carter. For years now, Brzenzinski used to brag about how he brought down the Soviet Union by starting the Muslim insurgency in Afghanistan that bogged the Soviet Union into ‘their own Vietnam’. The US threw $2 billion PLUS dollars into a covert war waged by puppet troops of the US led by people like Osama bin Laden. Today, Brzenzinski is singing a different tune though, and he is inow nto warning us about militarism, instead of bragging about promoting it.

The Washington Post carries his thoughts in a commentary titled, Terrorized by the ‘War on Terror’. How bizarre to see a terrorist like Jimmy’s former buddy now taking a stance against the likes of Bush and Cheney. Poor Zbigniew! Tears drop from my eyes even, in sympathy for this Donald Rumsfield of an earlier more..uh….innocent time. The man feels terrorized now by the thought that Bush’s gangsterism is undermining the economic system and imperialism that he did so much to prop up. Yes, there is a price to militarism that the militarists themselves will have to pay. Zbigniew worries about that.

For the overwhelming majority of us though, it will be the economic collapse that we will soon most suffer from. And for Brzezinski and his friends, the price to be paid will come from our anger at what unbidled capitalist corruption does to us all. Ultimately, the rich will become isolated as criminals that must be removed from the power they currently hold over us. The total price we will all pay for Iraq will be in many forms and will be seen differently by all of us American citizens. The returning troops are a first Tsunami wave that is hitting our society today. What will society look like afterwards though? Time will tell the now hidden price for turning away from solving our real problems by creating yet worse ones? The price is enormous.

The world’s top ten most polluted places

Posted on by
1

The Blacksmith Institute’s top ten most polluted places tells an interesting story. One can’t help but note that five of the top ten worst spots are in regions of the former Soviet Union. The business community of the US and their conservative ideological supporters will certainly point the finger at ‘communism’ for this. But let’s take a closer look, too. Worldwide, what are the activities that most pollute our planet, no matter what kind of economy is involved? The answers would be; mining and war making.

Now, in the context of that information, what happened in the former Soviet Union that produced so much mining and war making? The 20th Century started out for Russia being in a war with Japan. Shortly after that war terminated, the Czarist government dragged Russia into World War 1 which led to terrible devastation and huinger, out of which came the Russian Revolution. World War 1 continued inside of Russia and in the surrounding territories, even as it ended elsewhere. The capitalist countries of the world did not want a non capitalist Russia, so they continued to supply their allies within Russia itself, continuing the bloodshed.

Even when peace finally came, it barely lasted over a decade, as capitalist and fascist Nazi Germany invaded Russia, causing a horrible devastation and destruction to that country, now called the Soviet Union. The Russians fought the foreign invaders,and eventually threw them back outside of Soviet boundaries. The Americans came in at the end and gave the knockout blow to an already knocked down Germany. Result, the Americans immediately began the misnamed Cold War against the Soviet Unon, with the powerful message delivered by 2 dropped atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union got no peace post their victory over the Nazis, but immediately began to have to defend themselves from the threat of an American instituted atomic attack. Trillions of dollars spent on this so-called Cold War later, the Soviet Union collapsed, defeated at last by its own party bureaucracy, and the imperialist capitalsit allies they began to court under the direction of Gorbachev. So what did decades of war and mining to support those wars leave behind? Part of the answer is, that it left behind 5 out of 10 of the world’s most polluted areas.

The top ten list by the Blacksmith Institute clearly shows the interconnection between war and mining, and how that makes for horrible toxic dumps. Capitalism aggravates industrial pollution by its constant surge to producing warfare for private profit. The military uses much of the chemicals and metals that contaminate our world. If you want a Green America, a Green Mother Earth, then you must work to help stop the rampant militarism that infects every facet of our current society. Until we do, the cesspool that is already made will just continue to keep getting nastier, nastier, and nastier. Until we kill ourselves.

Congo spinning back into war

Posted on by
Reply

Most people in the US do not realize that the warfare in the Congo is the world’s most deadly war of the last decade, with well over 4,000,000 casualties. Unfortunately, European and US intervention continues throughout the continent of Africa, and fighting once again is erupting in the Congo. The only solution to the bloodshed is to get the imperialists permanently out of all of Africa. Instead, we have the European Union and the US controlled United Nations running Congo’s affairs, all the while claiming that they are defending democracy. Sound familiar?

Tom Tancredo and Darfur

Posted on by
3

While nice sweet liberals like Rebecca Tinsley and Jody Williams are pushing for imperialist interventionism into Sudan for supposedly humanitarian reasons, it is interesting to see the company they keep on their Darfur rescue missions. They are long time Far Right reactionaries like Elliot Abrams, Kansas Senator Brownback, and our very own lovable Colorado prick, Tom Tancredo.

Tom, who is for Border Walls, deporting penniless undocumented workers looking for work, and committing US genocide against the Iraqi people, is also teaming up with the good hearted interventionist liberals who love NATO, the UN Security Council, European and African Union troopers under the Pentagon’s AFRICOM control. Both groups are united in desire to be ‘humanitarian’ it seems, by principally sending in the troops.

Check out ‘The Right’s Stuff in Africa‘ published on the counterpoint. org site. Tom Tancredo stars in this Darfur ‘benevolency’ as the article mentions.

Mini AIPAC- The American Turkish Council and its connections with Lockheed

Posted on by
1

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.

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

Posted on by
2

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.)

North Korea-US peace accord

Posted on by
Reply

As the whole world waits for the coming US attack on Iran to begin, there appeared to be little interest in the announcement of a North Korea-US peace accord. That is kind of stunning, since the US has waged war against the Korean people for over half a century with disastrous loss of life as a consequence. Over 2 1/2 million people died in 3 years of conflict back in the early ’50s, and subsequently the US economic warfare waged against North Korea has killed millions more.

Wikipedia reports that between 600,000 to 3.5 million North Koreans lost their lives due to famine after the Soviet Union was bankrupted by the US imposed Cold War. This cut off the principal outside trade that was the lifeline of North Korea’s economic sustainability, as otherwise the US blocked out almost all foreign trade.

