What the 1% Think of Us

 

 

 

In a word, Trump. What do I mean by this? Here is a person who is perhaps the most vile, corrupt, detestable person who has ever occupied the White House & most of us know that no one gets even close to that position without having been approved of by that tiny fraction of the 1%. And this says to me that they just plain don’t give a fuck about what we think or feel.

so all female Trump fans don’t mind if men grab their pussies???

 

Trump is like that tiny fraction of the elite, morally bankrupt corporate cockroaches flipping us & the rest of the world, the middle finger i.e. we could give a shit less about what you think, feel, or care about.

our “engaged” president thinking about a Big Mac

 

Many of us have heard of the proverbial “talk” given to new presidents when they take office. The new president may have promised the world to his constituents regarding all the changes he was going to implement but after “the talk,” those promises seem to just fade away?

 

So, it’s very clear except to the willfully blind that those who give the new presidents this lesson in the reality of how the U.S. government is really run are those top-secret men behind the veil of secrecy, and they are the de facto masters of the universe.

The banking cabal, not all the Masters but a significant part

 

And my guess is that were it not for Trump being the president, most of the high-class restaurants & clubs across America wouldn’t even allow Trump in their establishments due to his vulgarity & total lack of decent etiquette or proper behavior & speech. This may be another reason why he just hangs out at his own hotels & resorts though who knows if he actually owns them or merely gets to plaster his name all over them for the grand façade of his “success” brand.

Trump’s “brain-trust”

 

You see, my imaginary reader, Trump isn’t simply some malevolent force out of the blue, no, he’s just the end result—sort of like the end result of our bodies’ processing of the food we take in—of a publicly declared agenda by the rich after FDR enacted his “New Deal.”

 

In short, they declared that they weren’t going to stop fighting until they had rolled-back every single aspect of the New Deal that helped us, the coerced taxpayers & cost them so much as a penny. Moreover, you may recall Mitch McConnel, the Machiavellian miscreant who announced from Day 1 of Obama’s election that he & the G.O.P. were going to block Obama at every single bit of legislation he tried to pass. What a noble patriot!

 

By-the-way, don’t misunderstand me, the Democratic party is pretty damn close to being equally guilty in their betrayal of us, the 99% but for the sake of brevity in this essay, I’ll keep my criticisms mostly targeted on the G.O.P. (Greedy Old Pigs).

 

So, here’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how that elite scum think of us or rather, don’t think of us.

 

  • The privatization of all public water—note Nestles water in Michigan which gets the water from the Great Lakes at pennies on the dollar while Flint’s once clean source of water is shut-off & they are forced to use the toxic water of the Flint River

    Why won’t Trump drain the swamp in Flint???
  • The elimination of all unions, public & private. Note one of Reagan’s first acts as president was to fire the Air Traffic Controllers out on strike for life. And this sent a message to corporate America i.e. it’s open season on unions

    he busted-up every union he could but didn’t break up the Screen Actor’s Guild which he used to head?
  • Sorry American public, but there’s simply not enough money for quality health care, education, or welfare for the 99% but there’s a never-ending flow of billions & trillions to the “Defense Industries,” because the terrorists are coming (and we get a nice slice of the pie!) i.e. Halliburton, Bechtel, G.E., etc.

    Do you remember how Cheney/Bush backtracked after their lies were revealed?
  • No taxes for the rich or the megalithic monopolies that are strangling not only America’s workers but workers around the world. And ever since Reagan, they’ve promised that this would cause a trickle-down benefit for all of us. Yeah, and how are you doing financially from this trickle? But we, the intimidated taxpayers are sent to jail if we “cheat” on our taxes.

    Trump’s version of “Draining the Swamp” i.e. the U.S. Treasury & the 99%’s pockets
  • No, or very rarely do they prosecute the rich & when they do, the rich, especially the giant corporations, don’t even have to plead guilty & there’s no conviction on their record. So, they go right back to committing fraud, poisoning our environment, etc., pay a relatively small fine as compared to the profits they made from their criminal activities. You or I, pay a huge fine relative to our financial status, have a record, & often go to jail or prison. And we get three strikes & we’re out i.e. your third offence could be as little as stealing a candy bar & you spend the rest of your life in prison.</li>
  • More & more protestors are being labeled terrorists so they have no rights such as habeas corpus, right to a lawyer, etc. & their lives are destroyed (see The Patriot Act) & note Obama’s prosecution of more Whistleblowers than all other presidents combined—the brave souls like Edward Snowden who warned us that our government with the help of the tech giants is spying on every single communication device & platform

    Continuous Fear/Hate rallies, above the law, silence the media, countless criminal acts-Wake up People!
  • The Hell with clean air, clean water, safe food—Monsanto can experiment with GMO food & we can’t even know which foods are GMO (would hurt their profit margin) the corporate cockroaches are polluting the entire planet & pushing into ever greater ecological disaster which threatens humanity’s very survival, Oh well? They’re getting richer by the minute.

    And you claim that you love your kids???
  • Deregulation ad nauseam i.e. deregulate every industry but when their greed brings about their downfall, we, the taxpayers must once again bail them out (The World-wide Crash of 2008 which stole the pensions, homes, life savings, & jobs of tens of millions of people around the world, but when we, Joe & Jane average with maybe a mom & pop mini-market, go under? Too bad, too sad, it’s the free market for us but socialism for the rich i.e. we are all left to that mythological “free market,” where it’s sink or swim or the law of the jungle but the elite are always bailed out by us, the taxpayers because we’re forced to. And they proclaim that they must be saved or America will go under.

    Trump is busy deregulating every industry he can becuz 2008 was so much fun

 

In conclusion, the 1% have nothing but complete & utter contempt for the 99%. Just look at Trump’s chin, poked out in arrogance like he’s Louis the XIV th or Mussolini. He’s been spoiled & protected all his life because of his dad’s wealth built largely on his being a slum lord & manipulating the loopholes of tax laws, bribing of city council members, & friendships with mafia figures.

The Great “Deal Maker”

 

And this is why Donny throws a fit whenever anyone criticizes him. He’s used to always getting his way & this is also why he loves authoritarian figures around the globe. They remind him of the mafia bosses & the fear they have instilled in their citizens who dare not speak out for fear of being killed.

Trump idolizes dictators cuz he imagines himself one but his followers don’t care that they massacre thousands of their own citizens, at least they’re “strong” men

 

Trump demands total loyalty to him like the kings during the age of feudalism but he has absolutely no loyalty to anyone except his buddy, Putin who has killed god knows how many of his own citizens. Putin even hunts down his opponents who have fled to other countries like those in England that he had poisoned.

 

Trump admires Duterte who declared himself above the law & told his police to shoot dead anyone they suspect of using or selling drugs. Tens of thousands of Philippinos have been gunned down in the Philippines, no court hearing just summary execution. This appeals to Trump again because he loves the feeling or thought that he has absolute power & his word is law.

 

We also have Erdogan in Turkey who has declared himself “sultan,” and runs his country like it as well. And don’t forget Trump’s friend whom he declared falling in love with i.e. Rocket Man of North Korea has been letting his people starve for decades so that he can live like Kubla Khan in opulence. And last but not least, President Xi of China who declared himself president for life & has also killed god knows how many Chinese citizens & has the world’s largest open prison comprised of that religious sect who harm no one but dare to dissent.

 

Moreover, what really confuses & depresses me is the fact that so many American citizens can sit by & watch Trump flout our laws—remember, we love to brag about being a nation built on law & order—most glaringly his ignoring of the emolument’s clause in our most sacred document, the U.S. Constitution, and brazenly he tries to steer the G7 Summit for next year to be held at one of his resorts.

 

Trump supporters are either the world’s biggest fools or hypocrites & willfully blind to the fact that he is clearly not one of them & has nothing but contempt for them. He’s coming for your food stamps people, Make America Great Again! I’ll see you in line at the food bank.

Ah yeah, Trump telling it like it is

 

—Rob DeLoss, Dec. 4, 2019 in Gold Beach, Oregon

 

P.S.  I almost forgot to add that the arrogance of the rich has touched my life as well. I worked many shitty factory jobs in my 20s & I hated it with a passion on one particular occasion, the owner of the factory was leading a group of businessmen on a tour of the factory. I was standing & working at the machine I was assigned to & they stood not ten feet away from me & studied the machine & never once acknowledged my presence, not even a nod of recognition. I felt like a domestic animal in their barn. That anger has helped to fuel my lifelong pursuit of knowledge in order to empower myself and not have to be in a position like that one ever again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Truly Pornographic

this is the truly pornographic i.e. the continuous death of war & for what?

 

The other day, my ex-wife got upset at some photos I had printed of some nude women. I believe these photos are excellent examples of natural beauty & are every bit as lovely as Michelangelo’s “David,” Botticelli’s “Venus on a Half Shell,” the Mona Lisa, etc. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder & so is “pornography.” The true pornography is the pornography of violence that America reveres & is awash in.

I have never bought a Penthouse magazine or Hustler, etc. because to me, they are tasteless. I have bought many copies of Playboy over the years. But what occurred to me after my ex-wife got upset & felt so offended was that the true pornography is the pornography of power & the pornography of ignorance that allows or turns a blind eye to so much of the pain, suffering, degradation, & death all around us.

Trump & his “Christian” base don’t give a damn about these innocent victims of their wars for the corporate cockroaches

 

First off, what I mean by the pornography of power is the obscene levels of power that we have allowed our government & transnational corporations to acquire. Time and time again they have in effect, spit in our faces. The American public in poll after poll, voted against the bailout of Wall Street but the government went ahead & bailed them out. They tell us they don’t have the money to provide health care for all of us but they keep funding these wars in Iraq & Afghanistan to the tune of a billion dollars a week.

Of course, the “other’s” suffering & death never counts when it comes to America’s “good intentions”

Our public school system has been steadily crumbling for decades & they tell us there isn’t enough money yet the weapons manufacturers & the private mercenary corporations like Blackwater are flourishing. Our infrastructure is disintegrating

Obama’s stunt in Flint revealed his betrayal & sell-out to the powers that be

while the president of vice, Dick Cheney’s corporation, Halliburton is making record profits supposedly rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, which we destroyed.

U.S. sent 363 tons of shrink-wrapped cash to Iraq & $9 billion goes missing, but, oh well?

 

These are but a few of the many truly pornographic or obscene acts that are going on & I wish my ex-wife and all Americans were even a fraction as outraged at these acts as those “Christian” fundamentalists are at abortion & gay marriage. It’s the pornography of ignorance that has allowed things to go so wrong for so long in this land of “freedom,” “equality,” & “democracy.” And the corporate media & the purposeful “dumbing down” of our children have deliberately spread this pornography of ignorance in our public educational system. The standards of academic or intellectual excellence have been watered down steadily over the past decades & as a result, many high school graduates aren’t even equipped to handle a minimum wage job. The paramount skills of critical & analytical thinking are taught in only a few, isolated school systems. An uninformed & unable to think clearly & rationally citizenry is easy to fool and easy to ignore.

