This forlorn, futile ‘decision’ was made long ago and far away. Obama gets to salute endless body bags as the dead are carted home. Welcome to Imperial hell, soldiers dying, bankers stuffing their bags with loot while the US military/industrial complex plunders the public purse. Oh, and national healthcare is communist! We can’t afford it, obviously. Not when we must pay for dead bodies overseas, endless dead. And to think the Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Will this horrid man return it, burning with shame? Or will he fill his goblet with blood and laugh? Shame on him, just shame on him.
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The rising disappointment with Obama (and very much, with Clinton) can be seen all over the place. 100% of the antiwar vote went to Obama. His spitting in our collective faces is most dangerous. The Democratic party seems to never learn the lessons of history: piss off antiwar people and they will go third party candidate or not vote or push for candidates. Of course, this means that only pro-war candidates ever get into office.
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And this is why the Pentagon gobbles up an immense hunk of the US budget and is directly responsible for US government overspending as well as imperial overreach. People supporting the idea that our empire is grossly overextended are always shoved aside as imperialists struggle to expand our military empire even as our mercantile empire shrivels to nearly nothing compared to all our major trade rivals.
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The ONLY reason for an empire is economic: if the empire causes wealth to flow to the Capitol, to ‘Rome’, then it is good. When the empire’s costs and trade causes wealth to drain out of the Capitol, then the empire declines and falls. This storyline has been painfully obvious to historians for at least 1,500 years. Ask any historian, even ones that are ill-informed and ideological, and they will agree that Rome fell when the military costs were impossible to discharge due to the capitol of the empire losing money at a mad rate.
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Tax revenues fell, debts rose, the currency was debased for several hundred years until finally money began to literally vanish and barter replaced it. The machinery of the bureaucracy ground to a shuddering halt and then the capital of looted by barbarians and Rome fell into penury and destruction of 1,000 years. So, what is Obama doing today?
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Obama Plans 34K More Troops for Afghanistan — News from Antiwar.com
White House officials announced today that President Barack Obama will address the nation on December 1 to unveil his new Afghanistan escalation strategy, putting an end to months of speculation and allowing NATO to approve its own escalation later that week.
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Support for this insane war in Europe is nearing rock bottom. NATO will not be sending massive troops there to die. They will, as our creditors who own tremendous seas of US debts and dollars, will demand we expose Americans to the firefights while they lounge about in ‘safe zones’, sneering at us.
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Why US patriots allow this baffles me. In WWI and WWII, we certainly didn’t tell our allies to sit back and sup tea while we did all the fighting. Certainly, the Soviets were in no mood to not fight, they were relentlessly eager to destroy the Nazis totally. And the Brits fought a long battle in both wars, bleeding their own empire white until it died.
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But this fiction of ‘NATO’ troops must end. Either we send them to their own deaths as ruthlessly as our insane military leaders are doing to their own captive personnel or we ditch this stupid and burdensome alliance. After all, every country in NATO runs a trade surplus with the US. This, alone, is grounds for chopping off this dangerous appendage. That is, our ‘provinces’ who ally themselves with us are causing a sea of red ink for our empire. And they are very eager to keep running trade surpluses with us (this very emphatically includes Japan) so we can cut them off of our massive and expensive military empire and they won’t die.
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WE ARE DYING. Our economy is dying. Our ability to provide jobs for Americans is dying. Our main industry is military and our most secure jobs are military. Our military spending goes up all the time without hinderance and our budget deficit is soaring. On every meaningful front, we are bleeding badly no less literal bleeding as soldiers are now killed nearly every day in Afghanistan, trying to dominate a people who have thousands of years of refusal to bend the knee to anyone.
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Chilcot Iraq Inquiry: Britain ‘knew Saddam Hussein had destroyed WMD’ – Times Online
Intelligence information that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his weapons of mass destruction programme was received by the Foreign Office days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, an inquiry into the war heard today.
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The revelation on the second day of the Chilcot Inquiry will raise fresh questions about the justification for invading Iraq in March 2003.
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The inquiry heard that the Foreign Office did not believe that Iraq had a large number of long-range missiles and that the claim that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes related only to battlefield weapons and not those capable of reaching other countries.