It helps to understand the context of all this loss of life. The US took over from the Japanese as being the principal imperialist occupiers of the Korean Peninsula at the end of WW2, and blocked the establishment of one country governed by Koreans themselves. Instead, the US installed a puppet regime in the south, very similar to the one later established in the South of Vietnam when the French got the boot from that country. When the end of the hot conflict ended in the US-Korean War, the US did not leave like they had to eventually in Vietnam. The US occupation had destroyed over 80% of the civilian infrastructure in Korea by mid 1953, and coming after the Japanese occupation of Korea during WW2, left the country divided and in total shambles. Plus, the end of hostilities left the US firmly in control and with military bases in the South of the Peninsula.

Is the new treaty real, or just a US ploy? Basically, it calls for North Korea to incrementally receive fuel oil supplies in exchange for incrementally dismantling its nuclear power program. As such, it runs directly counter to the US economic warfare against North Korea that has been the mainstay of US government foreign policy for decades. Condoleezza Rice hailed the accord as being a break through, while John Bolton panned it as being an ‘appeasement’. Actually, it appears that his main disagrement might probably be to having an accord which the US will deliberately not abide by in the months ahead. That will then make the US look rather bad, even if it allows Bush to now bide his time with North Korea as he wages war against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran in another part of Asia. In short, this appears to be a ‘peace’ that is not even paper thin in substance.

Not only is the US not prepared to help the North Korean economy economically, it is not prepared to do its part in removing nuclear weapons off the Korean Peninsula. The treaty appears to be more game playing than anything much else. It bides both North Korea time to further strengthen its weapons program in self defense, and time for the US government ot wage war in regions more important to its imperial plans regarding seizing energy supplies. Hopefully some day peace will finally come to the Koreans, but this is not the day.

US Out of Korea! Bring the Troops Home Now!

Pablo Picasso’s (US) Massacre in Korea

Putin- ‘nations are witnessing the almost uncontained (US) hyper use of force’

Posted on by
Reply

Russia’s Putin has given notice that though the US government is the bull running amok in the world china shop, there are also other bulls inside, too. Don’t forget. Message to American people? If you don’t want to run into another mad bull, you’d better get your government under control soon.

Yes, and there are also more capitalist bulls in the world china shop today, than just the US and Russia. China also is aware of the raging US hyper use of force to rob the shop, so to speak. Americans learn litle from history, since they know little even of where places are on the map let alone other nuances of world society. China and Russia are not just going to sit by idle forever while US capitalist imperialism runs amok in the world stealing world resources for themselves.

WW1 and WW2 were begun because capitalist imperialist countries started to butt heads with each other over world resources and who would control them. Now that China and the exSoviet Union have been de-socialized, their governments see themselves strictly as nationalist entities whose national interests must be defended strictly through military and economic might. Same as how our corporate US ruling class is acting.

Time to get our government to pull out of rampaging through the Muslim countries like they own the place. Russian and China are not going to just sit it out forever passively watching from the sidelines, as they too have world interests to defend. Our national security is not served by starting WW3.

Democratic Guv Ritter betrays Colorado Labor-What a surprise!

Posted on by
Reply

The Guv has just vetoed HB-1072, a Colorado bill that had already been passed in both houses of the Colorado State Government, and a bill he had promised the unions he would support. In doing this, he acted on behalf of the Republicans and business interests that want it to continue to be almost impossible to unionize work places in this state.

This veto was a total betrayal of the workers who voted for him, and believed his promise that he was pro-labor. He is not, and now has shown his true colors but only after he was elected by those in the Colorado Labor Movement who supported him with their votes, and in return got conned.

Workers would have been electing a union shop when they vote union if this legislation had been allowed to take effect. Now, if they vote to have a union, they don’t really get one since the current state law allows the losers of any employee vote to just opt out of paying dues, even as they still would benefit by any contracts negotiated to their benefit by the dues paying union workers in their workplace. This of course destroys the cohesiveness of those trying to present a solid front on behalf of the employees against the bosses, and as a result, makes it next to impossible to unionize.

The type of betrayal done by Democrat Bill Ritter is par for the course. Labor unions have been pumping billions of dollars through the years into the corporate Democrats, and as a result, is now so pitiful and debilitated in the US that essentially we have no functioning unions here in America. People don’t want to join the unions even if there is one around, simply because the laborcrats siphon off most of the dues to themselves, and into lobbying a political party, the Democratic party, that is pro business, and not pro worker. How stupid is that?

There is one bone thrown still tossed out by Ritter to the labor bosses of Colorado that spent union dues money in helping him get elected. They got a man with a Spanish last name, Don Mares, appointed to head up the Colorado Department of Labor. Oh Wow!

Mares is an attorney and vice president of the LAEF (Latin American Educational Foundation, and ex candidate for Denver mayor. The LAEF is a total corporate write-off and public relations group funded by the Coors Foundation, a major funder of Right Wing causes throughout the US. Some ‘labor’ rep Don Mares will make! The union hacks might as well throw their rank-and-filers’ union dues paying money to the wind as to keep funding these types of con artists. What losers they are, these trade union honchos lined up with the DP!

Governor Bill Ritter is just another case in point that the Democratic party sucks big time. Progressives need to stop wasting their time and money on these charlatans, and it sure is no way to rebuild the union movement in this state, or this country, to be trying to buy and lobby votes from the Democratic party politician scoundrels. All that good money wasted and for about next to total Zilch.

Amazing George, the Health Care magician

Posted on by
2

Like the Wizard of Oz, Amazing George promises all, yet delivers a rabbit out of his hat. As we watched his State of the Union speech unfold hypnotized in front of our boob tubes, George told us all that it wasn’t right what we have now, that we needed to be empowered, and that we need to be informed consumers of health care. So he said he was going to simplify the health care billing system we all have horror stories about? Well NO. Instead he was going to tie our health care to the the Infernal Revenue System! What genius is that!

Most of America is so befuddled with this tax scheme called (by Dubya) a medical system reform, that few have actually commented on Bush’s proposals. This is a sign of not even taking the whole preposterous thing in the least bit seriously. Heck, who can figure out a health system actually being tied to a nation’s tax codes? Sick? Well now you’re also being tortured. Why not now make the deadline for choosing your health care plan AND paying your taxes, April 1, April Fool’s Day, Amazing George?

