Our State of the Union's Troubled State

The British Economist Magazine says that "A strikingly unaudacious speech from Barack Obama failed to address America's problem. - As if his "speech" consisted merely of the words bla, bla, bla. America faces two huge, linked problems. Our unemployment rate is running at 9.4%, once you add in those who want full-time work but can only find part-time jobs, it is almost twice that. Job creation is not even keeping pace with the rise in population, and the budget deficit is running at almost 10% of GDP; on that measure this year and the previous two will have been the three worst since the Second World War. Nevertheless,Obama continues to employ our military to find useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To the Republicans who now control the House of Representatives, the main problem is the deficit and the cumulative burden of debt it brings with it. The deficit will of course narrow as the economy recovers, but because of the insatiable demands for health care of America's now creaky and retiring baby-boomers, unless taxes are hiked, it will not dip below 4% of GDP, and it will start to rise again after 2015. That is not sustainable. Not only will borrowing on this scale tend to crowd out more more productive investment: the interest on it is already eating up 10% of government revenue, a figure that will rise as interest rates go up. Hence the Republican demand for swift and deep cuts. Get spending down, shift government off the backs of the people, and jobs will return, as the invisible hand works its magic. Mr. Obama sees things the other way around, but that's another story!

Israel's War Against Iran IS ON!!!

Do you REALLY want to die for ISRAEL?? SORRY: You have no choice in the matter. After talks in Istanbul between Iran and the West on its nuclear program broke down on January 22, the danger of revival of a military option will probably be considered, especially by the morons who now run our United States! It may not come in the form of a direct, conventional US and/or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations, but rather in the guise of the warfare of the future, with cyber-weapons and terrorism. Political forces opposed to such an escalation in the Iran conflict would do well to examine the reasons why dialogue on the nuclear issue has failed thus far, and reshape their approach to dealing with the Islamic Republic. On the eve of talks between Iran and the West, the German weekly of record published a devastating expose of Israeli covert operations against the Islamic Republic, including targeted assassinations. The cover story of the popular weekly Der Spiegel , entitled "David's Avengers: Israel's secret killer-commandos" hit the newsstands and arrived in subscribers' mailboxes on Monday, January 17, just four days before talks were to open in Turkey, between Iran and the the 5+1 group - the five UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany. www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22962
I know you want to read the rest of this story, especially to seek shelter with your family between Soviet nuclear weapons begin falling near your house, so click on my headline, and read Muriel Mirak-Weissbach's article on Global Research!!

UN Expert to be sacked for 9/11 Remark!!!

Just after I made another remark today on this blog about 9/11, a UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, wrote in his personal blog that there are "awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations" provided by the US government for the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Falk suggested there was "an apparent cover-up" by the United States over its knowledge of the attacks which were allegedly masterminded by Saudi-born al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Associated Press reported. The UN official went on to criticize mainstream media in his January 11 blog for being "unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al-Qaeda operation with with no foreknowledge by government officials." The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, flatly rejected the claims as conspiracy theory, and said that Falk should "no longer continue in his position on behalf of the UN." (A little close to home, is it, Ms. Rice?). Rice described the comments by the UN human rights expert as "despicable and deeply offensive," adding that she had "registered a strong protest with the UN on behalf of the United States." Unfortunately, Ms. Rice, this has no bearing on the facts involved, and justice will eventually be served!

A Question by John Kozy: Can America be Changed?

John Kozy poses an interesting question: If the American people ever hope to take back their country, they need to understand America's political economy, so that the parts of it which are morally offensive and economically ineffective can be repudiated. Only then, will Americans be able to make the changes that are needed to make Abe Lincoln's dream of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people a wondrous reality. The reality is the idiot George Bush, who claimed: "There is still an enemy out there who would like to inflict damage on America - Americans- The most important job for the next president is to protect the American people from another attack." Unusually powerful words for a man who has never even carried a rifle, or any other weapon in combat, as I did in Vietnam, or who has killed men, women, and even children in that sordid disaster. But I digress: John Kozy wants to know, as I do: "Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives" This statement is too ambiguous. He suspects that more than 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, but not all of them died as a result of the airplanes that were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Furthermore, the people who did die as a result of these events fall into different groups - those who were in the buildings before the planes crashed into them, and those who responded to the crashes, and all who were in the buildings before the crashes died as a result of the crashes. Possibly fewer than 3,000. Actually, I had occasion to visit the Pentagon, accompanied by Steve Mayfield, a CIA man, who had earlier, while he tried to get me to serve as a spy in East Germany, and kept himself busy updating the "analysis of our area of operations". My boss, Colonel Aantero Aakkula, assured me that this was NOT James Bond, and that the East Germans would lock me up in a "dirty, rat infested jail", and that our "American government" would NOT try to have me released.