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Arrest Blair. Arrest Bush and Cheney. Arrest Powell. They are obvious war criminals. The US evades paying the true price of military belligerence because we presently rule much of the planet. The only reason the Europeans and Japanese happily accept this misrule is very simple: they are profiting from it. They are not ringing up vast debts to be paid in the future! They are not seeing a decline in living standards or tax hikes to pay for these wars and occupations! They are happier than us.
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England, riding on the coattails of the US empire for half a century, has been content with the status quo since it allows Brits to strut and fret on the world stage as mini-emperors while not paying for this theatrical production. The US bankrolls this business while allowing the Queen to continue to live like an empress in many palaces. And while She protects many small pirate islands that are piratical banking havens used to evade US taxes.
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Police have obtained arrest warrants for four children of U.S. military personnel in Tokyo on suspicion of being involved in an incident in which a woman was seriously injured after being caught in a rope on a road, investigative sources said Wednesday.
.As two of the four boys and girls, aged between 15 and 18, live in the U.S. Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, police will ask the U.S. military to hand them over, according to the sources.
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The woman in her 20s was entangled in the rope, which was stretched across the road in Musashimurayama, Tokyo, as she was riding a minibike on the evening of Aug 13. She collapsed and suffered a skull fracture…The four are suspected of attempted murder, the sources said.
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The Japanese do not like our military. They passively allow us to occupy Japan for more than half a century because we protect Japan from everyone they tried to enslave in the past. Surrounded by people who love the Japanese underground/manga culture but hate the Japanese imperial government, the cheap solution was to have the US misspend trillions of dollars, defending Japan from these neighbors while Japan merrily goes around Asia, making deals and beating US export corporations.
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And while running immense trade surpluses with the US itself. And on top of this, holding our dollars and debts so they have a stranglehold on our financial systems! But up close, on the ground, the Japanese people hate the American military and I am guessing, from the way things are going, this is now mutual. Our troops are not beloved in Iraq. They are not seen as heroes in Europe. People put up with our imperial pretensions only if they get vast economic advantages.
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This is a goofy way to run an empire. The ONLY reason to keep ANY troops ANYWHERE is if this brings economic benefits to the heart of the empire. Instead, it has ravaged the US imperial power at home. Cold calculations have to be made when it comes to stationing troops. If a nation we have bases at is benefitting financially from the arrangement, we terminate it. If it profits us, we keep it.
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Using this yardstick is very simple and it leads to a major conclusion: virtually no country where we have bases are benefitting us at all. The debit side of the ledger is too vast and we must let go. Military adventures work ONLY if they are profitable. WWII, for example, was extremely profitable for the US. The Vietnam War was a total military and economic loss and very badly crippled the US domestic situation.
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The Gulf War I was also very, very profitable. It even balanced our trade deficit briefly due to the rich oil sheikhs paying us as their mercenaries. But all the other wars and occupations have been very bad money losers. So we are in a very big net loss here and have to cut our losses. Now, not 100 years from now.
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Consumer Spending in U.S. Rises More Than Forecast (Update1) – Bloomberg.com
Another Commerce Department report showed orders for long- lasting goods unexpectedly dropped last month, depressed by a slump in bookings for defense gear.
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The median estimate of 75 economists surveyed called for a 0.5 percent increase in spending after an originally reported decrease of 0.5 percent the prior month. Projections ranged from no change to a gain of 0.8 percent.
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This month, ‘consumer spending’ went up again because the Pentagon is now freely spending more money on ‘defense gear’. Congress just voted more money for these purchases and like under Bush, it was ‘off budget’ special spending….which Obama and the Democrats promised us, they would cease doing, they were not going to copy Bush. Like during all wartimes, gold continues to shoot upwards, rising another $14.60 in just one day.
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Financiers making oodles of loot from our war spending are using our IOU money sold to Asia and Europe and are rapidly turning these into literal gold. Squirreling away all this IOU debt money into hard metal is a sign that they expect the US dollar to die, very badly, once we give up on our debts and go bankrupt like England or Spain or other previous empires.
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US economic indicators mask the death of our empire because much of our industrial base is purely military and is driven by government spending, not US producing domestic products. Our chief export industry is selling military stuff. Japan just asked for and got our top military jets because we are desperate to have some counterbalance to Japanese exports to the US that are rapidly destroying our own native auto industries, for example.