Lest we forget, this is Dubya’s 2nd foray into ‘health care reform’. The other rabbit out of the hat trick was to announce the HIPAA ‘medical privacy’ law in 2003. That one generated oodles of paper, oodles of ‘education’, oodles of administrators running in circles ‘implementing’ absolutely nothing, oodles of no enforcement of whateveritwas anyway, and oodles of non relevance to anything including guarding or protecting any sense of privacy we might ever have regarding our health, and the records of it that insurers and employers float about everywhere today, just as they did before the great privacy ‘reform’ took place.

Poof! Smoke and bluff. One step forward, and two steps back. Bush in charge of privacy, no less! Now, the doctor is protecting our health care, too? Too sickening for words.

Algonquin, Iroquois, Hmong, Montagnard, Pashtun, Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, Kurds, Timorese

Posted on by
Reply

What a tragic list. The list is actually much, much larger than the one I put here as the title of this thread, but the unifying theme is a simple one. It is a list of smaller national groupings that have cooperated in some way with major imperialist powers, usually with tragic results to themselves. It is a list of smaller cultural, racial, national groupings that have gotten historically used and buffeted by much larger powers, that themselves were acting in their own perceived interests within much larger world conflicts.

An interesting and poorly taught history, is the history of the conflicts between the Algonquin vs the Iroquois, French vs the British, then enter the Americans, too with their own internal conflicts. Much easier to teach are the fables of Pocahontas and that of ‘Thanksgiving’. How much brutal warfare for the Algonquin and the Iroquois as they tried to side with one group of Europeans against the other. Their efforts to survive were only minimally successful.

Then are the stories of the Hmong and Montagnards, who cooperated in one degree or another with the French and the US in their imperial efforts to dominate SE Asia. They did so in rebellion against their own domination within their regional societies by the more numerous Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer peoples. But as a result, they became soon ‘strangers in their own land’, so to speak. Many ended up in far away exiles in the US and elsewhere.

And look what has befallen the Pashtun, used by the US and the US allied Arab dictatorships to battle against the exSoviet Union which backed different Norht Afghan groupings of other national backgrounds. Much more complicated than just blaming it on the Taliban or ‘Muslim extremism’, as the idiot US Right Wing does so.

The Kosovars remain with 60% unemployment years after Clinton/ Gore’s war. What have they gotten by cooperating with US imperial interests against their neighbors, the Serbs? Little, it seems. Would ‘independence’ bring any better? It is doubtful, since Serbia is unlikely to easily forget such an evil alliance between Albanian and American. And the Bosnian Muslim? He faces a backing that now is in a religious war against the very same religion backed just yesterday.

The Kurds? They had certainly legitimate reason to rebel against Saddam Hussein and the his Arab Sunni grouping. But now they are linked irremediably to the CIA and Pentagon, even as those same sinister forces back Kurd oppression next door in Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan is now the better off section of Iraq, yet what a dangerous situation for the Kurdish people long term.

And the Timorese? Half of Timor remains part of Indonesia, and the other half is now an impotent pseudo state, dependent on the UN, Australia, and the US for its semi-starvation bound existence. Its 1,000,00 people are divided into an incoherent number of language, tribal, ethnic, and cultural groups, whose only field of unity is that most everybody is of Christian religion, legacy of Portuguese imperialism.

US/ Australian imperialism split off a Christian portion of Indonesia and mainly to help control better the oil resources for themselves, and not the people being manipulated. There can be little independent and local economy in such a miniscule and divided half of an island. Meanwhile, Indonesian Timor has more population, more economic activity, and is not a society that is essentially a colony dependent on White racist Australia. It is part of the Indonesian archipelago of 17,000 islands, and not a colonialist split off.

How sad the results most always are, when small national, ethnic, and cultural groupings get picked up and carried along in the power plays by various imperialist world powers. What will happen to the Balkans, will they ever be able to restabilize themselves now that imperialism has reentered into their affairs in such a major way? What will happen to the Kurds, Shia, and the Sunni/ What about all the ethnic groups of Afghanistan and Pakistan? All now victims of US power plays.

Is Kosovo just an accident of war?

Posted on by
2

Remember when America was torn asunder and went to war for the Albanians? Yeah, the liberals’ war. Clinton and Gore’s war. We cared so much about Albanians then and whether they were getting a fair shake! Makes one laugh in retrospect, does it not?

Care about them now, Liberal? We bombed and invaded another nation, and the cheerleaders for that activity back then, are the liberals innocents so aghast about Dubya’s and Dick’s actions these days. They’re planning to ‘take back America’ for us the Democrats say! What a bunch of sorry ass phonies those donkeys are! But if one day you support invading and tearing apart one ethnic minority out of a multi-ethnic society, then it shouldn’t surprise the Democrats that the Republicans are doing the exact same thing in Iraq today. Oops, didn’t Slick Willy start that off, in fact, by arming the Kurds?

Well what to do about Kosovo? The NATO forces want to move on, yet can’t. They’re too busy guarding Albanians for Western humanists, I guess? So why not have 2 Albanias? The genius who thought that might be a cute trick is Bill Clinton! But how to do it? Even with all the aid and support the Kosovo Albanians have received, the 2,000,000 of them have an unemployment rate of over 50%. Remember those evil Serbs that oppressed these gentle US allies so? Well, Milosevic never allowed such a crime to occur to the people there. It was the American, Brit, European Union imperialists that did them in.

I remember even all the so many European, American, Australian, Canadian socialist and communist groups that said that they were against that war, yet supported the US objectives there. They said that they opposed Milosevic, and opposed NATO in equal part. Heard any of them lately urging that NATO pick up and leave? Shoot, NATO is using the bases they built in Bosnia and Kosovo both, to ‘render’ and torture prisoners from other parts of the globe. Heard the Lefty, anti-Milosevic do-gooders campaign on that issue much? Neither have I.

Is Kosovo an accident of war? examines the issues a bit. Heck, Kosovo as it exists today was no accident, but rather it was an excuse for a crime. It was an excuse for a gang of imperialist countries to further crack up the multiethnic society that was once called Yugoslavia. Your British and American liberals brought that crime on, and by extension they brought the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq into being.

Let’s take back American from the Democratic Party liberal dummies, too! And the other Kosovo lesson to take home to heart? Just because a group calls itself Left, socialist, or communist even, does not mean that they know much what they are doing or talking about. They may be screaming along with the liberals to supposedly help folk out in boonies, like Darfur, East Timor, Kosovo, etc. But when all is said and done they are mainly helping the imperialists formulate propaganda to convince people that their wars are necessary to help people, when in fact, they are most certainly not.