And in Trump-land, being stupid is worn as a badge of honor

No, I’m not a ‘conspiracy nut,’ the elite have publicly declared their goals time and time again. Look up President Wilson’s statement regarding public education for a prime example of their contempt for us.

 

To continue, we’ve become so disengaged or psychically numbed that we don’t have sympathy or compassion for the soldiers returning from the horrors of the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. I don’t see those outraged fanatics screaming that abortion is murder, scream about the suffering & humiliation of the homeless. Many if not most of the homeless are veterans of the Vietnam War, the Gulf war, & now the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. Bumper stickers proclaim “Support Our Troops,” but this is the same shallow or simplistic jingoism as those bumper stickers commanding “America, Love It or Leave It.” If we truly supported our troops, we would house them & we would give them the best medical & psychological care available immediately. I just watched a panel of “Winter Soldiers” testify before members of Congress about the horrors of war they’d experienced in Iraq & Afghanistan and several told how they & many of their comrades turned to alcohol & drugs to escape the pain of what they’d seen & done in war and when they seek help, they are ridiculed, told they’re faking it, & put on waiting lists for up to a year or longer. Some tried to commit suicide & some succeeded.

This is the ugly truth behind the corporate cockroaches’ agenda of perpetual war

 

This is the true pornography and obscenity. The politicians & the military commanders turn these young, idealistic people into killers & then tell them they’re phonies or weaklings and turn their backs on them. Our soldiers are trained to dehumanize the “enemy,” in order to make the killing of the “enemy” easier to live with psychologically yet when they return to America, they are also dehumanized by the very people that told them it was their patriotic duty to go to war & defend America and her values. My family & “friends” have long told me that I’m “too sensitive,” and it has been both a blessing & a curse because I empathize with all the downtrodden of the world e.g. the working class who break their backs for a lifetime & live in a constant state of dread, despair, & pain; the scared immigrants who risk their lives to get here only to be treated like sub-humans & to be exploited by the wealthy;

Could it be that Trump & Co. doesn’t need cheap immigrant labor anymore when we have our prisoners to do the work? see A.L.E.C.

the people of countries that our military has invaded & bombed and killed & maimed their loved ones in the name of democracy & freedom. The corporate cockroaches & their lackeys in the government have duped us all.

 

To sum up, we should all be so outraged that we take to the streets en masse & bring business as usual to a complete standstill because it’s not until the greedy swine holding the reins of power, feel it in their bank accounts, will we begin to reclaim our dignity & honor as a people.

We need to find that spirit we had in the 1960s when we cared about one another

I’m not a religious person but when I see the picture of or an actual lovely nude woman, I feel she is a beautiful reminder of God’s handiwork just as much as those majestic Redwoods or the waves crashing on the Pacific coast. No my friend, the true pornography is that which degrades us as human beings & makes some of us do obscene things because the pain has killed that most precious gift, the human spirit!

Does this offend you more than the little Vietnamese girl burned by U.S. napalm? If so, you should look into your soul.

 

If we persist in our apathy & ignorance, this may come about sooner than we think, especially under Trump!

—Rob DeLoss, November 28, 2008

Willful Ignorance is a Cancer on America

Reminds me of Dick Cheney & his smug arrogance but Trump is a moron!

In a recent essay by Henry Giroux, “Resisting the Weaponization of Ignorance in the Age of Trump,” he starts with; “Ignorance now rules the U.S. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue.” I wrote this essay originally back in 2013 but wanted to insert this quote by Giroux because it is so right on the mark in this nightmare world with someone as astoundingly stupid as Trump in the oval office. And what’s worse is having to see that smug look on Trump’s face every time I watch the news or that nauseous smirk on his mug which radiates contempt. I believe he’s so self-satisfied because he knows the depth & breadth of the crimes & fraud he’s committed throughout his years. If there were a prize handed out for the most willfully ignorant person in America, Trump would win it hands-down, & willful ignorance is allowing Trump to destroy America!

“Christian” fundamentalists & White Supremacists

 

Preface: before I begin I want to state that my aim is to be briefer than usual because I know that most people aren’t willing to take the time to read anything “too lengthy.” Moreover, many on-line sites that allow you to post your writing, censor how long an article/essay can be. So, don’t criticize me if some of my points aren’t as clear as perhaps you’d like them to be. In fact, I was tempted to just make this a bullet-point list but upon reflection I realized that I must do more to “connect the dots.”

 

My simple definition of “willful ignorance” is that a person purposely blocks out new information, knowledge, or wisdom because it is basically too threatening to their belief structures. And by contrast, “innocent ignorance” simply means that a person doesn’t know something through no fault of their own, they simply have never been exposed to the new information. My thesis is that a pervasive willful ignorance is killing America and I am very concerned not just because I fear about America’s survival but also because America is such a major player in this global game of Monopoly, the survival of our planet is at stake!

an “option” for not having to go to prison for the rest of his life?

The recent revelations regarding our Justice department’s spying on Associated Press reporters motivated me to write this essay. And the general sense of apathy among the general public regarding our government spying on us so blatantly ever since 9/11 truly saddens me. When I bring this issue up to people I know or have recently met, the usual response is “Oh well, I have nothing to worry about because I’m not doing anything wrong!”

Yeah, like what you don’t know about Trump won’t hurt you either

This is mind-boggling to me & I ask myself “Then why have our soldiers died or been maimed in this perpetual state of war we’ve been in my whole life?” The constant refrain I hear is “Support Our Soldiers because they are fighting for our freedom, Democracy, etc.” How can this be when our freedoms, democracy, etc. is being seriously undermined & eliminated altogether here in America?

has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined

 

Case in point; President Obama has prosecuted more “Whistleblowers” than All the presidents who preceded his administration. Like so many other terms or words, the word “whistleblower” has been twisted to the point that it is now almost completely understood as a negative thing. This is truly Orwellian because “whistleblowers” are the true patriots & are doing us a great service by warning us of illegal & immoral actions on the part of our government & the corporate cockroach elite.

 

Some of you may not be familiar with I.F. Stone, George Seldes, Edward R. Murrow, or Robert Scheer but these men were/are amongst a relatively small handful of our greatest whistleblowers & often labeled as “Muckrakers.” Another derisive term implying they just stirred up trouble & threw mud at political officials, corporate Robber Barons, etc. because they were jealous, mean-spirited, unpatriotic, etc. etc. etc.

and he absolutely idolized Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan/Chase the largest of the four most powerful banks in the U.S.

This is another example of willful ignorance and absolutely wrong. These men and women were the most patriotic and courageous people this country has produced because they dared to stand up on their hind-legs and blow the whistle on the thieves in high places by stating publicly how politicians & businessmen were breaking our laws as a nation & the higher laws to which humans are responsible for—the laws of humanity commonly known as ethics!

the only guy who could lose money owning casinos & now he gets to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury?

 

Today’s America is but a dim shadow of those golden ideals & principles that we were told we believed in & practiced as a nation as we went through public school. Most Americans are now either afraid to speak up or are too apathetic & as long as they have their inane television sit-coms, soap operas, sports, & “reality” shows, don’t give a shit! Willful ignorance is now held up as the way to be & well-meaning friends admonish me to not fight the system, it’s futile. I have been fighting this apathy & willful ignorance all my life and it’s been a lonely journey. For example, several years ago when my son was still in high school, his mother & her brother started saying they believed that it would be a good thing for my son to join the military. This scared the Hell out of me because I was in the U.S. Army and came close to being sent to Vietnam & knew after 30 years of serious searching for facts, knowledge, truth, & wisdom the lies, the needless slaughter of Vietnamese innocents, the death of over 55,000 American soldiers, etc. how wrong & how dangerous a game they were playing with my son’s life! (I know that my wife was innocently ignorant on this subject though)

 

So, I sat down at the kitchen table & wrote for two days, (see my post; The Politics of Patriotism https://cockroachconspiracy.com/the-politics-of-patriotism/ )every reason I could think of as to why my son, or any young person should not join the military. And to this day, I haven’t been able to persuade my son to read this outpouring of my soul in an attempt to save his life. Thankfully he didn’t join the military but I still feel the pain & suffering of all those poor, young people who have joined the military and had their souls crushed.

 

Continuing on, this isn’t a self-pity party but merely to substantiate my argument regarding America’s general sense of apathy & willful ignorance. I have been mocked & dismissed for most of my adult life because I am almost always in the minority regarding these issues & people take comfort & believe they must be right because they are in the majority when arguments arise about these topics. If we had more courageous journalists like those I mentioned earlier, then perhaps we could have averted invading Iraq and all the horrible aftermath of that war of choice?

 

Furthermore, I contend that because of our general sense of apathy and our willful ignorance, the powers that be have been, are, & will continue to erode & destroy America as a nation. And lest you think me an alarmist, conspiracy nut, or whatever, I challenge you to do a little research for yourself starting with the late, great Gore Vidal and his book “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” In this simple little book, Vidal lists the over 200 military incursions or whatever you care to refer to them as, since 1945. Here is a blurb relevant to this point:

 

In all, the United States has only made 11 separate formal declarations of war against foreign nations encompassing 5 wars.

  1. War with Great Britain 1812 (Act of June 18, 1812, House 79-49; Senate 19-13)
  2. War with Mexico 1846 (Act of May 13, 1846, House 174-14; Senate 40-2)
  3. War with Spain 1898 (Act of April 25, 1898, House & Senate voice votes)
  4. War with Germany 1917 (Act of April 6, 1917, House 373-50; Senate 82-6)
  5. War with Austria-Hungary 1917 (Act of December 7, 1917, House 365-1; Senate 74-0))
  6. War with Japan 1941 (Act of December 8, 1941, House 388-1; Senate 82-0)
  7. War with Germany 1941 (Act of December 11, 1941, House 393-0; Senate 88-0)
  8. War with Italy 1941 (Act of December 11, 1941, House 399-0; Senate 90-0)
  9. War with Bulgaria 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 357-0; Senate 73-0)
  10. War with Hungary 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 360-0; Senate 73-0)
  11. War with Rumania 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 361-0; Senate 73-0)9

Since 1942, of course the United States has not led the world in a seventy-years’ peace. Despite Roosevelt’s relative ease in obtaining six formal declarations of war, since World War Two Americans have been drawn time and time again into war without a congressional declaration. Gore Vidal commented:

“Since V-J Day 1945 (‘Victory over Japan’ and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A. Beard called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’ I have occasionally referred to our ‘enemy of the month club’: each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us.”