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Since all military export products cost US taxpayers tremendous sums to generate, develop and market, our collective benefit is negative. That is, all of this runs very much in the red on our own government ledgers as well as trade ledgers. We still, despite being the world’s #1 military exporter on earth, we still run bigger and bigger deficits and selling military stuff to allies who we protect hasn’t fixed our deficit spending at all.
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House Democrats Eye War Tax — News from Antiwar.com
Citing increasing concerns about the rising cost of the Afghan War, a group of House Democrats led by Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) have proposed a new tax on personal income. The tax is being pressed forward as part of the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010,” which Rep. Obey and others say will ensure that all Americans share the onerous burden of continuing the seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan…. .
…..House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was among the high profile co-signers of the bill, and said there was serious concern in the Democratic Caucus about how to afford the war, which Rep. Obey estimates could cost another $1 trillion over the next ten years.
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We threw well over one trillion down the rat hole since 9/11 and plan to do likewise, all over again. This won’t happen in a mere 10 years. We spent this much in less than 8 years and the betting is, we will be forced to do that again. This means over a trillion dollars extra will be spent above the assumed rate, over the course of 50 years. Remember, the Pentagon believes we are in a 50 year war here.
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History is very clear: empires that get embroiled in 50 or 100 year wars end badly. For example, the 100 Years War between the Norman British royalty and the Kings of France ended with the British crown losing all its French lands and turning on itself at home with a civil war called ‘The War of the Roses’ which ended the dynasty entirely.
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England was able to claw back from that long catastrophe and rebuild but this required giving up forever, the dream of regaining Aquitaine and Normandy. So, here we are, our demented Democrats talking hysterically about imposing a stupid and worthless tax to pay for a worthless and stupid war. Why are they doing this????
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We are not in a symbolic economic mess here! We are in a real mess and the real problem is government and trade red ink, no fake gesture can staunch the red ink. We can’t pretend to pay for wars we can’t afford. If we can’t pay for these wars, we should simply stop fighting them. We retreated from Vietnam and this had one major effect: it saved us from utter ruin! Duh!
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The GOP cut taxes again and again because they are irresponsible jerks. The Democrats never raise taxes enough when they are in power. The ONLY times we get any traction on taxes versus revenues is when Congress hates the President and cuts his spending. And follow on the heels of a Congress that votes for tax hikes and then lose seats as voters vote them out for doing the sane thing.
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Ultimately, it is the US public who lives in fantasyland. We want to have our spending while not paying for it. We are like a bimbo in a high-end clothing store, wanting to buy everything and put it on her sugar daddy’s credit card.
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AFP: US lawmakers: New tax should pay for Afghan war
The proposal, a heavily symbolic measure seen as having next to no chance of becoming law, would impose a war surtax on income beginning in 2011 — though it would allow the president to delay implementation by one year upon deciding the US economy is too weak to sustain such a tax shift.
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This makes this weak, futile tax a total farce. So many back doors are being left open so the President can evade paying for his stupid Nobel Puke Prize wars, the tax is now meaningless as even a gesture. Of course, Obama was warned by the ancient Chinese Imperial Dragon to balance the books and cut military spending or pay for it, ourselves. We still hope the Dragon, anxious to keep decimating our industrial base, will buy our debts. So we are gambling that, after spending the money via printing presses, this money will be isolated in Asia and not circulate here in the US causing inflation.
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ALL WARS CAUSE INFLATION. All wars destroy currencies. The only exception are looting expeditions that are successful. In WWI and WWII, the US bankrolled the winners and won, ourselves. So we imposed rules and conditions that made our economy stronger. Even then, the financial collapse of exhausted empires in Europe and Asia still troubled our own economy! We did NOT like it ONE BIT when empires who owed us money, defaulted. Well, the Chinese will be of the same mind when they clobber us if we go bankrupt.
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Honoring America’s Battlefield Entrepreneurs – Forbes.com
This week, Americans will recognize our veterans by thanking them for their service and sacrifices. But perhaps the best way to appreciate them–particularly those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan–is not just by expressing our gratitude, but by recognizing what they can contribute to our economy back home. America’s vets are an untapped treasure of entrepreneurial energy. If only we would take a page from the country that best leverages its veterans as innovators and leaders: Israel.