Is it Better without a bean than Green?

Posted on by
2

The hardcore American nut slogan of 40-50 years ago was “Better dead than Red”. Then they came up with “America, Love It or Leave It”. Dull. But now, the idiot American Right should have as their philosophical slogan, “Better without a bean than Green”!

That’s because their knee jerk support for a totally rapacious capitalism, will lead us into a world without even a tiny bean of anything left worth having. And they the Dittoheads truly do believe that it is Better to be Dead, than Green. Their theory is that Greens are like watermelons, with their concern about the environment only a thin green cover for their evil Red Marxist leanings.

The American Right is clueless about why others oppose capitalism, too. They see the entire Left part of the political spectrum as being equal to the thoughts and actions of Joe Stalin. MLK, Hillary Clinton, Mao, Trotsky, Al Gore, Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Noam Chomsky, FDR all merge into one for them. They are pinko reds who hate the American way, and care more about owls and jumping mice than their fellow humankind. Global warming cannot be real, any more than the minimum wage should be allowed to exist. Both are socialism. Green is Red, and Red is Green. Simplicity for simpletons!

Let’s face it, the nutcase Right is right! Green is turning Red while many Reds iare now turning Green. It has to be, simply because capitalism destroys the environment. The evidence is now all in, and all pinkos do agree. Capitalism is bad for planetary health.

But Black is Green, too! Black being the color of Anarchism, which is another political ideology quite different than Marxism. And Social Democracy, too, is Green. In America, the Social Democrat is essentially a non European, Democratic Party liberal who wishes for trade unions and social programs to blunt the capitalism they still support, and add in the nationalism that is always the Social Democrat’s core belief. And we certainly cannot forget the religious anti-capitalists, too, whose belief is that socialism is best found through the teachings of Jesus. All these folk are Greens today, even as they stay on merely as dupes of the Red menace side of the political spectrum, at elast to O’Reilly, Pat Robertson, and Murdoch.

There is no way that the world’s ecological problems can even begin to be halted while the world economy remains capitalist. One should ask themselves, is it truly better to be drive toward humanity not having even a bean, than to become non-capitalist Green? Capitalism can yet come up with still more tech, but better tech will not solve any of the real problems. It’s what you do with your ‘tech’ that makes the difference. lol… Get sexy, get Green! Go Red! Better Green than deadhead.

America’s rolling invasion of Somalia

Posted on by
1

The US invasion and occupation of Somalia is like that of Haiti, nobody is paying much attention. And like the current occupation of Haiti, it ‘rolls’. What do I mean by describing this as a ‘rolling invasion’, for it is a term I think that describes the now prototypical US intervention into the affairs of other nations? Lebanon, too, is being violated by an American rolling invasion as yet another example. So let’s take a quick look at Somalia then, to get a glimpse of the US strategy everywhere for its misnamed ‘war on terrorism’.

In Somalia, the US first arranged an invasion of that country using Ethiopian troops. Then it followed by bombing the country from US ships. Just several weeks after the initial assault using another country’s military, that of Ethiopia, the US is switching them out, and moving a contingent of another country’s military in, 1,500 Kenyans troops. In turn, the US is pressuring Uganda, Rwanda, and South Africa amongst other countries, to follow. And without any interest at home what-so-ever, the US bombed Somalia once again just yesterday!

Imagine how the Somalians feel? As a Muslim country they finally get some semblance of government after 15 years of chaos, but then the US returns once again to topple the cart yet one more time. The US sponsored troops? Thousands of Christian Ethiopians! And to follow up this humiliation using a traditional enemy of one nation, the US brings in yet a second nation’s troops. See the roll? Like rolling waves of a heavy surf on the beach. This will then be followed by an eclectic assortment of other nations, none of which have anything in common with the natives, except for their racial coloring perhaps. And that of being sponsored by George W. Bush!

We could go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see the same nonsensical outsourcing of imperialism once again. But let’s look at Lebanon first. US invasion launched using Israeli troops first. Less than successful, so the Jewish forces pull partially back out. The US then has an unwanted UN move into the country as so-called ‘peacekeepers’. The US then threatens Hezbollah. The US then has France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and others to cajole the country with being given possible funds to rebuild itself some. The US threatens Syria and Iran. What will Bush roll in with next? US troops? Or maybe Polish troops? Don’t joke, they are already in Iraq and Afghanistan in large numbers. How about Japanese? Don’t joke, they are in Iraq! At the end of 2006, Yugoslavia had its area of Kosovo occupied by troops from 30 nations! Talk about a Tower of Babel!

OK, enough of Lebanon. More rolling imperialism, the grand daddy of idiotic imperialism, Haiti! US invades, deposes the legitimate president, and then partially removes itself, bringing in Canadians (some speak French) and Brazilians (many are Black)! Haitians in the streets improve their language skills in French and Portuguese. But wait! Troops arrive on behalf of Dubya from China, Chile, Argentina, France,Nepal, Jordan, Peru, Sri Lanka!, and Guatemala! (80 of them). I especially think the Haitians are impressed with Sri Lanka and Guatemala coming to visit. Those 2 militaries have such great reputations! And Haitians love a circus!

Isn’t all this rolling imperialism reminiscent of the Romans? They would send in all sorts of barbarians from one end of the Empire into the next. Can we even begin to imagine our own reaction if we were ever to be disrespected with such occupations and warmaking against us, as the US uses against so many others? Imagine if the former Soviet Union had won the Cold Ware, and followed it by occupying our country with troops speaking 20 different languages, 30 different cultures, etc.? That certainly would have gotten us into an enduring peace, for sure! lol.

Where will the US invasion of Somalia roll off to? What new group of heathens to trample on? Will any American ever really give a damn about these smaller societies that get run roughshod over by their government? Liberals are too busy trying ot get the US to send troops to Chad and Darfur to notice much where the troops are actually at. Some have yet to figure out that there is a war going on in Afghanistan, for example. Though it is encouraging to see that the latest poll finally finds over 1/2 of Americans are for withdrawal from that country at last. No thanks to the Democratic Party, I might add. Afghanistan is a dirty word for them to mention.