Vidal goes on to list several hundred wars and operations conducted against Communism, terrorism, drugs, or as he puts it, “sometimes nothing much” that occurred between Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001.  Based on casualties alone the costliest conflicts following the last official declaration of war include the Korean War with 33,686, the Vietnam War with 47,424, Iraq War with 3,542 and Afghanistan at greater than 2,000.  http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2013/volume_5/number_1/war_is_declared.php 

 

 

And with the latest brainstorm on the part of the Pentagon & the politicians, we now “embed” our journalists in military units so they can “report” the facts of war protected by the units they are embedded with. Is it just me or does anyone else see the dangers inherent in this new version of war coverage by journalists? This is a very clever tactic designed to keep an even tighter leash on journalists by making them dependent on soldiers for their very lives, journalists will naturally be a lot more reluctant to report on abuses, crimes, etc. committed by the soldiers they are embedded with. And as a result, we, the American public will be left even more in the dark regarding the truth about the wars, police actions, incursions, etc. that we are continually involved in around the globe.

” We learned that the United States has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, a number that could exceed 1,000 if you count troops stationed at embassies and missions and so-called “lily-pond” bases, with some 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe. David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Overseas Harm America and the World,” https://www.thenation.com/article/the-us-has-military-bases-in-172-countries-all-of-them-m

 

One of the most pernicious myths about the Vietnam war is that it was the “liberal media” which caused us to lose that war because they were broadcasting all those horrible images of war back to our homes and as families sat around the T.V. and watched those images day in and day out, Americans gradually began to turn against the war. The movie “The Killing Fields” showed how bogus this claim was because it revealed the fact that most of the journalists covering the Vietnam war would wait until after a battle and the military had brought them to the battle scene after it had been “cleaned-up” and take their pictures & accept the military commanders’ version of what happened and dutifully transcribe it for their newspapers. Noam Chomsky clearly proved the falsity of these claims and the myths regarding the liberal opposition to the Vietnam war, etc. And again, because i don’t have the space to go into great depth, you’ll have to check out the truth of what I claim for yourself.

 

The myth or “truism” that there is a “liberal media bias” in America is just that, a myth. And it has been mostly been thanks to FOX News and the “mainstream” or corporate media which have vested interests in maintaining the status quo in America. It’s very well known that FOX News, especially during the Gulf war and the Iraq war, took their daily “talking points” directly from the White House so as to keep all their talking heads on the same page and hammering the same pack of lies day in and day out. And this brings me to an extremely important point e.g. just because a newscaster, a politician, or anyone keeps on repeating something it’s not necessarily true or a fact. I have gone around and round with people, including my ex-wife, on this matter and in particular, far too many naive people don’t recognize the difference between opinion and objective fact. Facts can be backed up or substantiated and yes everyone has a right to their opinion but not all opinions are valid or perhaps I should say, equally valid. FOX News is the farthest thing from news because it is mostly opinionated, loud-mouth bullies who believe that if they scream loud enough to drown out their disagreeing guests, they’re right and the guest has been proven wrong. Moreover, even sticking to mere opinions, if one person in an argument is arguing about a subject they have formally studied for years & have earned a degree in the subject is arguing with someone else who has never even read a book on the subject, their opinions are not equally valid. One is arguing from knowledge & experience and the other is arguing from an emotional perspective or a set of beliefs. And this is not elitist but simply logical or scholarly and is the basis for most of human progress. I know that for a lot of people I have met over the course of my adult life, this point regarding the validity of arguments is a bitter or hard pill to swallow. It sounds very arrogant of me to make such statements but consider it from this point of view if you will; I have next to no knowledge when it comes to mechanical aptitude or matters and if I tried telling some guy who had 30 years of experience as a mechanic that he was definitely wrong about some mechanical problem I was having, it would be just as absurd for him to tell me I was off my nut about some political issue which I had spent 30 years of my life studying.

 

Naturally, the power elite or the 1% want to keep the general public as ignorant as possible because it’s much easier to control an ignorant populace than a well-informed one. Why do you think they cracked down so hard on the Occupy Wall St. movement? These protestors were constantly derided on FOX News as dirty, lazy, young kids who didn’t want to work, etc. They weren’t allowed to use microphones at their meetings, they weren’t allowed to even carry a backpack but at the Tea Party rallies, they were allowed to use microphones, they could even bring their guns, and they were covered by the corporate media because they were the dupes of FOX News and the so-called conservative Republican party. Free speech in America? Yeah, right. Only if you agree with the corporate cockroaches are you allowed to be heard.

 

I didn’t start listening to what was going on politically until Ronald Reagan became president because I grew up in L.A. and I’d seen what he’d done as governor of California. Reagan the “great communicator,” cracked-down on student protestors with a vengeance & probably would’ve like to have them all shot down like dogs.

If you were rich, you loved Reagan, if you were poor, you knew he was the enemy of the people

So, when he became president I got worried and ever since his presidency, there has been a steady & stealthy building of power on the side of the rich in America. They built a network of think tanks and hammered away at the American public with their rhetoric & propaganda telling the public ad nauseam that it was the government that was making their lives tough & it was the liberals, the students, the illegal immigrants, gays, in short, anyone who wasn’t rich was the problem.

Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers for life signaled corporate America it’s open season on unions

 

And just as Hitler’s minister of propaganda, joseph Goebbels realized, the more you repeat a lie and the greater the lie, the more people will accept it as truth. The Right-wing extremists in America now have the microphone almost exclusively & when people like myself who have been paying attention, try to speak up, we are shouted down as communists, terrorists, etc. It’s gotten so bad e.g. we’ve become such a corporatocracy that the Democratic party which once stood for the working Americans has now almost completely gone over to the corporate controlled side.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS ONCE THE PARTY OF THE NEW DEAL and the ally of organized labor. But by the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it had become the enemy of New Deal programs like welfare and Social Security and the champion of free trade deals. What explains this apparent reversal?….According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class.” http://inthesetimes.com/features/listen-liberal-thomas-frank-democratic-party-elites (In a nutshell my imaginary reader, this is why we’re so screwed today & have a supposed billionaire posing as a populist in the White House.)

 

I thought I was pretty savvy politically speaking but Obama even fooled me but only for a few weeks. After he was elected and appointed Bernanke, Summers, & Geithner to the top financial & economic positions in America, I knew I & America had been duped yet again. And if you still need convincing of this, as many “liberals” do, note Obama’s speech where he said he wasn’t interested in “looking back” in reference to calls for Bush, Cheney, et al being prosecuted for lying us into the Iraq war and wrecking the U.S. economy. Yet Obama is going after ‘Whistleblowers’ with a vengeance & he has prosecuted those who are trying to protect America more than all the other presidents did in total. Obama the Oreo as I call him (black on the outside, white on the inside) not only hasn’t given up any of the illegal expanded powers of the presidency that Georgie Bush stole, he has expanded the imperial presidency and he personally participates in a weekly meeting where he & his advisors act as judge, jurors, & executioners as they select people to assassinate around the world, even American citizens.

 

At the risk of being dismissed as just another “conspiracy nut,” I think all these racist attacks against Obama on FOX News may serve the financial elite’s hidden agenda because it keeps the yokels, both the innocently ignorant & the willfully ignorant occupied & focusing their anger on Obama rather than the truly heinous criminal class who are sucking the lifeblood out of America. We have witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the poor, the working class, & the middle class to the obscenely wealthy in the top 1% of our population over the past 30 years or so. The traitors at the top have almost completely eliminated unions, have outsourced almost every manufacturing plant that used to be in America, have gained ever more tax breaks, have made our land, air, & water toxic, and are now focused on getting their bloody talons on Social Security & completely gutting Medicare & privatizing our public education system.

 

By keeping the ignorant public focused on guns & gays & abortion, they have emptied the federal treasury and bankrupted America & turned us into a Third World nation. And the horrific events of 9/11 were the perfect excuse for them to hide their sinister agenda behind. With the passage overnight with no Congressional review & very few even took the time to read it, of The Patriot Act and Homeland Security, they have almost completely eviscerated our Constitution & Bill of Rights. We more closely resemble Stalinist Russia than the America I was born into in the 1950s. We hear the talking heads on television, the political pundits, the politicians, the corporate crocodile C.E.O.s, the televangelist preachers, etc. constantly telling us how great America is and how proud we should be of our soldiers fighting in the steady stream of wars overseas for freedom & democracy right? So then why are so much less free here in America? We are truly living that book by George Orwell “1984” here in the United States in 2013.

 

Again, as Gore Vidal has pointed out, just about every month there is some new enemy of the month and we must again spend billions of dollars fighting this never-ending stream of villains. As they slash our programs that were supposed to act as a Social Safety Net such as Head Start, food stamps, welfare, health care, etc. they keep spending billions & trillions on weapons systems that often don’t work & kill our own soldiers. They lose pallets of money in Iraq. They pay warlords in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of dollars month in, month out for the past decade, those same warlords who also control the poppy fields that produce the majority of the world’s heroin. Yeah, it must be nice to be stupid & not think about all these blatant contradictions & hypocrisies that are going on, but this is why you’re being fucked & losing everything but don’t strain your brain, and don’t be surprised when you join the millions of other homeless haunting the landscape.

We were forced to bail-out the Wall St. wolves and the Banks too big to fail as they stole our homes, our pensions, our health care, our self-respect & dignity but hey, let’s go beat up some gays, some illegals, some Occupy Wall St. protestors because they are the ones causing our pain.

 

If you want to be a “success” in America, it’s really simple, all you have to do is ignore your conscience & be as cutthroat, ruthless, cold-blooded as you can be. Look at Colin Powell who made it up the ranks to the highest position in the military services. He showed the powers that be that he was their boy back in the 1960s when he was sent to investigate the My Lai Massacre and returned a report saying nothing had happened or no wrongdoing had been done. If you’re tired of being ignorant about the Vietnam war, check out a book by Lt. Colonel David L. Hackworth called “About Face.” This guy was a true Audie Murphy and had been wounded more times than is almost believable. He fought in N. Korea, Vietnam, etc. and after a few years of serving in Vietnam, he couldn’t take the lies & the waste of human life anymore and started speaking out and finally resigned in disgust. And Lt. Colonel David L. Hackworth was the most decorated soldier of his time & created and commanded a unit he called ‘Tiger Force’ which used guerrilla warfare tactics to fight against the Vietnamese guerrillas.

 

Furthermore, we have the case of another highly respected officer who tried also to wake up our military commanders in the Pentagon & the political leadership as to the folly of our involvement in Vietnam:

 

John Paul Vann became an adviser to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and, as time went by, increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. In particular, he was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland, and their inability to adapt to the fact that they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed (for example the strategic hamlet relocation) further alienated the population and thus were counterproductive to U.S. objectives. Often he was unable to influence the military command but used the Saigon press corps including Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne to disseminate his views.