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Israel boasts the highest density of start-ups in the world (3,850 total, one for every 1,844 Israelis). It has more companies on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined. In 2008–a year of global economic turmoil–per capita venture investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China and 350 times greater than in India.
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Israel is looting the US. These entrepreneurial dynamos are the beneficiaries of billions and billions of US gifts from Congress. Their new businesses are allowed free rein in our own markets. They now infest our military/industrial complex and suck down vast billions of US IOU tax money. Can our own soldiers do this?
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Where will they get the capital to open military-related businesses? And what would they be selling? Per capita venture investments in Israel are the highest on earth because it is also the most subsidized on earth. We do not have such goodies for our own soldiers. And many of our soldiers are traumatized or wounded. And on top of all this, most of these Israeli soldier geniuses are not really soldiers but militias who spend most of their military time terrorizing unarmed Palestinians who can barely fight back by even tossing small rocks, unlike the mountain guerillas of Afghanistan or the well-armed militias in Iraq.
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Forbes magazine, like many money magazines in the US, lives in la-la land. The cures for our imperial ills are always quack remedies. Instead of fixing the fundamental illnesses assailing our empire (gross over-expansion and overspending) these cures are illusions that enable us to avoid facing reality: we lost our empire and it is now dying rapidly.
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Israel offers 10-month West Bank settlement freeze – washingtonpost.com
The freeze would not include east Jerusalem – the area of the holy city claimed by the Palestinians for a future capital…..Even so, the Palestinians say the offer is unacceptable because it does not include east Jerusalem. The Palestinians refuse to reopen peace talks with Israel until it halts all settlement construction.
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After the Israeli overlords who own Congress via AIPAC spat repeatedly in Obama’s face, they now slightly relent and make an empty gesture to him, promising to not illegally expand colonies in Palestinian lands…but as a contemptuous slap, they can’t even make it for one year. They deliberately slap him again, making it 10 months just because they want him to know who is the real boss here.
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They also knew the Palestinians would reject this feeble gesture and can then claim that the Palestinians are at fault in these faux negotiations. The loss of public ‘face’ in this matter is extremely significant. All our trade allies, all our rivals, all of everyone now looks down on Obama. The Muslim community now actively hates him. We can’t win any wars in Afghanistan or Iraq if the Muslims there hate us and despise our leaders. We can’t win them over while allowing Israel to stomp on our own President.
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Just the idea of not respecting our own Presidents kills our empire. We are very, very partisan here at home and the very brief moment when Bush had vast US public support after 9/11 was squandered when he pushed for the Iraq war. Now, very much divided, the Democrats see not a revolt in the ranks due to Obama’s betrayal of the peace movement but dispirited defeat in the ranks. Which is very bad for us and won’t save our empire. Nor will Palin’s sort of goofy wild End of Times warrior Whore of Babylon belligerence save our empire from economic and military destruction.
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CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
As that amount continues to increase by $100s of billions, recent reminders that the now estimated $500 billion in Medicare “cost savings” will be taken out of the hide of poor seniors have been relegated to the final lines of press reports. For example: “To finance the expanded coverage Reid [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.] proposed higher taxes as well as cuts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in projected Medicare payments. Hardest hit would be the private insurance Medicare plans, although providers such as home health agencies would also receive significantly less in future years than now estimated.” (AP/Espo, November 21, ’09). And, “About half of the bill Reid unveiled Wednesday would be financed by curbs in projected Medicare spending. While providers such as home health care agencies would absorb some of that, the biggest blow would fall on private Medicare plans.” (AP/Espo, November 19, ’09).
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They are cutting Medicare. The pathetic thing about the Tea Baggers was how FOX TV and the GOP manipulated them so they were screaming about single payer health being very bad but at the same time, they want to keep government Medicare benefits intact. This childish desire to have one’s cake and eat it too is a characteristic of empires that can’t take things seriously anymore.
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Obama just came back from a visit with the bankers who happen to be the Dragon of China. And the unhappy, subdued face of Obama as the Chinese leadership jerked him around (UNLIKE PUTIN who they coddle!) means that Hu and Wen had a very serious and angry conversation with him in private where they badgered him to start paying down debts and cease running more and more in the red.