These rolling invasions create nothing but chaos and misery.

Lebanon in ruins

Posted on by
Reply

Lebanon lies in ruins after the imperialist allies, the US and Israel, destroyed it once again. Israel’s invasion destroyed about $5 billion dollars worth of civilian infrastructure, and much of South Lebanon’s population has had to pass the Winter amongst the rubble of their former houses and cities.

No help has come, and the only possible assist for them in aid is coming through promises to help from those responsible for the destruction in the first place. At a conference in Paris, the US, France, European Union, and US Arab ally supreme, Saudi Arabia are promising 7.6 dollars of aid mirage to the Lebanese, but only if they do as the imperialists want them to do.

What we have is the mirror landscape that the US has forced upon Iraq and Afghanistan, and seems also determined to force on Iran and Syria in the days ahead. First the US and its allies reduce to rubble your country, and then if you obey us we offer to help repair some of the damage we have done! And everywhere the imperialist US Empire goes it foments warfare race against race, language group against language group, religious sect versus religious sect. Always divide and destroy in order to rule.

US ally, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, in control of the present Lebanese government in great part cooperated with Israel’s last entry into his own country. He thought to use the invasion against his internal opponents, the Shia. Instead, the resistance of the Shia headed Hezbollah to that invasion and destruction, strengthened them and weakened him. He is also held widely responsible for having allowed Lebanon’s foreign debt of $41 billion to have piled up. In short, he is the epitome of corruption, and this is the man the US is supporting against the majority of Lebanon’s population.

We in the US have watched stupid and ignorant from the sidelines, as our government has spread anarchy and chaos from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Somalia to where next?….probably Iran, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, and on beyond. In the last 2 weeks, the Democratic Party voters, that sat passively behind the passivity of their consenting-to-Bush DP leaders, have finally chosen to go out and protest some. The Democrats finally have stirred some. There is a current of optimism and hope in the air for them because of it.

But what of their newly found ability to oppose a little? Is it real, or just a pretense to get the Democratic Party back into office? Are they really opposed to their government’s imperialism? I have my own thoughts to what the true answer actually is. I am less than hopeful that their opposition is anything more than the most shallow and skin deep. I wish that I am proven wrong, but I think that I know my fellow Americans well, and that is what fuels my pessimism. Meanwhile, my heart goes out to the people of Lebanon, who are once again being forced into living in total Hell, all but ignored by those who put them there.

Bush declares war on Iran and Syria

Posted on by
5

To all effects Bush declared war on Iran and Syria tonight in his State of the Union address. He pretty much made it clear that the so-called ‘surge’ targets these 2 countries, and has little to do with the situation in Iraq itself. His speech was an announcement that he plans to further regionalize the war. All that is left is simply to find the suitable pretext to start the bombings off, but Bush left no doubt that that would be just right around the corner.

Out of babes comes the voice of wisdom and reason. I watched this speech in the presence of several kids. One of them asked me, that “if the Democrats are against Bush, then why are they there with Bush?” Exactly. It’s not like they had to come. It’s not like they had to stay quiet and not Boo the president. It’s not like they had to stand up for him and clap throughout the speech. Why are kids smart enough to ask this reasonable question, yet American adults are too brain dead to do the same?

How nauseating to see the triangle of Bush-Cheney-Pelosi in front of us on that TV. Sure Pelosi made a face or two, but then again she clapped, shook hands, and almost engaged in sex with the president in front of the entire country. This is opposition? And the rest of the Democrats were no better other than in perhaps stage managing their facial gestures slightly better. Ed Kennedy was the grand winner in that department, as he seemed to have down pat the holding of his head as if with a horrible migraine. Utterly ridiculous.

This is not an opposition, and America is not a democracy. A country that has opposing political factions does not behave like this. We need to move on past all these Democratic Party controlled MoveOn liberals and their poli gurus, and begin to build a real opposition party to these (DP-RP) shenanigans. We are going to have this war carried on, and yet almost all the country seems to be in some sort of trance of denial. So damn ready to buy more stupid lies from the venal thieves that are out there trying to destroy any possible stability within the Middle East, all to grab that oil like the imperialist vampires they most certainly really are.

I challenge the Colorado Springs radicals and liberals. We did not get it together enough to build anything in coordination with this weekend’s national demonstrations against the war. But Denver did. We need to get on over there this Saturday 12 noon at the State Capitol building, and add our numbers to this protest. It’s way too little and way too late, but much better than to do absolutely nothing.

Governor Ritter will be speaking at 9AM at the ‘Unity’ meeting in Denver, and should be challenged as to why the hell he’s not protesting this war at noon at the capitol building in person, being the grand big shot liberal that he represents himself as? It’s time to call these Democratic Party assholes-donkeyholes on the carpet just as we should do with Bush and his cronies. They’re really the same people and they’re going to sit on their butts, clap, and go along with this new barbarism being prepared for the Iranian and Syrian people by their Republican buddies.

We either get out into the streets, are we become utterly complicit with the crimes being prepared by the bipartisan corporate gang we currently have in power. They are in it together. It’s as simple as that and we need to get going. They are going to extend this war, and not close it down. That’s the state of the union.

Lampwick and the original Lost Boys

Posted on by
5

Trouble my friends right here in River CityWas Lampwick the archetypical dilettante? You know, dapper, cultured, erudite, jaded, amusing, but nihilist? The boys in Pinocchio who cut school to smoke, drink and play pool were turned into donkeys in the Land of Boobies. Sound like a fitting analogy for an effete lounge-oisie? Internet blogs can amuse us with cynical antics, they often feel to me like small plexiglass window-seats looking on protracted personal train wrecks in upholstered stalls.
 
I got quite preachy a day ago in a local salon maudit, a favorite site I should also say. I’ll reprint my lecture here because the question I asked in earnest, albeit tucked inside some name-calling, remains unanswered.

This discussion has illuminated for me the challenge of how to activate the hands in pockets crowd. You make light of self-righteous do-gooders who take themselves too seriously. I do wish my indignation was less serious. It’s not that left-leaners have arbitrary spiritual beliefs which are being offended, it’s that our common sense of humanity is being trivialized. Bankrupted farmers, child slaves, indentured laborers, you tire of hearing about such horrors, but still you drink your Starbucks, buy your chocolate, and plug into your iPods with a yawn. What tone do you expect from activists beside scolding?

