June News Factoids

"Only 21% of registered voters now identify themselves as Republicans"
~~ Washington Post / ABC News poll of April 2009

"Marijuana accounts for 47% of all U.S. drug arrests."
~~ Time Magazine

Japan’s economy contracted by a record 4 percent quarter-on-quarter in the first three months of this year, as domestic demand declined and an export deficit continued.
~~ Financial Times sub-headline, May /2009

The next American military quagmire will be in Turkey, most likely in the Kurdish region in the south, which abuts northern Iraq. Second choice: Africa.

Had my old Maytag washer repaired recently and the local appliance repair guy told me that his business has increased a lot lately, because people are getting household gadgets repaired rather than tossing them and replacing them with new units, which are often seen as being of lesser quality. {Hooray!}

TIP FOR OLD PEOPLE
A doctor at the V.A. hospital told me that vitamin D is now considered the best treatment for 'bone pain', which is the common vague soreness of feet and ankles in older people. Daily vitamins usually have 400 units or so of vitamin D, assuming that at least another 400 units will be gotten from actual food. The new theory is that after a certain age (50 or 60), the body needs 2000 units per day of vitamin D, which is readily available as capsules at your local drugstore. I was told that 'you cannot overdose on vitamin D'; for example, the theorists on this are treating patients who need to catch up with an injection of 50,000 units of vitamin D per week, for 6-8 weeks.

Americans spent 83% more time on social-networking websites in April 2009, as compared with the same time in the prior year.
~~ Time Magazine

Theaters are already showing trailers (previews) for the Robert Downey, Jr. version of "Sherlock Holmes" [due in December 2009], directed by Guy Ritchie. In researching that film for my Sherlock Holmes Film Festival Page, I discovered that there is a real listing on Internet Movie Database for an "Untitled Sherlock Holmes Project" designated 'in development' with Sacha Baron Cohen set to play Holmes and Will Ferrell set to play Watson – Hollywood, have you no shame?

Prohibition in the U.S. lasted 14 years. At the end (1933), arrests for drunk & disorderly were up 41% and the prison population was up 366%.
~~ Mother Jones Magazine, June 2009

"It is unsafe to swim or fish in nearly 40% of U.S. rivers and streams."
~~ Mother Jones Magazine, June 2009

The new motto around recycling is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink"

U.S. building permits are at the lowest since 1960.
~~ A.P. Radio News

Home prices fell 19% in the first quarter of 2009.
~~ Schiller Index

DVD sales for April 2009 were down 11% over the same period in the prior year.

Forty percent of 2007 births in U.S. were out of wedlock.

122 million movie tockets are sold each month in the U.S.A.
~~ on-screen ad June 2009

"I don't think [corn-based ethanol] has proven itself of any value except to Archer Daniels Midland."
~~ Michael Pollan

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

June Quotations

"We must know what we are, before we can know and use what we inherently possess."
~~ C. Larson

"Every artist was first an amateur."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882]

"I like myself better when I'm writing regularly."
~~ Willie Nelson

“It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”
~~ Errol Flynn [1909-59]

"Courage is grace under pressure."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Amateurs hope. Professionals work."
~~ Garson Kanin [1912-99]

"A firm grip on reality is not a critical component of happiness."
~~ David Hempy

"Count [the minutes] by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"Reach high, think big, work hard, and have fun!"
~~ motto of Disney Channel's "Imagination Movers" children's TV program

"The future is already here, it is just unevenly distyributed."
~~ William Gibson

"A kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt."
~~ old saying

"The trouble with the motion-picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise."
~~ Garson Kanin [1912-99]

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
~~ James Thurber [1894-1961]

"It's no fun being a century ahead of the times."
~~ L. Frank Baum [1856-1919]

"There is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit of fundamentalist dogma."
~~ Adam Gopnick

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
~~ Woody Allen

"If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself – ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity – before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly."
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job."
~~ Woody Allen

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

“Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common."
~~ Satchel Paige [1906-82]

"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

Essay #90: "The Festival of Stupid"

        Stupid, as a commodity, is not in short supply.
        Stupid is quite plentiful, much like the kudzu vine of the American South, as both are ever attempting to take over Civilization.