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The Chinese didn’t mind Bush running $500 billion in the red. Two trillion in the red, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot more than the Chinese trade surplus with the US. China doesn’t buy US debts that are more than the trade deficit. Period. Ditto with Japan. The US is now ‘monetizing’ our debts which is fancy talk for ‘printing up IOUs in the Treasury and palming them off on the Federal Reserve’. The end of this process is hyperinflation. This hyperinflation won’t hit us slowly but rather, rapidly.
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When Germany went bankrupt after WWI, the hyperinflation didn’t hit the first year. It hit after 1921. And then it hammered the economy and totally and utterly destroyed the German Mark in less than 3 years. This is our fate if we don’t take things more seriously. We must not just reduce but must eliminate our military empire and erect good tariffs to protect the shattered remains of our industrial base and start all over again. Or we can passively wait until hyperinflation does this for us. The choice is ours. No one is putting a gun to our heads…yet.
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Culture of Life News 
Afghan army soldiers have
high rate of desertion and
after 3 year enlistments
25% leave the Afghan army.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2009/11/24/afghan-army-turnover-rate/
Obama is a failure beyond my wildest day-mares. I knew he was going to suck at the corporate trough along with the other piggies, but I didnt think he could be THIS
freaking bad.
Our former nation is now a failure on EVERY possible level. Never has a society,historically, failed at so many levels. At least in the past when a big empire failed
it usually had some internal opposition. This time, opposition imploded before the empire.
I remember how proud I was to cast a vote for a historic president.
And he took that and squandered it on filth. I can’t believe that he could not recognize the power that he could have wielded. Probably greater than FDR. But instead he chose to fill his bank account.
It won’t be Bush Jr. who will live in eternal infamy. The name of Obama will be one of shame and will carry with it the destruction of the U.S. itself. It will overshadow the Bush criminal family.
It is beyond sad. I supported Kucinich and Ron Paul and even said, both would be a great team together. But voted for Obama because I didn’t want ‘bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ McCain and his insane hausfrau running mate.
Obama threw it all away when he didn’t condemn the Israeli one-sided ‘war’. Then, when he refused to close Gitmo (the man in charge of that charade just resigned in disgust today) and didn’t tell Congress to hold hearings about 9/11, the Bush/bin Laden/CIA connections nor did he push to shut down AIPAC’s influence, etc. ect. He did nothing useful at all…except promise to cut Medicare!
@Gary, “but I didnt think he could be THIS
freaking bad.”
Obama is worse than bad. He is totally unqualified. What has he ever done to merit the oval office?
But Rocky Lizard loves Obama to death. The Depression of 2010 is right on schedule.
We are approaching 25% unemployment, 20 million unoccupied homes, 1,000 banks underwater, huge cutbacks in government services, food shortages, rationing, inflation, all due in 2010.
The Lizards (in U.S. – UK – Israel) plan to install a New World Order out of chaos.
EMS says: “This childish desire to have one’s cake and eat it too is a characteristic of empires that can’t take things seriously anymore.”
But that is the fundamental theory of socialism. That the aristos can have their cake and eat yours too … all for your own good of course. What a delightful world we inhibit, filled with conjurers and fakirs and other sorts of elected and appointed goons with guns.
In a free society you get what you pay for, in the US you get what you can steal from the next schlub. Enjoy your government medical care, your government science, your government security, enjoy your tax increases to pay for someone else’s war..
Jim Willie prospective … paper-vs-gold:
“They overlook how the S&P500 has fallen by 80% in the last several years in terms of its gold value.”
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/willie/2009/1124.html
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ELAINE: Yes, it always pays to compare prices of things with gold prices to see how they correspond.
A perspective from the east.
http://benjaminfulford.typepad.com/
What a disappointment. I guess turds do float to the top after a little while. Just another politico, big words with no objective or idea what he’s doing. For those of us old enough to remember, what we have here is LBJ II. The only difference is we don’t have a vibrant 60’s economy anymore. Hope and Change my ass!
Dear United States of America,
In your 233 years, you have slaughtered and enslaved more people than any other nation in history. Now at last, you are dying the slow death you deserve. Good riddance to your soulless beast of an empire.
– MCC
Oregon
MCC: there is great competition to see which empire has killed the most people. Britain, for example, oversaw the deaths of many millions, the Germans ran a very efficient killing machine for a number of critical years, the Soviet machine ground down many millions, killing millions of people is what all empires do.