I ask that question seriously. What tone would cause you to say to Coca Cola: we’re not going to tolerate you killing Columbian union leaders or stealing India’s water? If consumers don’t withhold their consent, they are as guilty as Coke. I’m sorry fun-lovers but life comes with responsibility. Your pursuit of happiness may have to wait a bit, the rest of mankind begs your assistance.

The social justice movement isn’t about enlivening your water-cooler conversation, it’s about prompting change. We’re trying to organize a bucket brigade to help our neighbors stuck in a fire. And we have to stop those among us who are starting those fires. If you are standing idle, making light of the message we are trying to spread as quickly as possible, in chorus with the establishment voices already demeaning us, I’d just as soon walk over you.

Quite seriously, what would light a fire under your gay asses?

Smell Paso Texas

Posted on by
Reply

Antique postcard of Franklin Canal in El Paso TexasMexico is falling apart worse than I remember. I used to haunt downtown El Paso/slash/Juarez. The two cities are really one, but Juarez is about 6 times bigger and the poor side of town, and there are armed guards keeping the poor from the rich side of town.

The colonias described, they are on this side of the border as well. And just as illegal.

In 1991 there was a story on one of the El Paso stations, on the video news, a guy emptied one of those honey wagons, the Port-o-potty emptying trucks, into the canal on the mexican side. There are two main canals, the Franklin canal as it is called in El Paso and downstream, and the (don’t dear God hold me to this name) La Victoria canal on the Mexican side. Mind you, this kind of literally “shit” goes on everyday. Only this particular day there was a Mexican news crew hiding in the bushes.

They filmed him for forty-five minutes nonchalantly emptying the crap into the PEOPLES DAMN DRINKING WATER. Then the cops moved in and arrested him AFTER aaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggg. Then they shot some scenes where women and children were getting their water downstream from the incident. To show us how noble the government was in protecting them I suppose. Of course, it might have been a little bit nobler if they had gone up to the people and at least warned them that they were drinking feces. Guess they just figured they would watch it on the TeeVee news in their cardboard shacks which have no TeeVee, which is kinda good because they don’t have any electricity to run a TeeVee anyway.

But in downtown El Paso, you can go to Alameda street and actually just look across the creek, in its concrete-lined bed, looks like a drainage ditch actually, with the concertina-wire topped 12 foot cyclone fence, and see the maquila sweatshops. There are supposedly designed to be modern and convenient and comfortable and all, but the strangest thing about them is that there, a mere hundred yards from the line where things like OSHA and the EPA are such bad wicked naughty whiners that they actually insist on workplace safety(sometimes) and environmental protection (sometimes) as I said dear friends a hundred yards away… in these wonderful modern factories and warehouses, the other side of PRI, used to be the dominant party there, the Unions, are forbidden to organize, and since every worker in Mexico pre-nafta was a card carrying member of the labor unions, the people working there are ordered to disavow their union membership.

You know, I would almost bet that some of those workers were in the video of the women and children drinking shit out of an irrigation canal.

Oddly enough, there was a cholera epidemic that year. as in most years. The epidemic was spread to this side of the border as well. In colonias on the Franklin canal.

The US & Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today

Posted on by
Reply

If it is not enough to give Israel the free reign and financial aid to terrorize Palestianians and steal their lands at will, the US and Britain also try to disrupt and tear up the governance the Palestinians try to arrange for themselves.

For years they made demons out of Arafat and Fatah, but today the US & its allies are politically supporting Fatah by trying to force new Palestinian elections early and pumping money into Fatah and its leader Abbas, so that this group will be able to buy the new elections at will and destroy their opposition, Hamas. The US and Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today, though this in effect is nothing new, and this is just the most recent example of this. Our corporate government leaders no more support democracy in placxes like Palestine and Iraq, than they do in our own workplaces if we try to organize unions.

We can go back to the US’s coup against Allende where Washington DC installed Pinochet into power. We can go also to examine Algeria, where in 1991 the US and Europe supported a military coup after the elections were won by an Islamic coalition. Subsequently, several hundred thousand were slaughtered down, and repression there continues to this day. Hardly an incentive for Muslim groups looking for national independence and liberation to take a peaceful course of action, as opposed to crashing planes into the Pentagon and elsewhere.

We can also see today, the US and its allies pushing to keep an undemocratic and unpopular Lebanese government in power. One that opened the gates to a foreign power (Israel) to wage war once again inside Lebanon against the majority sector of that country’s population. We can see it in the US and European’s support for the fraudulent and unpopular president just installed in Mexico, that provoked the largest demonstrations in the history of that country. And we can see it in the longterm US and Brit support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, and the repressive Egyptian government, that has merely the sheerest of mirages of having any democratic trappings to it.

Everywhere we look, the US and its allies are supporting tyrants and thugs, but can anybody really claim that this is something new? But this latest example of the US and Britain trying to force new elections on the Palestinians, is a new low of sorts, I think. It is forcing upon the Palestinians the type of factional violence that the US and Britain have already forced upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Could the Nazis themselves have taken this strategy of fomenting inter factional fighting to a form more detrimental to its victims?

Your own private post office

Posted on by
3

Have you seen the postal contract service centers cropping up at suburban strip malls? This is part of an ongoing congressional effort to privatize the entire USPS and divest it of the Postal Service Union. The Republicans want to convert the USPS civil service jobs into minimum wage jobs so that Republican contractors can pocket the savings. The new privatized post office jobs will provide no benefits, no security, no skills, and no upward mobility.

The national postal workers union has just signed a four year contract for its members, but feels their future is uncertain after that. Meanwhile it is responding to urban growth with outsourced contracts.

Do you think your experience at the post office will change if it’s staffed by unskilled workers watched over fast food restaurant type supervisors? The whole city loses with inferior services, but that’s not the worst of it. Fewer dollars into the labor pool means workers who have less to spend around town. A community of poverty wage workers can’t support anything more than cable, pizza and Lotto tickets. It perpetuates poverty which means less education, less productivity, lower expectations, more crime and richer Republicans in their gated communities.

Privatizing the loo

Posted on by
Reply

John out-house rip offPrivatization is nothing but a scam to lower wages and pocket the difference.
 