The volume begins with a prologue giving an account of Vann’s funeral on June 16, 1972, following his death in a helicopter accident in Vietnam. The author, Sheehan, a personal friend, was present. The subsequent account is divided into seven “books” detailing Vann’s career in Vietnam and America’s involvement in the conflict. Book I tell of Vann’s assignment to Vietnam in 1962. Book II “The Antecedents to a Confrontation” tells of the origin of the Vietnam War. Book III gives a detailed account of the shambolic Battle of Ap Bac on January 2, 1963 in which the South Vietnamese army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong. Book IV details Vann’s criticism of the way the war was being fought, his conflict with the U.S. military command and his transfer back to America. Book V tracks back to give Vann’s personal history before his involvement in the war. In the final chapters, Books VI and VII give an account of Vann’s return to Vietnam in 1965 and his doomed attempt to implement a war winning formula for the beleaguered U.S. army and how he eventually compromised with the military system he once criticized.

(A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam)

 

But of course, if you don’t mind sending your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, or mothers to slaughter or being maimed for life in these wars to make the rich even richer then by all means enjoy your blissful ignorance! Moreover, we are kept in the dark about the epidemic of sexual assaults against not only women in the military services but of men as well. We are also ignorant of the fact that a good percentage of the homeless wandering our streets like ghosts on the landscape are veterans who were used, chewed-up and spit out on the street with little to no assistance by the government who had promised them the world to get them to enlist.

 

As for me, I will continue to speak out, to argue, to scream about the true betrayers of the American promise, the real traitors like the politicians, the top officers in the Pentagon, the corporate cockroaches, & the cowards who crow so brazenly on television. Against the wolves in sheep’s clothing claiming to be Christians as they preach hatred, fear, & call for the murder of those whom they don’t agree with. Against the Bush administration who “leaked” Valerie Plame’s identity but weren’t prosecuted by Obama, the Constitutional law professor. True Christians know that Jesus focused all his time & energy on taking care of the homeless, the sick & disabled, those shunned by society such as the prostitutes, etc. and that he detested the rich for their greed, oppression of the poor, & their apathy. And I know what the true agenda or the motives behind the prosecution of whistleblowers are, it’s to silence the true patriots who sound the alarm warning us, the willfully ignorant, that the power elite are killing America just as surely as an inoperable cancer but under the guise of National Security. But what they mean by National Security is the military/industrial/congressional complex that gives the overwhelming majority of our tax dollars to the already obscenely wealthy while impoverishing the rest of us, the 99% forced to work for slave wages & pay taxes or be imprisoned! I choose to inform myself and will fight to inform others but of course if you prefer to be willingly ignorant, there’s nothing to be done and I feel no sympathy for you as you wither & die!

—Rob DeLoss, Gearhart, Oregon, May 16, 2013

 

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

—Bertrand Russell, winner of the Nobel Prize

 

 

 

           

 

           

           

           

 

           

 

 

The Business of America is Fraud!

a trio of the top insiders who crashed our economy in 2008

Watch the film; “Inside Job” by Charles Fergusson if you give a shit about fraud at the highest levels. The pic above shows (Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under Bush; Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury under Obama). Of course, we mustn’t forget Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, etc. This film won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary & was narrated by Matt Damon. It is about “the systemic corruption of the U.S. by the Financial Services Industry.”

Yes indeed, the business of America is fraud and the higher up the food chain from small companies to megalithic corporations, the more prevalent fraud is & the less likely they will be held accountable for their crimes.

a world of corporate conglomerates & no more sovereign nations

 

I recently spent three months traveling around the state looking for a place to retire & a home to buy. I was looking for a small, used manufactured home, but unfortunately, they’re almost all in trailer park “communities.” And these “communities” like corporations, are private tyrannies as Chomsky has pointed out. I’m not being facetious, each of these “communities” has its own set of rules & regulations and a number of hurdles one must pass for entrance.

 

I was going to pay cash for the home and then have to pay “rent” for the privilege of living in this “community.” Rent usually includes water, sewer, & garbage and an incredible number of restrictions which, if violated, could get you evicted. Most of these “communities” won’t allow you to have a dog or a cat. The few that do allow pets, often tell you what size dog you can have, what breed of dog you can have, etc. And most of these “communities” won’t allow you to park your RV there but will allow you to park them there if you pay an additional fee. I won’t go into the absurd assorted other rules & regulations but it is truly mind-boggling.

 

I was told that my income must be at least three times the rent amount which was going to be $375 per month. I get Social Security and it is several hundred dollars more than this rent amount but because I have a “bad” credit rating, my application was denied. So, I paid $50 to be rejected by the petty tyrant owners of this “community.” The owners are a husband & wife and I dealt with the wife. She tried to persuade me to pay off the debtors who made claims against me which give me the “bad” credit rating. It was all I could do to refrain from screaming nasty epithets at her over the phone.

 

A few days before this rejection, I was in her office going over my application & the notebook full of rules & regulations. I mentioned that I write about politics & she asked whether I was liberal or conservative. I said I’m definitely liberal & she said they were conservative. I responded with yeah, most business owners are conservatives. I had also mentioned that I started collecting my Social Security early because I feared that the GOP would get their hands on it soon & had been trying to do so for decades. She argued that it was democrats who wanted to tax & spend.

Yep! It’s always those damn tax & spend democrats

This is the non-thinking mantra of the so-called “conservatives,” and they’ve been repeating it ad nauseam for decades as well. I was very tempted to ask her, well, tell me, who was it that started the war in Afghanistan which is the longest war America has ever been in & what have we accomplished there.

why we’ve been in perpetual war since WWII

I also wanted to mention that it was again the republicans who started the war based on a pack of lies, in Iraq and we, the taxpayers have been forced to pay a billion dollars a week for all these years to finance these wars but I knew that I should keep my mouth shut & not antagonize the boss so I kept my mouth shut.

and he’s going to reduce the $21 trillion dollar national deficit? Yeah, right!

 

A little later in this enlightening conversation, this petty tyrant informed me that people on food stamps & government assistance are lazy & dependent and don’t want to get off this assistance. Yep, once again it’s clear that those with all the money & privilege see the rest of us as the unwashed masses intent on stealing their hard-earned wealth. Although I was looking forward to settling down in this area because it’s only a few blocks to the ocean & a nice area in Newport, Oregon where I’ve tried several times in the past to get a foothold, it’s probably for the best that I was turned-down. I can only bite my tongue for so long and sooner or later, I probably would’ve told her just how stupid she is.

 

I use this personal experience to highlight the bigger picture of what’s happening all across America i.e. a return to debtor’s prison. Charles Dickens is revered by many scholars as being on an equal level, if not superior to, William Shakespeare. And I believe he has attained this degree of respect largely because of his vivid portrayals of the down & out in England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. And this “revolution” has clearly run its course in America and the so-called “First World” nations & has now moved on to the “developing nations.”

King Trump’s economic plan for the 99%

 

Dickens’ own father was imprisoned in a debtor’s prison & this is why his son could write so powerfully about the degrading & devastating effects of this relatively modern phenomenon. I have also experienced the horrors of growing up poor in America because my mom basically raised four children by herself & worked two or three jobs for a good part of her life in her struggle to keep us out of the gutter. This is why I have spent the last 30 years or better teaching myself about politics, economics, history, etc. And this is why my writing is often passionate & full of anger.

and Trump fans just ask that he uses Vaseline before proceeding

 

Don’t worry my friend, I haven’t forgotten what this essay is supposed to be about i.e. fraud & private tyrannies. In our so-called “advanced” society, the corporate cockroaches have only refined their methods of oppressing us & keeping us under their thumbs. As I said, in today’s world & in America, the home of the free, if you want to rent an apartment or a house, etc. you must not only pass a credit check but also a criminal background check. Imagine if they required all politicians and CEOs of corporations to do likewise?

 

And not only does this apply when seeking a roof over your head, it is also becoming the standard when applying for a job & they often require that you pass a drug test as well. The 99% in the United States of America, you know, all us suckers & victims who are forced to pay the taxes that enrich the wealthy or face prison, are trapped in an ever-smaller vicious circle. This circle or cycle is like a noose around a prisoner’s neck that is slowly tightening around their throat & it’s a Catch-22 from which there is little to no way to escape.

 

If you’re part of the 1%, you got there because you’re either a sociopath or a psychopath. But, if you have any semblance of compassion or empathy, you realize that many, if not most of our most vulnerable citizens i.e. the homeless, the working poor, the shrinking middle class, etc. often turn to drugs & alcohol as a means of temporary escape and/or relief from this nightmare we’re engulfed in. I believe pot is the drug of choice for most of us & I believe it’s relatively harmless in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, pot stays in our systems far longer than the more harmful drugs like crack, meth, heroin, etc. I’m not excusing those who commit violent crimes against others but if we truly gave a damn about crime in terms of the devastating personal toll it has on us as individuals, as families, and as a society, we would lock-up most of the corporate CEOs in this country.

the true face of crime in America, the untouchable super bankers

 

Reflect on this if you will, try to name a single, major corporation that hasn’t been guilty of defrauding its customers/consumers at least once? Most of the corporate behemoths have been charged with fraud repeatedly yet they are still allowed to go on doing business as usual. And to rub salt in the wound, they don’t even have to admit guilt in a court of law. They are occasionally required to pay a small fine relative to the amount of profit they made from their fraudulent practices. Yet, if you or I write a “bad check,” because we’re down & out and are just trying to feed our family and we’re out of work, we’re sent to jail or today’s “debtor’s prison.”

The Land of Opportunity for Corporate Cockroaches

 

Speaking of prison, are you aware of how profitable cheap, prison labor has become in this land of the free? Moreover, Walmart which is touted as the largest & most profitable retail business in the world, uses mostly prison labor & a de facto slave labor force from China. I believe that most of us have become desensitized to the fact that advertising, like it’s cousin, public relations (P.R.), a powerful tool of the politicians & the business class, is the art of lying or fraud in all its malevolent glory.

the president who made a career out of fraud

 

So, corporations are freely & legally allowed and encouraged to lie, cheat, steal, & manipulate us. They’re allowed to poison us with their GMO foods, their contamination of our air, water, & land. They’re partners with the politicians who are their high paid whores i.e. Dick Cheney & Halliburton and use their high paid PR whores to dupe us into wars of aggression i.e. Iraq. Our poor & desperate citizens who see no way out of their misery & poverty and fall for the military propaganda, reluctantly join the military & risk their lives and sanity in the never-ending stream of wars. And when they return, often with a limb missing & serious mental issues, they are denied benefits or receive pitiful care, in terms of the quality of assistance available to them. By the way, remember our reverence for the law in this nation based on Law & Order, and our reverence for business? Then why is it that contracts we sign, like the contracts I signed with telecom corporations who defrauded me, are airtight for us and can have such significant impact on our lives as for example in causing me to be denied residence in the trailer court I applied to, but when the military invents their policy of “Stop Gap,” they are free to break the contract you sign when you join a branch of the military? A soldier, whose tour of duty is complete & their spirit is soaring with the anticipation of returning home is told, sorry, we need you & you’re going to do another tour. Some poor souls have been forced to do three or four more tours of duty than they signed up for.

the only escape from the corporate cockroaches

 

For these and oh so many other reasons are why I say that the business of America is fraud. It’s a sad & truly horrifying Brave New World the corporate cockroaches & their lackeys in Washington D.C. have created for us. You may believe that if you play by all their rules & zealously pay all your bills, no matter how many of them are fraudulent, that you may escape the nightmares I describe but you are only deluding yourself. How many horror stories have you heard of people who were obedient & quiet all their lives only to retire & discover their pensions had been stolen by their corporate executives, their health coverage they were guaranteed for life was wiped-out, etc.? I have been spitting in the wind most of my adult life & I know that I’m probably little more than a modern-day Don Quixote but I also believe to the marrow of my bones that it’s better to die standing than to live on my knees!