But when there are no empires, even more people die but not due to just one agency or another. Like Yugoslavia or Congo, the slaughter is all internal, intense and like Rwanda, even crude. For example, using virtually no post-stone age tools, Cambodia managed to kill more than a million people in just 8 years.
These statements and the exchange with MCC are worth contemplating, in my opinion.
They definitely fly in the face of the idea of universal human rights.
If the argument is that humans are basically evil and empires are the lesser evil then extinction is not only inevitable but justified. Evil will always destroy itself.
Perhaps this is why I do not fear the apocalypse.
But I would prefer universal human rights.
@blues, “Me and Sky understand statistical evidence.”
Give it up.
Nobody cares.
Obama: hamstrung by Washington vested interests?
Dear Elaine,
I was impressed by Obama’s ‘Yes We Can” election slogan has turned into dismay because several of his strategic decisions.
The first example is retaining the Bernanke/Larry Summers/Geithner team (Economic Cabal) and rewarded Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.
Second, he has acquiesced to Israel’s continued colonisation strategies at the expense of US national interests generally.
Thirdly, he continues to support the occupation of A-stan and the destabilising Pakistan strategies etc.
Is it reasonable to suggest that Obama’s failure to replace the above Economic Cabal with, say, Volcker and Stiglitz was due to a combined Washington politics, pressure from powerful European and Asian Reserve Banking peers as well as simply naivete?
Particularly, when people such as Elizabeth Warren have expressed concerns on governance issues?
Is it possible for the military and security complex (Pro Military Cabal) to constraint Obama’s ability to break with the existing military coercive strategies for Iraq, A-stan, Pakistan, and China etc?
How much credence do you place on the claims that Kennedy was assassinated because was a threat to the Pro Military Cabal – refer below?
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16273
I understand that Benazir Bhutto was a CIA asset and her husband Zardari was corrupt.
Is it possible that Bhutto was assassinated by the Pro Military Cabal to enable Zardari to become Pakistan’s Prime Minister?
Zardari’s ascendancy to Prime minister has facilitated policies towards his governments war in Waziristan, his government sanction for Blackwater mercenaries within Pakistan as well as “false flag” bombings as claimed by radical Islamists recently?
It seems to me that many of such acts of terror simply facilitate military action against the “Pakistan Taliban” and Iran?
Another frame is the refrain that US/NATO coalition cannot leave because Karzai government will fall and his government must root out corruption?
The above frame becomes delusional because the US installed the corrupt Karzai and warlords and created the world class opium industry in A-stan.
The re-curing theme of duplicity runs thru many narratives we read about today….including concerns about Florida vote manipulation resulting in a Bush junior victory etc.
What do you think?
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ELAINE: One of the most terrible things about land-locked Afghanistan is the grave difficulty of retreating from it. Similar to trying to retreat from Russia after attacking Russia and fighting all the way to the Gates of Moscow (or Stalingrad): There is no good way to disengage. This is why we all warned the US to not rush into Afghanistan after 9/11.
Believe it or not, the vast, vast majority of Americans wanted to go into Afghanistan back then. And bin Laden’s global revolutionary plans very much depended upon the US rushing heedlessly into Afghanistan. We fell into an obvious trap. Instead of going in, doing a surgical procedure, we tried to take over the entire country in a hostile way and here we are, being hammered to death, one tiny bit at a time, like termites eating out the hull of a great, wooden ship.
We thought, supporting the opium warlords, we could win ‘cheap’. This was a tactically stupid choice. But common. The US often sides with corruption in the hopes the corrupt ones will do all the repression for us.
@MCC, “Now at last, you are dying the slow death you deserve. Good riddance to your soulless beast of an empire.”
Oh my, the charms of cognitive dissonance.
Just to clarify what is meant by ‘evil’:
The point is we have consciousness. We aren’t bound by the law of the jungle. We can choose.
There shall be no hope until ‘they’ throw a war and no one shows up.
This is the ONLY path to a ‘culture of life’.
FWIW, I gave it a shot.
military and is driven by government spending, not US producing domestic products. Our chief export industry is selling military stuff. Japan just asked for and got our top military jets because we are desperate to have some counterbalance to Japanese exports to the US that are rapidly destroying our own native auto industries, for example.