A few years ago our city Republicans decided to pull a porta-potty switcheroo. First they convinced the citizens it was too expensive to maintain public facilities in the city parks. To save money they leased portable outhouses from Republican businessmen. Thus the city workers who normally cleaned the bathrooms lost those jobs, union jobs of course. The contractors who supply the Port-a-lets hire day laborers to hose the plastic units down, making for a tremendous savings in labor cost. Every dollar that would have gone for a living wage, benefits, retirement, etc, goes right into stinky Mr. Port-a-let’s pocket.

Might I add there’s a stretch of Highway 24 on the west side of Colorado Springs where, if you have your window rolled down, you can smell a back yard where they service Port-a-lets.

Meanwhile city park patrons are left with the plastic Port-a-let experience, instead of the brick facilities they once paid for thirty or so years ago, unveiled at a ribbon cutting ceremony, when local politicians were not so visionary with their greed.

Mengistu found guilty of genocide

Posted on by
Reply

Ethiopia’s ex-ruler and Leonid Brezhnev’s African superstar, Mengistu, was found guilty in absentia for genocide today. He fled Ethiopia for Zimbabwe after the capital, Addis Ababa, was taken by rebel forces in 1991. He has been tried in absentia by a regime that itself is now having real problems with keeping its repression from running totally out of control. Still, Mengistu was definitely a bloody tyrant despite his original revolutionary drive. Under his Dergue regime, somewhere beetween 1 and 2 million died during his time in power, either from famine, through war, or directly through assassinations ordered by Mengistu’s people. He deserves his conviction, though he alone was not responsible for all those who died.

The problem one has though in assigning responsibility for crimes such as genocide, is that often there is so much blame to share all around. All of Africa became an arena for proxy fights in the ‘Great’ Cold War between the US plus its allies Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Britain, and the White Apartheid regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, all combined in struggle to keep the former Soviet Union from influencing the region in alliance with various indegenous rebel groups. This combined European-US interventionism caused the deaths of millions upon millions of Africans. And yet no genocide trial for the Whites.

Much has been made of Brezhnev’s miserable decision to have Russians fight it out on foreign soil in Afghanistan against the Islamic proxy troops of the US. This was actually a reasonable fight though, since what went on in that country certainly effected the Soviet Union, too. But why on earth Brezhnev continued to side and fund Mengistu in the Horn of Africa wars is hard for many to understand. He truly was a totally incompetent and corrupt leader, and his decisions he took in regard to the African tribal conflicts, certainly had a major effect on what ultimately led later on to Gorbachev’s own reaccionry and embecilic policies. That in turn led to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union back into a group of many barbaric and often warring, Fourth World capitalist states.

That all being said, one positive effect of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is that it pulled the rug out from under Mengistu’s foreign funding for war in the Horn of Africa. When he finally fell in 1991 from power, he was about as credible as Pol Pot had become in Kampuchea after beating back the US in SE Asia. Lesson learned once again? An intial revolutionary movement that comes to power with war being waged continuously by imperialist powers against it, can lead to a meltdown of the revolution and a total disintegration into slaughter and famine.

Bush gives early Christmas gift to racists- turns INS loose on Latino workers

Posted on by
Reply

With Bush’s press affairs going so badly for the Iraq Holy Christian Crusade againsts Arabs and Muslims, how to rally the kore Klan klowns around the flag once again? If the Middle East holy war for oil appears to be sputtering along on only one cylinder, why not jumpstart another holy crusade somewhere to distract people with? You know? What about the one that Anglo racists have going against the Spanish speaking? What a thought!

What a nice Christmas gift for the White, English speaking, America First, hate all the rest crowd, too! Turn INS loose in droves around the country at meatpacking plants! Kick America’s most exploited workers in the teeth, too! Fuck the unions! They thought they won a victory in Houston by raising Latino janitors salaries a dime or two in the SEIU Justice for Janitors effort. We’ll teach those mojados a lesson! Si, no se puede, pendejos! That’s the Bush way! He’s such a compassionate conservative.

And for the kids of the parents to be rounded up? Well Uncle Dubya has a nice lump of coal for them for Christmas! He’s a sweetheart, he is. And such great photo ops for the press! Anglo dittoshits just love to see those minorities hauled away in shackles! Their only regret is that more aren’t shot down like dogs.

In Greeley, Colorado alone, the INS goon squads hauled away over 300 from the Swift meatpacking plant there alone. Nationwide the total hauled off to be deported is sure to go over 1,000. See the map locator at the end of the Greeley paper’s article above to see where the other Swift plants are. Apparently Hyrum, Utah needed over 150 stormtroopers on hand to do the dirty work at that plant.

Here is a Denver paper slideshow of the pigshow at Greeley

To add insult to injury, the INS cops decided to loudly and publicly accuse the rounded up with being all involved in Identity Theft crimes. How better to make Spanish speaking people really be labelled hardened criminals amongst Anglos than to throw this stuff into the stew? So our latest messages from the authorities is, Don’t be Muslims and pray in airports and don’t be talking Spanish in public, if you know what’s good for you, that is.

Since Democrats are also on board this Holy Crusade, we can expect much more of this tax paid hatemongering ahead of us. Our political representatives from both parties suck totally on immigration issues. They both entirely support this sort of witchhunt against the working poor, all under the guise of ‘keeping our borders safe’ and ‘protecting the native workforce’.

Baroness Thatcher is sad

Posted on by
Reply

Lady Thatcher is sad today in England. A long time family friend, the Chilean torturer general , Augusto Pinochet, has died. Margaret did what she could to keep this man from ever being held accountable for his crimes against humanity, and she had the help of Tony Blair, too.

Jack Straw, former British Foreign Secretary for Blair and good friend of Condaleeza Rice, allowed the popular Chilean thug to rest in bed under ‘house arrest’. Current Foreign Secretary for Blair, Margaret Beckett, hails Pinochet today as being a model economic genius. Aw shucks, Marge, all he did was follow University of Chicago Professor, Milton Friedman’s advice. And torturerama! All that said, Our lovely Baroness Thatcher today laments that she has seen her last tea with Augusto.