 

—Rob DeLoss, Newport, Oregon (January 21st, 2015)

 

P.S.  I forgot to point out that because of my “bad credit” rating, I am now forced back into renting an apt. where I must jump through all the same unfair & outrageous requirements and if I disturb a neighbor by playing my music too loud if I’ve had a bit too much to drink for example, I face eviction. We face ever more outrageous rent prices & are de facto prisoners in our own homes. We are de facto all living in debtor’s prisons, it’s just that some have bars on the windows while others don’t. I confess though that I’m seriously considering abandoning ship i.e. leaving America for good and seeking asylum, spiritually speaking, in some other country where there is the possibility of owning my own home & peacefully retiring with fewer fascists dictating when I must shit, go to sleep, etc.

this is the truth behind the “free market” myth

 

Addendum

 

Well it appears that I did lose track of the central point I wanted to make regarding “bad credit.” I did mention this to the petty tyrant who rejected my application for becoming a resident of her luxurious (sarcasm intended) trailer court, though. Charles Ferguson pointed out in the brilliant documentary that he wrote, produced, & directed, “Inside Job,” that just a few days before the world-wide, economic collapse of 2008, the three major credit rating agencies in America gave the “Super Banks,” and many, if not most, of the hedge fund firms, the insurance giant, A.I.G., etc. triple A or at least double A ratings. The petty tyrant’s response when I told her this was “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.” So, in other words she didn’t grasp the connection or the point that I was trying to make i.e. the big boys can tank the economy of the world & cause tens of millions of people to lose their jobs, their homes, & their life savings but you’re going to reject me because I refused to pay my “bill” to a few of the telecoms who defrauded me? This is the world we live in my friends & this is what passes for justice in this corporate cockroach infested society of ours! By the way, my mom worked for AT&T for 36 years but when she died, they kept denying that she had a pension. My aunt was co-executor with me though & she refused to give up and after months of persistent phone calls, my aunt got through to an honest employee there who told us, yeah, there’s $39,000 in a pension account.

Perhaps this is Trump’s “end game” i.e. he, the corporate cockroach master will survive Armageddon?

The Art of Manipulation

 

 

 

We are gradually morphing into a fascist society, yep, right here in the land of freedom & democracy. Fear mongering, exaggeration, being an alarmist, you say? A third of the American public believe that Trump is the populist champion of their dreams & he uses these tactics and many more and they believe him yet the majority of them most likely would dismiss my argument here? Okay, for those of you who are still able & willing to read an essay that’ll require 15 minutes of your time, here’s an overview of the subject for you.

It Can’t Happen Here, Right???

 

Most people are aware of the fact that Freud was the father of modern psychology but did you know that his nephew, Edward Bernays, was the father of the public relations industry or as we usually refer to it, the PR industry? There’s an old saying, “Advertising is what you pay for & Publicity is what you pray for.” Well Bernays soon became the darling of New York’s elite circle of businessmen because of his skillful use of his uncle’s insights into human behavior in his P.R. campaigns for many, if not most of the major corporations of his time. (by-the-way, Bernays published a book in 1928, its title was “Propaganda.”) 

 

And to give you an example of just how pernicious & powerful the P.R. industry became, let’s take a look at how he helped to make it acceptable for women to smoke cigarettes. Before this PR assault on America, it was considered a social taboo for women to smoke;

 

After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not publicly acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up “torches of freedom” during the parade to show they were equal to men. Like the “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads, this campaign commodified women’s progress and desire to be considered equal to men

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smokin  (by-the-way, Bernays hired dozens of young, beautiful women fashion models to play the part of female rebels defying social conventions).

 

Evidently, Bernays had stumbled upon the golden formula that generated millions in profits for the corporate cockroach class i.e. employing psychological appeals in their advertising & P.R. campaigns. By manipulating peoples’ fears & desires, corporations could sell their products that people didn’t need & condition them to want or desire the products which would serve as symbols of their elevated class status & thereby enhance their self-image. Need I illustrate? Look at all the car ads that show beautiful women flocking around a guy in a fancy sports car for example.

tell me again how different we are from Russia?

 

Well, as the 20th century rolled on, so did the power of corporations until the point we’re at today where these corporations are more powerful (in terms of wealth & influence) than many nations;

Walmart

Exxon Mobil

Royal Dutch Shell

Apple

Samsung

Amazon

Microsoft

Nestle

Google

 

And this is just a partial list. Let this sink in for a minute if you will? Private corporations so rich & powerful that they hire armies of lobbyists to seduce politicians into writing legislation that further increases their profits, protects them from lawsuits, provides them with millions & billions in tax subsidies for research & development, allows them to use the public infrastructure (highways, bridges, ports, airports, etc.) to conduct their business and most of these behemoth corporations pay little to no taxes—some even get back millions & billions in their tax returns.

What did our soldiers die for???

 

If this doesn’t morally outrage you, you are either a member of the corporate cockroach class or are a sociopathic narcissist like Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan. By-the-way, Donny is a great admirer of authoritarians & dictators in case you haven’t noticed; (Saddam Hussein, Putin, Kim Jong Un of N. Korea, Mussolini, Gadhafi, 1980s Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping of China, Duterte of the Philippines, President Erdogan of Turkey, Egyptian President el-Sisi, the Saudis, & Brazil’s new president, Boisonaro. And Trump not only admires these murderous authoritarians & dictators, he envies them & wishes he could be America’s authoritarian like the role he played on The Apprentice “reality” T.V. program. Note; Trump insisted that as part of his contract with the producers of that absurd show that every time his name was mentioned on the show, they had to also say that he was a billionaire. Talk about manipulating his public image, are you beginning to take my point?

So this is defending freedom & democracy?

 

Moreover, speaking of Trump’s admiration of Mussolini, some have credited Mussolini with saying;

 

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”

 

I know how die-hard most of Trump’s “base” is but I am a proudly stubborn (determination undisciplined) Irishman & I don’t give up easily either so here’s a sampling of the mountain of evidence proving Trump a malignant, greedy, megalomaniac:

 

*Trump consistently attacks peoples’ characters when he can’t refute their argument

*he’s a non-stop braggart i.e. I’m the smartest, I’m the best, I’m the greatest negotiator, etc. etc. etc.

*his biggest lie is his wealth & that’s why he will never reveal his tax returns

*he’s intentionally vague so he can deny having said what he’s said because his words are often open to a variety of interpretations

*he’s been exaggerating his wealth, his popularity, his skills, etc. his entire life

*he minimizes others so he can exaggerate his own significance

*he is fond of making false equivalences

*he likes to use the lesser of two evils argument (which is bogus)

*repetition ad nauseam is one of his favorite deceptive tactics i.e. I am the most famous president ever, the most successful real estate developer in New York City, etc. etc. etc.

*Scapegoating was his lead-off in his presidential campaign i.e. Mexicans are rapists, murderers, etc. & he blames everyone except himself for everything that doesn’t go his way

*Emotional Appeals—a favorite tactic used by dictators throughout history i.e. Hitler’s constant claim that the Jews were behind all of Germany’s problems (using fear, guilt, & calls for loyalty to him)

*Bandwagon—everyone else is doing it, so why not me or we

*Black & White/Either-Or; it’s us against the democrats

Burden of Proof—trying to turn the tables & demand his accusers prove their credibility rather than answer a question

*false flattery—try to flatter your opponent to keep them from attacking you

*Incredulity—I am offended that you would even ask me such a question

*labeling—any journalist who criticizes him or disagrees with him is with the “fake press”

*Ridicule/Mocking—his shameful mocking of handicapped guy during one of his rallies

*slippery slope—if we don’t stop the illegal immigrants, we’ll soon be overrun by terrorists, etc.

*Dehumanizing—something Trump has a particular talent for especially when it comes to anyone who dares to say a bad word about him

*Slogans—replacement for serious thought i.e. America, love it or leave it

 

I could easily provide you with hundreds if not thousands of examples of Trump’s manipulative techniques/tactics but I realize that no matter how much proof I provide, Trump supporters aren’t open to logic or rational thought but are ruled by their passions & Trump is a master at pushing peoples’ emotional buttons in order to win them over. So, why should I waste my time talking to the willfully ignorant or rather trying to persuade them to reflect & trust their own judgment rather than the circus master Trump the Vile?

Trump as Jim Jones & the kind of loyalty Trump expects

 

I am providing a public service that some may seriously consider or may pass it on to some of those who haven’t drunk the Jim Jones Kool Aid yet, and that is my only solace. And in that spirit, here are the eight signs of malignant narcissism, and if you dare, see if any of them are accurate reflections of Donald the psychopathic narcissist:

 

  1. Sense of entitlement
  2. Lack of conscience and empathy
  3. Sadistic streak
  4. Egocentrism
  5. Grandiosity (I am the greatest, smartest, richest, etc.)
  6. Paranoia (it’s a witch hunt by the democrats)
  7. Manipulative nature
  8. They project their bad behavior onto others

 

In conclusion and to prove that this isn’t merely a one-sided attack on “republicans,” Obama bears a large part of the responsibility for Trump becoming president. In fact, Obama was so good at his “bait & switch” tactic that he used on us to persuade us that he was going to be the champion of “Hope & Change,” that his campaign for his first term as president won two awards at the Cannes Festival for Advertising:

 

“The campaign that drove Barack Obama to victory in the US presidential election has claimed two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards.

The campaign, submitted by Obama for America, has been hailed as a masterful combination of new media, door-to-door and community grass roots campaigning with a clever tactical use of traditional TV advertising.

The campaign won two grands prix in the Titanium and Integrated Lions categories.”

 

Yep! Obama swore up & down and everywhere he went that he was going to enact real changes, be the transparent president, etc. and what did he do within the first few weeks of his presidency? He appointed several of the top Wall St. wolves to the most powerful positions regarding our national economy i.e. Summers, Geitner, Bernanke, etc. And right then & there I knew I had been suckered just like the millions of other Americans. I detested all the racial attacks on him & Trump barely concealed his own racist campaign against Obama with his “birther” issue which he beat the drums for ad nauseam. But Obama’s refusal to prosecute the Wall St. culprits, the “Super Bankers” who were “Too Big to Fail & Too Big to Jail,” his war on Whistleblowers, etc. etc. etc. only fanned the flames of anger in America which should rightfully be directed at the corporate cockroach class because the politicians are merely the willing tools of these creatures who have no loyalty to America whatsoever. Look into how Obama sold out the residents of Flint with stunt pretending the water was safe to drink. Obama the Oreo President!