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personally im kinda pissed we are selling F-35s to the israelis… we have no leverage with these people… its like one of those duh moments, we could have a roadmap if we just did not sell F-35s rite now to these blockheads
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ok palestein is not perfect…. but israel gets to write all the terms in our name???? that what selling them F-35Z MEANS
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if you want to honor a president and revive the road map…. JEEZUS HOLD OUT…. not like they can make them themselves…. sure defence of borders ideological blah blah blah… we need a few chips here…. i dont trust none of these guys
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F15z they got will blow damn near anything but US munitions out of the sky anyways
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far as the war goes…. iraq is ‘in the money’ they can choose a new destiny and build on what is left of sadams megalopily…. afghanistan is different, building a government from 10,000 villages is not near as easy as hillery would like to think…. the world is not a village…. nearly anything is a village anymore…. but Afghanistan is full of them from what i read…. the taliban is the easy part we learned from vietnam the weakness of a poorly funded insurgency ‘like not the VC’…. the taliban have no backers if russia or iran doesnt pull up the love bus these guys are marked men
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problem is afghanistan…. history is a culture, and a US government underfunded in afghanistan wont cut it. A corrupt central government in afghanistan is hopeless but theres no money in afghanistan, so how do poorly funded ill equiped 2nd world governments function…. now think of villages which are not as cohesive ‘like afghanistan’…. THERE IS NO MONEY IN AFGHAN GOVERNMENT….
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we need the balls to form a government and thats about it
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the taliban are history
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5AN5EW20091125
Swiss court grants Roman Polanski bail
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She suggested Polanski might be prepared to face the U.S. justice system. “I think if he has to do it, he has to do it,” she said.
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every international turd sandwich has its day
‘fool on the hill’ beat me to it but;
”This is a goofy way to run an empire.”
So how do you run an empire?
is there anyway that is morally defencible. the examples of non-empire are good, but what now you sound like the british ‘civilizing’ the natives. lots of aboriginals lived peacefully until disturbed by the imperialists.
Hey i’m still pissed about Vietnam.
History tells us that there will always be a major empire in the world. The question then becomes, what will this empire be? How will it behave? Can we influence it?
Thinking that we can have a non-imperial world is futile. Note that Europe is madly trying to turn itself into an empire that if free standing! China is very certainly, a major empire.
We disappear, we will be replaced.
Hmm, the Danes are said to be the most content people , do they have an empire?
no, i don’t want to hear about vikings. Empire is built into the structure of capitalism i suppose, you have to have a cheap supply of something. China has that built in, minus oil and some metals i guess.
The best way to run an empire? Mind your own business as much as possible. That is, keep your army inside your borders.
Fighting for resources can easily cost more now than benefit, so to me it’s sensible choice whatever ones ideology is. Unless that ideology requires world dominations… but not a single country has been able to do that long.
Denmark is 100% deep inside the Fourth Reich, the new Holy Roman Empire.
It is a fractured empire but note that the EU just got its first ‘president’ and this guy was NOT elected by the people. Ahem. EU=New Empire.
Empires are not ‘capitalist’. The USSR was an empire. All empires are attempts to control political events and to create flows of wealth to the heart of the empire.
This always works….for a while. But when corruption worms its way into the system so the people running the empire loot the heart of the empire, when corruption and venality cause the wealth flow to cease or reverse, the empire dies. And is replaced by a new, more focused empire that executes anyone who screws up and causes deficits, etc. Like we see in China today.
I´m 100% with Elaine on this one.
My minister of foreign affairs as of now is:
Baroness Ashton of Upholland, Catherine Ashton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Ashton,_Baroness_Ashton_of_Upholland
Now I don´t expect anyone to understand how utterly crazy this is for someone in my country.
Finland: lutheran, parliamentry, multi-party, non monarchy, non nato, member of the eurozone
So a british baroness is now represents me and my countrys foreign policy.
It´s so unbelievable that it´s not even funny.
-sigh-
Another thing about empires: inbreeding. Hemophilia is called the ‘royal’ disease because so many members of European royal families had hemophilia in their family. Closer to home, one can see this as well. Look, for example at how long the good old US of A has had either a Bush or a Clinton as president. Note how many members of Congress have spouses and/or other family members in important government jobs. Then there are the members of Congress–and members of Presidential administrations–who leave their “public service” and go on to more lucrative careers in the private sector. And then start to lobby Congress on behalf of the agencies they use to have oversight on while they “served” in Congress. Corruption breeds corruption. This is the main reason why both Repubs. and Dems. fight tooth, fang and claw the formation of third/fourth/fifth parties. Which is why we need more political parties.