        George W. Bush is not as stupid as he appears. It isn’t so much that he IS stupid, but that he does stupid. The entire premise of the Bush 43 Administration was to wreck the economy, to really screw it up worse than Reagan-Bush did, so that the political takeover of America by the Robber Barons and the Fascists would be easier (for them).
        But Dubya screwed that up! The economic crisis was scheduled to happen after the Democrats got control of the Executive and Legislative branches, so that the Oligarchs could then blame the Democrats – those terrifying Liberals – for the mess.
        But Dubya screwed up the intentional screw-up, and the People woke up and Barack Obama won by a landslide in many precincts and states, and Dubya gets the blame by present and future historians for the Recession, Depression, Meltdown that is the current and future economic plight of America and the world.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        While a significant portion of the U.S. population were infected by the sleep-inducing propaganda of the Culture-Structure, the sheeple let the Party of Stupidity run the country using obvious strategies of stealth, plunder, Mafia-style ethics, talk-show alarmists, and an insane disregard for the consequences that always arise from such actions.
        (And the Tea-Bagger sheeple even mindlessly protested President Obama’s tax CUTS for the Middle Class!)
        The Corporatists and Fascists and Oligarchs and Conservatives and Religionists and bigots and Federalists have continued to work in concert, with the full intention of producing a mess just like the one that we are in. The anti-Reason gangsters always move in the same direction – to benefit from the exploitation and degradation of We The People.
        And the sheeple let them.
        And it never works. The mess gets dire and the People rise up and re-establish Progressive programs, and clean up the mess from the new Festival of Stupid.
        And the Master Class sits back and complains about taxes – taxes that had to be raised to pay down their recent fiscal crimes – and the Master Class bides their time. And when the economy and civil rights are restored, or at least repaired, then the Master Class invents some new imaginary monster to make afraid those infected with Stupid, and here we go again.

        Freedom is the result of Reason. Locke and Hume and Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson and the American Revolution set in motion a Progressive ideology that will eventually prevail.
        But it is tough work keeping Freedom alive. There are indeed those who oppose Freedom, who cannot tolerate rule by The People. They seek a return to feudalism, where in their view the Master Class (aristocracy) owns the peasants and is entitled to anything that it wants.
        So Stupid exists in two places: the Master Class thrives on doing harm, and the sheeple suffer the consequences of their obliviousness.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        To be truly free from something is to not need it. I cared that the First Amendment was torn to shreds by the Bush Administration, but those freedoms still were alive where I was anyway because I do not need a piece of paper behind glass in Washington, DC to give me those freedoms. I am free to exercise my rights at all times because living from those Unalienable Rights ensures their existence. I am free, the Constitution says so, and that is a matter that is worth risking one’s life for.
        Reason gives Progress. Action creates opportunity. Persistence delivers results.
        Meanwhile, Stupid just creates more Stupid: messes to clean up, lives ruined, a planet despoiled, mindless waste, perpetual violence, and pain for everyone involved.

        Reason is the antidote for Stupid. The Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, the Existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, transformative education – all are based on Reason and lead to solutions that benefit Mankind as a whole.
        We are all in this together. (Except for the Stupid, who are not IN anything, except failure.)
        Reason has a person seek Progress; Stupidity can be defined as the lack of seeking or striving or thinking.
        Reason is an act of Free Will; Stupid is based on a want or a wish, often for some fantasy, such as An End To Fear.
        Reason seeks Progress; Stupid makes a mess. The act of cleaning something up is always a result of a cause that was sourced by Stupid.

• Federal cleanup sites are the result of Stupid behavior: atomic radiation, mining poisons, industrial pollution, the Texas-sized (literally) mega-pile of trash in the Pacific Ocean.
  
• Economic rescues (bailouts) are the result of Stupid behavior, and the bailouts themselves are Stupid behavior.
  
• The conflation of gambling and finance is the result of Stupid behavior: commodities futures, money market funds, indexes on indexes, convoluted ‘instruments’ – none truly exist (have equity) and are therefore sold only to suckers (stupid people with money).
  