 

And Trump with his appeal to peoples’ fears and hate using his racism, bigotry, & the other techniques I listed above, managed to slink into the oval office. I recently permanently deleted my Facebook account for several reasons but a significant factor was that every time I criticized Obama, many so-called Progressives came unglued and practically accused me of being a. troll for Trump. Yep! A sad reflection of the myopia on the Left that just like the so-called conservatives who are blind to the crimes of their party, are willfully blind to the crimes & betrayals of the democratic party.

Lastly, what should really worry us all is what my intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky has been warning us about for quite some time now i.e. the catastrophic, perhaps already irreversible destruction of our climate or environment. Exxon Mobil & several of the other oil & natural gas conglomerates have spent millions, perhaps billions pushing their fake news sowing the seeds of doubt about climate change. Of course, Donald Duck is doing his part by claiming it’s all an elaborate Chinese hoax. In this Alice in Wonderland World where Trump is the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, and can start a nuclear war in a childish fit which he is notorious for, we should all be quaking in our boots!

May we persevere!

Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA 1/28/19

 

P.S.  It must be a sign of old age but I forgot some juicy tidbits regarding Trump that I want to include. Trump’s supposed War against the “Fake News Media” would be laughable if it weren’t so destructive of a vital institution in any democracy. Moreover, where would Trump be if it weren’t for all the free media coverage he received in his campaign for the presidency—some estimate over $5 billion while Bernie got a tiny fraction of coverage. Trump learned from his slimy mentor, Roy Cohn, that any media attention i.e. publicity is good whether it’s scandalous or not because it keeps you in the public eye. Cohn’s “wisdom” which Trump assimilated into his very DNA was “to always hit back & never apologize.” You see, Trump’s “brand” is his most prized possession because he sells his brand i.e. logo, all around the world & people pay him millions to use his logo. Sadly, far too many Trump supporters believe that everything that has Trump’s name on it, is owned by him. And once again we witness just how destructive advertising & public relations can be.

Addendum

 

Oh yeah, another minor little detail i.e. our government launches P.R. campaigns to “motivate” us to go into wars. The Iraq War is one of the most blatant campaigns of lies to date. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al spent weeks & months going on the Sunday morning talk shows warning us what a threat to our freedom & democracy the Iraqis were, how they had weapons of mass destruction, etc. and it was all proven to be a grand conspiracy of lies afterwards but not a single one of these war criminals was held accountable. In fact, Cheney got rich off the war because his stock in Halliburton went through the roof because they just “coincidentally” were awarded the lion’s shares of the contracts for supplying our troops & rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure but neglected to do most of what they got paid for. And oh yeah, billions of dollars went missing, but what the hell? Moreover, the New York Times, the supposed bastion of liberal thought in America, beat the war drums every bit as loudly as FOX “News.” So, to some extent, Trump is right about the fake news of several of our “news outlets” but he clearly uses this label in his pathetic attempts to silence all his critics. Let’s see, officially we lost 4,486 military personnel & 32,226 casualties but if you dig deeper you’ll discover that our casualties are much closer to half a million if you count PTSD, depression, heart & breathing problems, etc. etc. etc.

 

And can you tell me again why we’ve been in Afghanistan now longer than any other war in U.S. history? Well, as Calvin Coolidge said, “the business of America is business.” Or to put it more bluntly, Welcome to Amerika, where the Corporate Cockroaches Rule!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Clear & Present Danger

Clear and present danger was a doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States to determine under what circumstances limits can be placed on First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, or assembly.”

I borrowed the title for my essay from the movie of the same name with Harrison Ford as the star of the film. With Trump’s mind-boggling press conference performance last week, it has become clear for all to see, except for the willfully blind of course, this guy is obviously a can or two short of a full six-pack. And his incessant berating of the press is of concern for many like myself who fear what may be ahead for us if Trump succeeds in muzzling the free press.

That is to say, Trump represents a sort of apex of the forces threatening our national well-being & by extension, the well-being of the planet because of our military & economic power. The confluence of the far right “Christians’” political agenda & the secular, “free market conservatives” has reached its “promised land.” Trump clearly chose Mike Pence as his vice-president in order to win the support of the massive Christian Right and it doesn’t bother the hypocritical “Christian” Right that Trump is just about as far from a Christian as it is possible to get unless he were an avowed Satanist.

Just as the Christian Right has been screaming for freedom to have prayer in public schools, the freedom to outlaw abortion in America, the right to censor books in our schools, to censor T.V., movies, etc., to control women’s bodies, etc., those free market fundamentalists have been calling for the complete elimination of all laws that regulate their business practices and having to pay a single dollar in city, state, or federal taxes. You may feel that I’m exaggerating here but if you had been following these forces as I have over the past 30 years, you’d see that I’m definitely not exaggerating.

As far as these “religious” believers are concerned, Secular Humanism is their number one enemy & it’s synonymous with drug-induced, wild, pagan orgies worshipping the Devil. For their supposed “clean” minds, these guys are pretty out there. And their ceaseless pursuit of power over the rest of us is always hidden behind a call for religious freedom & a plea that the rest of us stop waging our war on religion.

On the other hand, their crime partners in business have long whined that they are being stifled & can’t compete against the rest of the world economically because of all the oppressive government regulations that hold them back i.e. workers’ rights, health & safety on the job, etc. The Great Depression which threw one out of every four workers in America out of a job & forced millions of men to wander the country in search of work and split-up millions of families, the Savings & Loan Scandal which happened under that darling of the liberals, Jimmy Carter & was allowed to go on unabated under Reagan and which cost us, the taxpayers; “ In 1996, the General Accounting Office estimated the total cost to be $160 billion, including $132.1 billion taken from taxpayers.[2][3]

The deregulation of S&Ls in 1980, by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act signed by PresidentJimmy Carter on March 31, 1980, gave them many of the capabilities of banks without the same regulations as banks, without explicit FDIC oversight.

Yep, good ol’ Jimmy Carter, the simple country boy and good Christian. Of course we must’n forget good ol “Kenny boy” as that other devout Christian, George W. Bush liked to call him. And Kenny boy appreciated his buddy Georgie, the Coward from Crawford so much that he allowed Georgie to fly around the country on Enron’s private jet for his political campaigning for the presidency.

“While all this was occurring, the US Government and other public agencies continued to advocate for Enron, threatening poor countries like Mozambique with an end to aid if they did not accept Enron’s bid on a natural gas field. Enron was so intertwined with the US Government in many people’s minds that they assumed, as the late Croatian strongman Franjo Tjudman did, that pleasing Enron meant pleasing the White House. For Tjudman, he hoped that compliance with an overpriced Enron contract might parlay into an array of political favors, from softer treatment at The Hague’s War Crimes Tribunal to the entry of his country into the World Trade Organization.” http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=2279

Of course when Kenny boy & Enron were circling the drain, Bush claimed that he hardly knew Ken Lay, you know, another one of those “Christian” values i.e. abandon friends as soon as they’re in trouble. And you might recall that in one of the presidential debates when Georgie was asked who his favorite philosopher was, he said, Jesus Christ. My point here is that Enron represented just how dangerous it is when corporations & the government are so intricately intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish between where one’s interest leaves off and the other’s begins i.e. Goldman Sachs and it’s role in the world-wide economic collapse of 2008 & it’s overwhelming presence in our Treasury Department. Oh yeah, Hank Paulson, is another good “Christian,” a Christian Scientist.

Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Xerox, etc., what do they and so many other corporate cockroaches have in common? That belief in the free market, well in their definition of the free market which is government subsidies for their research & development but not having to share their profits once that research starts paying off i.e. the invention of the Internet mostly paid for from funding by the Pentagon & the research done at M.I.T., tax shelters, tax breaks, all our infrastructure that we, the taxpayers pay for i.e. roads, highways, bridges, airports, ports, police protection, military protection overseas as they’re invading one country after another so they can steal their natural resources, etc. all in the name of freedom. Yet when it comes to paying their taxes, their money is invested in the Cayman Islands, etc. and isn’t subject to being taxed?

Of course when the corporations that I mentioned above and oh so many others, get busted for fraud, theft, lying, massive pollution of our ecosystem, etc. every now & then, the first thing we hear out of their mouths is that, “Oh, it was just a few bad apples.” Yeah, and coincidentally, when those T.V. evangelists get busted for stealing their congregations’ donations, living like jet-setters, paying prostitutes, etc., yep, “just a few more bad apples.” (Jim & Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, etc.)

Evidently, these aren’t aberrations in business or in the religion industry, no, they’re sadly the norm. And in my opinion, this is why our founding fathers made sure to have a separation of Church & State because they knew from history & from being students of the Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason;[1] in French: le Siècle des Lumières, lit. ‘the Century of Lights’; and inGerman: Aufklärung, ‘Enlightenment’)[2] was an intellectual movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe in the 18th century. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and came to advance ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance,fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.[3][4] In France, the central doctrines of les Lumières were individual liberty and religious tolerance in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of theRoman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on thescientific method and reductionism along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy – an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude, “Dare to know”.[5]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

Our founding fathers were landowners & men of great wealth and sadly, slaveowners as well but moreover, they were also men with a great love of learning. And obviously, Donald Trump is a mental midget or not even in the same galaxy as them when it comes to intellectual prowess. Here’s a fragment of U.S. history that you may or may not be aware of;

“During the War of 1812, British forces entered Washington, D.C., burning the Capitol building and the 3,000-volume library inside it. Writing to Samuel Harrison Smith in September 1814, Jefferson expressed his particular distress at this loss: “I learn from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the public library with the noble edifice in which it was deposited.”1 Recognizing that it would be difficult for Congress to replace the library that had been lost, given the war and the difficulty of procuring items from Europe, Thomas Jefferson offered up his large personal library to Congress.” https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/sale-books-library-congress-1815

Now normally I’m not a betting man but I’d be willing to bet you that if Trump has any books in any of his homes/apartments, they are probably Reader’s Digest Condensed Books & a collection of every magazine that has his picture or name mentioned in it and oh yeah, The National Enquirer. But all kidding aside, the so-called Christians that have jockeying for position & power within our political system for decades if not longer, have always felt that our secular government’s respect for intellect & belief in public education for all our citizens was a threat. Why? Because they are so insecure in their professed beliefs and people, like our founding fathers, who appreciate the wisdom that comes from a deep study of classic literature, history, philosophy, political science, theology, etc. aren’t so easily manipulated into belief in the authoritarianism of much of theological belief. And just as those televangelists & pastors of the mega-churches who want blind faith, the majority of organized religions see it as their holy duty to do everything they can to undermine public education.