Professor John Kozy: Our Media - Selling Views, Calling it News

A few days ago, I posted an important comment by Professor John Kozy, in which he mentioned that American journalists are not "newshounds", but merely regurgitate information which we have already heard hundreds of times from other news sources. Like the press in the former "Soviet Union", our newsmedia consist of nothing more than salesclerks, hocking the products their employers want to sell, and these products are usually nothing more than the hucksters in our old west, who had nothing more than "snake oil " in their covered wagons. A controlled press, he argued, most certainly could not be trusted when reporting on government actions or policies, but he also argued that most certainly that press could not be trusted when reporting on govern- -mental actions or policies, but pointed out that much news is not affected by government, and therefore he saw no reason to be suspicious of a controlled press reporting on such matters, but he also argued that there was good reason to distrust the so-called free press no matter what was being reported: His argument rested on the observation that a controlled press, being funded by its controlling government had no need to attract readers, while the so-called free press had to rely on readers to remain economically viable. The "free" press had to market its wares in the same way that any retail company must, and one way to do that was to slant the news in ways that made it attractive to the news organization's target groups which, in a sense, biased all the stories all the stories the free press reported.
Please click on my headline to read the full story by John Kozy on www.globalresearch.ca

The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy

It seems that I derive most of my postings from global research, which is a Canadian Web Site. The people who run that site make such an enormous effort to bring us all the news in our world, that I really have little choice in the matter: Here I go again: Professor Peter Dale Scott is this time quoting Senator Frank Church in a speech from 1975: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that the National Security Agency, and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss: That is the abyss from which there is no return." As my wonderful black medic from my advisory team north of Kontum in Vietnam would have said: "Right On!". In recent years Peter Dale Scott has become more and more concerned with the interactions between three important and alarming trends in American history: The first is America's increasing militarization and above all its inclination, even obsession, to involve itself in needless and pernicious (harmful) wars. The second, closely related, is the progressive shrinking of public politics and the rule of law as they are subordinated, even domestically, to the requirements of covert US operations abroad. The third, also closely related, is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history and the global extension of American power, of what I have called "deep" events. These events, like the JFK assassination, the Water- gate break-in, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records. One factor linking Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all three deep events of personnel involved in America's highest level emergency planning, known since the 1980's as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more colloquially as "the Doomsday Project." The implementation of COG plans on 9/11, or what I call Doomsday Power, was the culmination of three decades of such planning, and has resulted in the "permanent militarization" of the United States, and the imposition at home of institutions and processes designed for domination abroad: Writing about these events as they occurred over the decades, I have been interested in the interrelations among them. It is now possible to show how each was related both to those preceding it, and to those which followed.

Presidents? Obama has been as Bad as Bush!!

Mike Whitney, the man who wrote this analysis for Global Research, is right, of course. By selecting Obama as their president, our electorate lowered itself to the lowest level of idiocy. As we all know, Obama, right after being elected, made certain that the presidential follies in which his predecessor engaged, kept Bush's idiotic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alive, right after picking up a Nobel Prize for his folly. If it were possible, I imagine that Nobel was turning over in his grave, yet Obama has no discernible morals! Just south of our United States, Hugo Chavez used his powers under his country's new "enabling laws"to enact the "Law for Dignified Refuge", a presidential decree which mandates "dignified and humane" housing for all Venezuelans. The Venezuelan parliament approved the controversial, and temporary enabling laws, because the country faced an unprecedented housing crisis due to the country's massive floods in December. More than 125,000 people lost their homes in the disaster requiring a speedy response from the government. Chavez swung into action immediately, turning the presidential palace into a homeless shelter and initiating a campaign to construct permanent housing for the victims. Please click on my headline to read the rest of this story!

Prof. John Kozy: The Media in America -Selling Views, Calling it News

Sometime in the 1960's, Professor Kozy took part in a university symposium along with three other faculty members: A political scientist, a historian, and a journalism professor. The topic was "Freedom of the Press", good or bad. During the sixties the Cold War was still being fought. The Soviet Union's news agencies, TASS and Pravda, were continually attacked by the American "free press" as untrustworthy. A common claim was that a controlled press could never be trusted while a free press could, and my three colleagues on the panel supported that view. A controlled press, I argued, most certainly could NOT be trusted when reporting on governmental actions or policies, but, I pointed out that much news is not affected by government, and I saw no reason to distrust the so-called "free press", no matter what is reported. My argument rested on the observation that a controlled free press, being funded by its controlled government, had no need to attract readers, while the so-called "free press" had to rely on readers to remain economically viable. The free press had to market its wares in the same way that any retail company must, and one way to do that was to slant the news in ways that made it attractive to the news organization's target groups which, in a sense, biased all the stories the free press reported.