• Economic failure or meltdown is the result of Stupid behavior: when hardworking regular folk find themselves homeless from tidal changes in The Market which they do not understand and had no hand in, and when their 401K or pension is now worthless after being touted as foolproof.
  
• Corporatism, which is based on the Stupid value of Growth For Growth’s Sake, which like pond scum will eventually suck all the oxygen out of the system.
  
• Ill health is the result of Stupid behavior: Reason-based healthcare prevents breakdown, as a boon to all, for a smoothly-running society and economy; single-payer healthcare makes prevention affordable. The economics of Stupid makes healthcare hard to get, with their proffered ‘solutions’ overpriced and with unwanted side-effects.
  
• Crime is Stupid, and not in any way Progressive. Crime is quite costly: lost equity, lost time, and waste of resources – the chase, the meting out of justice, the incarceration, the restoration of plundered goods, the parole system. Crime is an industry in America, and that fact is the result of Stupid behavior.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The very fact that a cleanup is required means that a crime or assault on Liberty, or a crime of simple greed or survival has been committed.
        The evidence of that dis-empowering act is whatever needs to be cleaned up.

• Poisoned eco-systems
  
• Poisoned social systems, like healthcare and the military and police and justice systems, and the election system
  
• New Orleans
  
• The Rust Belt
  
• Chernobyl
  
• North Korea and Darfur and Somalia
  
• Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and the rest of the $25 trillion Republican National Debt
  
• America’s labor unions
  
• America’s automobile industry
  
• America’s housing industry
  
• America’s healthcare industry

        The internet is contaminated but not yet poisoned. Attempts were and will be made to mess it up, to remove the {small D) democratic elements, the We The People freedoms that exist in cyberspace, and are hard to come by in other venues.

        Politics is revitalized by Barack Obama’s campaign and his landslide victory. We the People did some cleaning up, got the election system working again, and President Obama has eight years to implement his planned repairs and improvements, his Vision For America.
        What the Obama Administration will leave behind is a better world, even for the sheeple contaminated with Stupid. That Progressive agenda (hated by the pro-feudalism talk-show gasbag pundits) includes better healthcare for Americans, better education, more jobs and more union activity (better jobs), Reason-based taxation, and a reduction in death by warfare on the planet.

        War is stupid. Feudalism is stupid. Hunger and starvation are stupid. Pollution is stupid. A frenzied life is stupid.

        But the pathogen of Stupid bides its time and looks for chinks in the armor of the Progressive Life Force. No matter that Obama won in 2008, the Bad Guys are still loose and making their Stupid-based plans.
        Stupid causes pain and death and suffering.

        Empower whoever you can, wherever and whenever you can.

Essay #89: “The Evil of Dick Cheney”

The most evil person in America today is Dick Cheney. So that there is no mistake, I mean Richard Bruce Cheney, the former Vice President.

He is more evil than the idiot George Dubya Bush, cowardly slime-bucket Karl Rove, and p*ssant Alberto Gonzales combined.

(Limp Rushbaugh & Sean Vannity and their pack don’t count because they are the political equivalent of the old Chatty Cathy doll – push the button and hear pre-recorded clichés.)

* *          * *          * *          * *
As preface to Dubya’s first speech as a former President, at a private event in Calgary (Alberta, Canada), he stated that he would not criticize President Obama, and that “President Obama deserves my silence.”

There is room for conjecture here.

President-elect Obama met privately several times with then-President Bush as part of the transition, and it looks like Obama offered Bush a ‘cease-fire’ treaty: that if Dubya kept his mouth shut and did not attack the Obama administration in the press, then the Obama administration would not attack Bush in the press.

You will notice that statements from the Obama administration might talk of mismanagement and failures of the ‘previous administration’, but Bush has not been blamed by name during these several months by any major figure of the White House or of the Cabinet. (Congress can say what they want; the accusations need to get stronger, such as with subpoenas to testify and with criminal indictments.)