Unfortunately for us as Americans and for the rest of the world again by extension because of our military empire, Trump, the Babbling Baboon & Buffoon who has conned his way into the White House won in his appointment of Betsy DeVos as our Secretary of Education. And DeVos represents those two sinister forces of which I speak i.e. the phony Christian whose goal is destroy public education & the free market fundamentalist who married into the Amway Corporation, you know, the legalized Ponzi scheme sanctioned by the government. Betsy knows absolutely nothing about public education, and neither she nor her children have ever attended a public school. She is clearly a part of that Christian far right organizations that have been steadily working against public education in the U.S. for decades.

Furthermore, Betsy’s brother is none other than the infamous, Erik Prince who heads one of the largest mercenary contractor agencies in the, well it used to be in the U.S. but then Erik felt the need to move to the U.A.E. (United Arab Emirates) because he & his organization, Blackwater, were under investigation & indictment for war crimes. You see, Erik is the perfect embodiment of John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” in that he loves killing Muslims in the service of the lord and making a pretty penny while at it.

Please excuse the interruption but I need to return to the separation of church & state issue briefly. While I confess (pun intended) that my study of history has been piecemeal i.e. I haven’t studied it formally in college but rather on my own by reading a variety of histories but my contention is that some of the most calamitous times in human history were when the church & state worked in unison i.e. the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Christian missionaries spreading their faith around the globe, etc.

Undeniably, America’s unequivocal support for Israel both militarily & politically has been the source of much of the tension in the Middle East and with our completely unnecessary attack & occupation of Iraq, we have stirred-up a hornet’s nest that is not likely to subside for decades. There is much debate on our motivations for invading Iraq but I feel that one would have to willfully ignorant to deny that oil was perhaps the overriding reason for it. Of course there’s also the geopolitical strategy of having a “foothold” in that region of the world & naturally “our” leaders trot out the tired, old worn-out pretense of, “We’re bringing democracy & freedom to them.” But it’s important to not lose track of the fact that many, if not most, in the Christian far right were also cheering & pushing for this modern day crusade for Christ.

Perhaps this is a good point at which to remind you of dear, old Georgie, the Coward from Crawford’s enabling of the Christian Right when he was in office?

The concept of the faith-based initiative, a political idea put forth by George W. Bush (in the United States), involved the U.S. federal government giving money to religious organizations in order that they would do the government’s work in caring for the poor, endangered, and troubled. Bush claimed that these initiatives could somehow work more efficiently than regular government agencies, an assertion that remains unproven bullshit. In order to implement this program, an executive order established a new government agency, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), soon after Bush’s inauguration.”  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Faith-based_initiative

In other words, Georgie, like Donny, just ignore the U.S. Constitution whenever it suits their agenda. That document to which all politicians, military personnel, etc. swear an oath to protect & uphold against all enemies foreign, and domestic, is simply cast aside whenever it’s not politically expedient to these craven bastards! Yet strangely, we often hear them pontificating in front of the cameras as to how deeply they respect the rule of law & order? Isn’t that interesting? In other words, whenever our laws are inconvenient for them, they can simply disregard them but if you or I try disregarding the laws, well, I don’t have to tell you what happens to us. So by signing this “initiative” into law, Georgie Dubya scored a helluva lot of brownie points with his hypocritical “Christian” base just as Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan is busy doing now. Why do I use the word “klan” in describing Donny, the girly-man with the small hands? Because the KKK and the skin-heads are besides themselves with joy in that they’ve finally got one of their own in the White House & they too, consider themselves good Christians. This by the way, is also what Charles Manson had hoped for & was trying to instigate with the murders he ordered in the 1960s. He was salivating at the thought of starting a race war in which the poor, oppressed whites would rise-up and slaughter all the blacks & other undesirables which he feared & detested.

To return to Georgie’s & Obama the Oreo’s “faith-based initiative,” these good “Christians” now ensconced in various departments of our federal government, had this to say;

The second head of the department, Jim Towey, in a session of “Ask the Whitehouse” dated November 26, 2003, stated in regard to a question about pagan faith-based organizations:

“I haven’t run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor! Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can’t be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.”[13]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Faith-Based_and_Neighborhood_Partnerships

Of course, “pagans,” another code word for Secular Humanists, couldn’t possibly care about the poor, the suffering, the destitute homeless, etc. because they’re too busy indulging in orgies & dancing naked in the woods at midnight like some of my ancient, ancestors, the Druids, the original tree huggers. No, we’re suppose to rely on the good-natured, “Compassionate Conservatives” whom Dubya proclaimed the Repubican party to be, for not only our physical well-being but also our spiritual well-being. I mean, isn’t it obvious how deeply they care about us? Okay, I know that I’m getting side-tracked as per usual so I’ll try to wrap-up this “digression” to a certain extent.

On the other hand, we are in serious danger once again thanks to the free market fundamentalists. Let me first introduce you to Brooksley Born, who graduated at the top of her class at Stanford Law School and whom Bill Clinton interviewed for the position of attorney general in his cabinet. He felt she was too boring though so he appointed her as the head of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), a little agency with little authority & even smaller respect among the financial superstars like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, & Larry Summers—all die-hard, free market fundamentalists. Greenspan had served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve under five presidents & was a rock star in economics so-to-speak. And Greenspan was an unabashed devotee of Ayn Rand, the Queen of Selfish, a libertarian who was an ardent free market champion and opponent of regulations. She was noted for her philosophy “Objectivism,” (because they object to everything except what makes the wealthy wealthier, sorry my pun) “the central tenets of it are strong self-reliance, the right of the rich to ride roughshod over everyone, and a hatred of those who take government money.” If you’re around my age, you might recall Reagan’s denunciations of what he called “Welfare Queens” i.e. an imaginary black woman who drove her Cadillac to the welfare office to collect her checks. If only the public knew of Ayn Rand the welfare hypocrite who for the last eight years of her life collected Social Security & Medicare benefits because she was dying of lung cancer but they kept it a secret.

Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to politics over the last several years is clearly aware of the hundreds, if not thousands of ways the politicians, who speak for the wealthy, have been attacking all the programs of the Social Safety Net that FDR enacted to help the vast majority of the public who had suffered so terribly during the Great Depression. In fact, the con-servatives have been waging a steady war to destroy them ever since they first came into being.

To return to Brooksley Born, she became concerned about the trading of the OTC (Over The Counter) derivatives that were off the books i.e. next to nothing was known about them aka “a black box” in which over $27 trillion worth of these derivatives was being traded. Brooksley kept appealing all the way up the chain of command, so-to-speak, for the authority to regulate & learn about these derivatives but was ignored & dismissed. She raised such a fuss that Rubin, Greenspan, & Summers clamped down on her hard even though a year earlier her fears were realized;

“In 1998, a trillion-dollar hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was near collapse. Using mathematical models to calculate debt risk, LTCM used derivatives to leverage $5 billion into more than $1 trillion, doing business with fifteen of Wall Street’s largest financial institutions. The derivative transactions were not regulated, nor were investors able to evaluate LTCM’s exposures. Born stated, “I thought that LTCM was exactly what I had been worried about”. In the last weekend of September 1998, the President’s working group was told that the entire American economy hung in the balance. After intervention by the Federal Reserve, the crisis was averted.” [the crisis was averted because the Federal Reserve commanded the Super Banks to come up with the necessary capital to bail-out the LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) corporation]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born

Yet due to the arrogance of Rubin, Summers, Greenspan and the overwhelming majority of the financial experts, Brooksley continued to be ignored & dismissed with condescending comments inferring that she just wasn’t sophisticated enough to comprehend these complex “instruments.” The final straw for Brooksley came a year later when she was called before Congress and basically told to shut-up and that her agency had no authority to regulate these derivatives. She resigned in protest in 1999 and need I tell you what happened in 2008? And what does our illustrious girly-man with a fondness for twitter and avoidance of presidential briefings have in mind? You got it, deregulate every industry in America and his cabinet picks are just the ones for the job. Are you beginning to take my point regarding Donald as a clear and present danger to America?

More importantly, if the Duck Dynasty doesn’t cause our economy to implode first, he & his hawks are salivating at the thought of attacking Iran, the only nation on his list of seven nations that he’s attempting to ban their refugees from entering America that hasn’t been destroyed yet due to our drone warfare program started under Georgie & expanded under Obama. Yep, these seven nations (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Sudan, & Yemen) coincidentally have been bombed repeatedly by us and even though we’ve never been a target of a terrorist attack by any citizens of these countries, Donny says we must keep them out? What does that tell you? Could it be an acknowledgement that if anyone has a right to be pissed-off at us it is the citizens of these nations? And even though 15 of the 19 hijackers who hit us on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, they’re still our ally and we sell them billions of dollars worth of military weapons.

Perhaps a brief refresher course in why the Iranian people hate America would be appropriate here? In 1953, Prime Minister Mosaddegh of Iran got the outrageous idea that his country should receive a lot more of the profits from its oil than the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (a U.K. corporation) which changed its name a year later to British Petroleum (B.P.) and because the British & the Americans didn’t think this a good idea, their prime minister nationalized their oil industry. Well, this ticked-off our corporate cockroaches so they sent in our C.I.A. which was just learning its trade-craft of instigating coups, assassinating world leaders, etc. and via bribes, etc. we managed the overthrow of Mosaddegh and installed the Shah who was much more amenable to bribes. Well, he wasn’t such a nice guy so we trained his secret police who terrorized the Iranian people up to 1979 when the Iranians had finally had enough so they had a revolution & the Shah headed for the hills. Well, we being such good guys, more specifically, Henry Kissinger felt sorry for the poor, multi-millionaire Shah whom no one else seemed to want & persuaded Carter to allow the Shah to come to America for medical treatment. And Carter had been warned that if the U.S. allowed the Shah to enter the U.S., the American Embassy in Tehran might be taken hostage but as usual, old Henry could be very persuasive and voila, our embassy’s people were taken hostage and held for over a year. I’m going to go out on a limb here & suggest that gee, perhaps the Iranians have a legitimate right to be angry & distrustful of the American government?

Continuing on but leaving the subject of history & bringing up current events, Trump has already expressed his desire to go back and do over our war in Iraq and take their oil and with that horrific possibility in mind, I want to share with you, a military historian whom I have great respect for:

Andrew J. Bacevich, Sr. (born July 5, 1947) is an American historianspecializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.[1] He is also a retired career officer in the Armor Branch of the United States Army, retiring with the rank of Colonel. He is a former director of Boston University’s Center for International Relations (from 1998 to 2005), now part of the Pardee School of Global Studies.[1]

Bacevich has been “a persistent, vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling the conflict a catastrophic failure.”[2] In March 2007, he described George W. Bush‘s endorsement of such “preventive wars” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.”