Is it any wonder that our own US and British thugs and warmongers fell in love with the idea of freely and openly using torture themselves? They have been hobnobbing with the Faisals, Saddams, Pinochets, Shah of Irans, Ferninand and Imelda Marcoses of the world for the longest time now. It even almost looks like Margaret Thatcher was carrying on an extramarital affair with Augusto, to see how fiel she has been to the man! And to think that Soviet CPer, Mikhail Gorbachev, also fell in love with the Iron Maiden! Certainly that love affair harmed the Soviet Union’s many peoples even more than Pinochet has harmed Chile.

But what is it that makes the leaders of our Western ‘Democracies’ enamored of the Third World torturers so? It’s like they don’t have even a shred of democratic sensibilities in them, is it not? I guess that’s what being leaders of a corporate model does to them. There is no other explanation. Cut the rebels down; those serfs! Pinochet led the way for them, and now they are sad in London and D.C.

A Pearl Harbor timeline

Posted on by
Reply

I found this timeline which addresses the lead-up to what Franklin D. Roosevelt knew would be a day to live on in infamy. His.
Japanese attempt at SHOCK AND AWE, our permission slip to go to war

1904 – The Japanese destroyed the Russian navy in a surprise attack in undeclared war.

1932 – In the Grand Joint Army-Navy Exercises, 152 aircraft carrier planes caught the defenders of Pearl Harbor completely by surprise. It was a Sunday

1938 – Admiral Ernst King led a carrier-born airstrike from the USS Saratoga successfully against Pearl Harbor in another exercise.

1940 – FDR ordered the fleet transferred from the West Coast to its exposed position in Hawaii and ordered the fleet remain stationed at Pearl Harbor over complaints by its commander Admiral Richardson that there was inadequate protection from air attack and no protection from torpedo attack. Richardson felt so strongly that he twice disobeyed orders to berth his fleet there and he raised the issue personally with FDR in October and he was soon after replaced. His successor, Admiral Kimmel, also brought up the same issues with FDR in June 1941.

7 Oct 1940 – Navy IQ analyst McCollum wrote an 8 point memo on how to force Japan into war with US. Beginning the next day FDR began to put them into effect and all 8 were eventually accomplished.

11 November 1940 – 21 aged British planes destroyed the Italian fleet, including 3 battleships, at their homeport in the harbor of Taranto in Southern Italy by using technically innovative shallow-draft torpedoes.

In a letter of January 24, 1941, the Secretary of the Navy advised the Secretary of War that the increased gravity of the Japanese situation had prompted a restudy of the problem of the security of the Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor. The writer stated: “If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible that hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack upon the Fleet or the Naval base at Pearl Harbor. . . . The dangers envisaged in their order of importance and probability are considered to be: 1) air bombing attack; 2) air torpedo plane attack; 3) sabotage; 4) submarine attack; 5) mining; 6) bombardment by gunfire.” The letter stated the defenses against all but the first two were then satisfactory.

The Secretary of War replied February 7, 1941. Admiral Kimmel and General Short received copies of these letters.

11 February 1941 – FDR proposed sacrificing 6 cruisers and 2 carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: “I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom. Particularly do I recall your remark in a previous conference when Mr. Hull suggested (more forces to Manila) and the question arose as to getting them out and your 100% reply, from my standpoint, was that you might not mind losing one or two cruisers, but that you did not want to take a chance on losing 5 or 6.” (Charles Beard PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE COMING OF WAR 1941, p 424)

March 1941 – FDR sold munitions and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe — both acts of war and both violations of international law — the Lend-Lease Act.

23 Jun 1941 – Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia.” FDR was pleased with Admiral Richmond Turner’s report read July 22: “It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies…it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philippine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war.” On July 24 FDR told the Volunteer Participation Committee, “If we had cut off the oil off, they probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war.” The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in US cutting off their main supply of oil and forcing them into war with the US. Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward.

14 August – At the Atlantic Conference, Churchill noted the “astonishing depth of Roosevelt’s intense desire for war.” Churchill cabled his cabinet “(FDR) obviously was very determined that they should come in.”

On October 16, 1941, the Commanding General, Hawaiian Department [Short], and the Commander in Chief of the Fleet [Kimmel], were advised by the War and Navy Departments of the changes in the Japanese Cabinet, and of the possibility of an attack by Japan on Great Britain and the United States.

18 October – diary entry by Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.”

November 24, 1941, the Chief of Naval Operations sent a message to Admiral Kimmel in which he stated that in the opinion of the Navy Department, a surprise aggressive movement … by the Japanese . . . was a possibility.

November 27, 1941, the Chief of Staff of the Army informed the Commanding General that hostilities on the part of Japan were momentarily possible.

On the same day (November 27, 1941) the Chief of Naval Operations sent a message to the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, which stated in substance that the dispatch was to be considered a war warning.

November 28, 1941, the Commanding General received from the Adjutant General of the Army a message stating that the critical situation required every precaution to be taken at once against subversive activities.

The Navy Department sent three messages to the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet; the first of December 3, 1941, stated that it was believed certain Japanese consulates were destroying their codes and burning secret documents; the second of December 4, 1941, instructed the addressee to destroy confidential documents and means of confidential communication; and the third of December 4, 1941, directing that in view of the tense situation the naval commands on the outlying Pacific islands might be authorized to destroy confidential papers.

On December 6, the Japanese government began sending a long message to its diplomats in Washington. The last part of that message arrived in the early-morning hours of December 7. Japanese diplomats Nomura and Kurusu prepared for a final meeting with Secretary of State Hull, knowing that they were being ordered to break off all negotiations with the U.S. What they didn’t realize was that the same message had been decoded and rushed to President Roosevelt and to the high commanders of the U.S. Army and Navy. The U.S. was now aware that Japan might strike somewhere in the Pacific, but a warning did not reach Pearl Harbor until nearly 8:00 a.m., Hawaii time. By then, Nomura and Kurusu were in Secretary Hull’s office, and Japanese bombs were falling onto the neat lines of U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor’s “Battleship Row.”

At about noon E.S.T. (6:30 a.m. Honolulu time) December 7, an additional warning message indicating an almost immediate break in relations between the United States and Japan, was dispatched by the Chief of Staff. . . . The delivery of this urgent message was delayed until after the attack.

The Commanding General [Short], the Commander in Chief of the Fleet [Kimmel] and their principal staff officers considered the possibility of air raids. Without exception they believed that the chances of such a raid while the Pacific Fleet was based upon Pearl Harbor was practically nil.