Spot-on as usual, Elaine.
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@MCC: Sod off, swampy.
Here a nice clip:
Farage reprimanded for criticising new EU foreign minister: “certain expressions not acceptable”
Great clip.
Dubai on the brink:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.172a2f217acbdb6e4e9b446773ee0f1c.a1&show_article=1
So i guess one of the benefits for the danes of being 100% in the Fourth Reich , is not having to strut about thumping ones chest and telling everyone how you are the Greatest Country on Earth.
“WE ARE DYING.”
Who is dying? The Holy Roman Empire is getting stronger every day, as planned.
“WE ARE DYING”
You/we/USA are/is supposed to die, it was planned this way, from the rubles of this controlled financial destruction a new world order is to emerge.
“WE ARE DYING”
There is no we/Americans, just an globally operating elite and us.
@Elaine, I voted for Obama for the exact reason you did even though he promised during the campaign to be more neocon than the Neocons (with the exception of Iran and Iraq). McCain called him out on his promise to attack Pakistan during one of the Presidential Debates. Unfortunately for McCain, he promised the very exact same thing! During that same exchange that he started by calling out Obama!
@Paul S. Both parties have been utterly corrupt since the 1870s when they cut a deal to maintain themselves in power, at the expense of the African-American freedmen in the South.
I noted during the election that once the true peace candidates (Ron Paul and Kucinich) were cut out of the debates and boycotted by the media giants, the ‘peace’ candidates like Obama switched gears. I even drew a cartoon showing the transformation of Obama from a happy ‘Snoopy’ to ‘Snoopy as Dracula’ to illustrate how he was totally different.
I then complained that as usual, there was no real peace candidates.
MMC & Wu Wei: Watch this insider estimate of how many people Pax Americana has killed all over the world.
All empires kill lots of humans. All non-empires kill lots of humans, too. Chaos kills the most people for the least profit, so to speak, that is, there is no counterbalance of civilization to make up for the carnage.
ziff house
November 26, 2009 at 6:58 am
Hmm, the Danes are said to be the most content people , do they have an empire?
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number one number one number one number one number one
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the US that is… let us be the forsaken indoctrination… trust me its better that way
no disrespect to germany or russia or venezuela or iran
How casually we write of the slaughter of whole nations and how we must do this at a profit lest we be failures.
Hey first class dummies;
all warfare is an armed robbery.
The cruel truth about humanity has been, our need to loot each other. This is one of the most common threads in the evolution of homo sapiens.
There must be something magical then in being hired by the government, once hired one loses all that evil need to loot others.
I suspect the real common silk of mankind is the need to be looted, to allow others to loot at their leisure. To submit to the will of the peepul or of the godhead or of the loudest lout yelling merka fuck yeah and waving some shreds of bunting and hypocricy.
Well, pacifist nations usually have very short histories. Empires have long histories.
We have a saying here that is told to every Finn when they start their conscript military service.
“Every country has an army, one can only hope it is our own.”
When do you become an empire?
IMO when you seem to have the need to start “defending” your country´s interests militarily on the soil of another country.
Again you confuse non-violent with pacifist.
It suits your purpose to conflate things that are not equal to each other.
I am minded that Iran has been quite a non violent nation for the last 400 years, Brazil appears to do quite well being non aggressive, VietNam shows that being non-aggresive is not the same as being pacifist.
The USA has never managed to be non-aggressive. A nation of cowards peeing themselves in fear of the other, that is what it takes to be an empire these days. ( That and fiat currency and Magic belief systems )
CK, none of the named countries in your list fought WWII successfully. The US, not Vietnam, defeated Japan, and Brazil was rather friendly with Germany…
By the way, your need to spit hatred is interesting. China wasn’t ‘aggressive’ while it was being torn apart. But once it got reorganized, it resumed trying to be an empire. This is a common thread in history.
Brazil is imperialistic, ask any natives living upriver from the coast which has mostly aliens from either Europe or brought in as slaves from Africa. The natives are still being squeezed and displaced by ‘aliens’. Which is imperialism, you know.