Colonel Bacevich graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1969 and served in the United States Armyduring the Vietnam War, serving in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971…..He holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, and taught at West Pointand Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998.

On May 13, 2007, Bacevich’s son, Andrew John Bacevich, was killed in action in Iraq by an improvised explosive device south of Samarra in Salah ad Din Governorate.[8] The younger Bacevich, 27, was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army,[9] assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division….. (Wikipedia entry) [excuse the appearance of bragging but Colonel Bacevich was gracious enough to read my lengthy essay, The Politics of Patriotism when I sent it to him last May & he was also generous in the compliment he paid me—not many people, friends included, have been willing to do so]

In short, Colonel Bacevich is far from being the only scholar who thinks that an attack on Iran would be absolute madness & if you haven’t had a chance to watch the documentary, “Zero Days,” may I suggest that you make a point of doing so because it’s very eye-opening in that it reveals that due to the collusion of the U.S. & Israel and the insertion of a malware virus dubbed “Stuxnet,” which went undetected for quite some time & allowed us to sabotage the Iranians’ nuclear power processing plant, they discovered it & duplicated it and they too now can disrupt & destroy our infrastructure (communications systems, power systems, water filtration, etc.). Let that soak in for a minute and try to imagine what that could do to our economy even if only for a day let alone weeks or months. Unless you’re a Trump fan in which case, you’re probably not reading this essay anyway, you realize how seriously ignorant he is and the thought of this egomaniac having the ability to launch us into a war with Iran, China, or whoever hurts his feelings just as easily as he launches into his Twitter wars in the middle of the night, is truly terrifying.

The danger looms because appointments that Donald Trump is making to senior national security positions are installing at high levels of the new administration a predisposition to stoke permanent conflict with Iran, a predisposition that is far more visceral than analytical and that embodies the kind of fervor and hatred that has the risk of leading to armed conflict.” https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/08/trump-and-his-iran-haters/

Undeniably, the powers that be are always plotting new ways or strategies to ensure that the military/industrial/congressional complex never collapses because it is the grand conspiracy behind the two most profitable words in their lexicon i.e. “National Security,” and if you still need confirmation of their hidden agenda, here you go and please note that this was written & published in 1997 and signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998 i.e. they had it ready and were just looking for an excuse to put it into practice. One of the traitors said, “What we need is another Pearl Harbor type event.”

Calls for regime change in Iraq[edit]

Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament crisis.[22][23] Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.[19][24] Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, and emphasizing the potential danger of any Weapons of Mass Destruction under Iraq’s control, the letter asserted that the United States could “no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections.” Stating that American policy “cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council,” the letter’s signatories asserted that “the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.”[25] Believing that UN sanctions against Iraq would be an ineffective means of disarming Iraq, PNAC members also wrote a letter to Republican members of the U.S. Congress Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott,[26] urging Congress to act, and supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (H.R.4655)[27][28] which President Clinton signed into law in October 1998.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Calls_for_regime_change_in_Iraq

I know that this is all very depressing & I understand most people’s impulse to want to avoid such knowledge but that is precisely why we have reached this turning-point in World history i.e. willful ignorance & apathy. And that’s why we are saddled with someone the likes of Trump. We can no longer afford to turn our heads and hope that someone else will do the work necessary to stop this madness. And as my hero, Noam Chomsky wrote back in the 1960s when he first started speaking out against the Vietnam War, it is the responsibility of intellectuals to inform themselves & to share that knowledge with others who don’t have the luxury to go to college and to read the important works & to write about them. If you’ve made it this far, I applaud your tenacity & your perseverance and I’m going to start winding-down but first, I have one last example in support of my thesis of the clear & present danger facing us. Some of you may recall dear, old Ronnie Ray-gun’s “Star Wars” program that was completely debunked and supposedly ended? Well, it may have appeared to have ended officially but I got news for you my friends, it didn’t and here is proof of it, they simply changed the name;

W

hen Donald Rumsfeld chaired a commission on space and national security just before taking office in 2001, the precursors for a deluge of spending on new space-based weapons programs were put into place. The commission concluded that to avoid a so-called “space Pearl Harbor” the U.S. must “vigorously pursue the capabilities called for in the National Space Policy to ensure that the President will have the option to deploy weapons in space.”

….These comments echoed the strategy recommended in an unclassified 2003 USAF document entitled Transformation Flight Plan. The latest Flight Plan details America’s right to “full-spectrum dominance”—the control of land, sea, and air, as well as space. According to the document, space superiority includes three main capabilities: protect space assets, deny adversaries access to space, and quickly launch vehicles into space to replace damaged or destroyed space assets…..

Much of this falls under the purview of the national Missile Defense Agency. After investing nearly $100 billion and 22 years into developing a ground-based missile defense system and yielding dismal results, the U.S is setting its sights on launching satellites capable of shooting down missiles. The Space-Based Interceptor Test Bed program — scheduled to begin in 2008 — would launch up to five such satellites…..

AMERICAN ARROGANCE

Senior military and space officials with the European Union, Canada, Russia, and China have all publicly objected to the notion of American space superiority. Last fall, the U.S. voted to block a United Nations resolution calling for a ban on weapons in space. Currently, the only international treaty on the subject is a 1967 agreement, ratified by 91 countries, that bans weapons of mass destruction in space.

“Almost unanimously, the rest of the world is seriously concerned about the direction of the U.S. with regard to military space,” comments Hitchens. “Because most nations hold that no one can own space, a move by the U.S. to try to establish ‘space dominance’ will be seen as highly threatening, and other nations are likely to react in a variety of negative ways.”  http://www.thirdeyemag.com/nonfiction/essays/full-spectrum-dominance/ 

In conclusion, Trump has appointed a Cabinet of climate change deniers, and pseudo or faux “Christians,” who are all in favor of a Crusade against Islam & who want to deregulate every industry in America. Moreover, we have a president who wonders why we can’t use the nuclear weapons at his disposal & has talked about fighting a nuclear war in Europe because “It’s a big place.”

When my dear wife, Jeri and I were on our honeymoon, we were walking in Paris & a reporter approached us along with his camera man & asked if we were American. I said yeah and he said that he was like the Dan Rather of Czechoslovakia & he asked what we thought of Reagan’s proposal of fighting a limited nuclear war in Europe? I didn’t hesitate and said, He scares the Hell out of me and I think he’s a moron.

If this confluence of corporate cockroaches & “Christian” fascists isn’t a Clear & Present Danger to humanity, then I don’t know what is? Furthermore, the rush to Economic Armageddon with the unleashing of the millionaires & billionaires in Dip-Shit Donald’s cabinet who apparently learned nothing from the World-wide economic crash of 2008. Tens of millions of people around the world lost their jobs, their homes, their medical care, their pensions, & their life savings but who gives a fuck as long as the 1% were saved & awarded themselves obscene levels of profit for tanking the world economy.

So, if Donald the Doomsday Dictator doesn’t start a war in Iran or somewhere else in the Middle East, he may cause our economy to self-destruct? And note that Muslims around the world are growing more fearful by the day & believe Osama bin Laden was correct when he warned them that the Great Satan, the United States of America, wanted to destroy Islam. “Our” leaders have played right into bin Laden’s game plan of igniting a world revolution against the West and the stakes just grow higher with each stupid move on the part of our political & military elite.

“Clear and Present Danger” was a test the U.S. Supreme Court devised to help them determine if a citizen had gone too far in protesting against America’s possible entry into WWI or posed a threat to our “National Security” by encouraging Americans to not join the military (my essay could well have landed me in prison in those days & who knows with the ways things are headed under the Tyrant Trump, it could still happen?).

In England, Lord Bertrand Russell was sent to prison for publicly protesting England’s entry into WWI and he went on to become a Nobel Prize winner for mathematics & philosophy. And he became a friend of Albert Einstein who also denounced war & was denied the security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project which may not have been completed before the Nazis’ similar program had it not been for Einstein’s discoveries?

Finally, we have now come full circle because as I’m sure you are well aware, Trump has been on a non-stop tirade against the media in this country & unlike the Supreme Court who silenced individual critics of America’s militarism, Trump has the galactic hubris to think that he can silence our entire free press because they annoy him with their “not nice” questions.

Following this train of thought a bit further, at the time of the McCarthy witch hunts for communists within our government, Hollywood, our press corps, etc., there was a journalist who embodied all that’s most noble & courageous in true journalism, his name was I.F. Stone. I stumbled upon his work over 30 years ago & was amazed at his work schedule & the sheer volume of his research not unlike that of Noam Chomsky’s. In fact, Stone although a royal pain in the ass to the power brokers in Washington D.C., was dubbed “Washington’s Conscience” because he’d cull through the Congressional Record and countless other documents that were available to the general public and he’d find the little gems often buried in thousands of pages of no consequence & his sharp, analytical mind would find the facts of what Congress was really up to, etc.

By way of contrast, today, the magazine, “The Nation” is widely respected as one of America’s greatest liberal or left-wing publications but during those years of McCarthy’s witch hunting for Commies, they wouldn’t hire I.F. Stone because he had been labeled a commie by McCarthy. So much for their “journalistic integrity.” Well Izzy as he was affectionately called by his friends, said fuck-it and he and his wife started their own little weekly paper of four pages. He’d do all the research & writing and deliver them to the post office, etc. while his wife handled all the business affairs, etc. Their paper started out with about 5,000 subscribers and three of their earliest subscribers were Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, & Eleanor Roosevelt. By the time Izzy decided to retire, their subscribers numbered about 80,000.

Additionally, Bertrand Russell was Noam Chomsky’s hero and he has a large poster of Russell on the wall of his office at M.I.T. And Chomsky feared that he too might be sent to prison in the 1960s because of his refusal to pay taxes as a protest against our war in Vietnam so his wife, Carol went back to college so she could support their children should he be sent to prison. About this time, Chomsky & Howard Zinn played a small part in helping with the publication of The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg i.e. they helped to hide the documents from the government who was in hot pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg and when they were published it unleashed such a shit-storm that the government quietly dropped their case against Chomsky & others.

Last but certainly not least, I’m sure that the Supreme Court which developed that test, Clear & Present Danger just before we entered WWI, could never have imagined in their wildest dreams that America would ever elect a president as colossally ignorant & childish and who would use the presidency to promote his “brand” and further enrich himself.

So, who knows if it’ll be climate change, a nuclear war, or the implosion of our economy that will be the final nail in the coffin of America’s life but one thing is abundantly clear to me, we must empower ourselves & everyone else we possibly can by informing ourselves and that begins with reading Edward Bernays’ book, “Propaganda,” which was the basic template of the advertising & public relations industries that began at the turn of the 20th century along with the new, discipline of Psychology established by Sigmund Freud, Bernays’ uncle!

—Rob DeLoss, Florence, Oregon on Feb. 23, 2017