* *          * *          * *          * *
Whether any such offer was made to Cheney is more than conjecture. In any case, evil Dick Cheney has no intention of halting his assault on the U.S. Constitution, now that being out of office hampers his ability to give direct orders to frightened underlings. Dick Cheney has not gotten that the People voted his gang out of office, because the People have never mattered to Dick Cheney. That a former U.S. Vice President is pumping the airwaves to attack the new administration has never occurred before; most VPs have just faded away to write their memoirs.

But evil Dick Cheney has an agenda to fulfill, so what if the damage already done to the country will take years, even decades to correct, that damage is not enough for him. There are so many evil tenets of the Federalist Society and of P.N.A.C. {Project For The New American Century} that need to be implemented and re-implemented so that the fascist Oligarchy can reign over a feudal America. It is as if every progressive movement and law since the Magna Carta just has to be repealed, so that the Oligarchs can restore their tradition of taxing the poor, making wars for easy profit, and torturing anyone that gets in their way.

Dick Cheney is a traitor to the U.S. Constitution. There are many incidents where he did so, but the key one is the Valerie Plame affair. For those with lousy memories, the Scooter Libby defense team put into evidence a memo in Dick Cheney’s handwriting telling Libby that ‘The Pres’ approved the public disclosure of C.I.A. agent Plame’s covert identity. (Brilliant move: Libby’s prison sentence was commuted by Dubya.)

Even if the content of that memo was untrue, that still leaves Dick Cheney as the person who authorized the undoing of twenty years of C.I.A. intelligence work, an event which got several foreign agents killed and ruined America’s future chances of recruiting new ‘intell’ sources in foreign lands.

That single matter requires that Dick Cheney be called to testify under oath before Congress and put on trial in Federal court and sentenced to hard time in prison.

* *          * *          * *          * *
But Dick Cheney's evil nature includes the fact that he has no shame. So he breaks precedent and tirelessly appears on the TV faux news shows and hate-talk radio programs upbraiding President Obama for making decisions that endanger America’s military security.

Oh, sure. The same guys who let the bin Laden family fly away on September 11, who let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, who dismantled the Osama bin Laden unit of the C.I.A. (until an outcry made them rebuild it), the same guys who started an unnecessary war in Iraq and lost it (i.e. did NOT win it, after more time than it took to defeat Imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany) – these guys, in the person of Cheney, are going to give President Obama advice!

* *          * *          * *          * *
Cheney is guilty of treason and murder, he is guilty of arrogance and self-importance, and then there is a whole list of personal failings. But what keeps him on the airwaves is that none of the so-called journalists that grovel at his feet will call him on his hypocrisy.

The first major action by George Dubya Bush when he took office was to begin illegal wiretaps of American citizens – that was in January of 2001. The first major action by Dick Cheney after he took office was to call meetings with the oil companies to plan the invasion of Iraq – that was in February of 2001.

One of Dick Cheney’s assignments as the new Vice President was as the head of the Counter-Terrorism Task Force. Though he found time to meet and conspire with oil company executives, he held no meeting of the C.T.T.F., ignored hundreds of written warnings about potential attacks by bin Laden and others, and finally called the first meeting of America’s Counter-Terrorism Task Force on 12 September 2001!

Whatta guy!

He is actually getting no pushback for blaming President Obama for the failures of the Bush gang in the specious War on Terror. That the evil Dick Cheney has any traction at all on TV news and radio talk just goes to show whose side the fascist-Federalist propaganda machinery is on.

Congress unfortunately failed its Constitutional responsibility to impeach the traitors of the Bush administration. Congress needs to investigate the long list of obvious crimes against the U.S. Constitution, and then to follow all the evidence as revealed and indict and prosecute any and all who conspired to subvert our precious Constitution.

And Dick Cheney belongs at the top of the list of suspects.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #88: The Party of No

Recent writers of letters in the local newspaper avoid certain facts, because objective reality is their enemy.

1) Barack Obama won the election for President in November 2008. That an African-American won the popular vote is a major accomplishment (in this racist country), and the landslide in the electoral college is equally important. The People are now back in power.

2) The Japanese surrendered in 1945, but the permanent opposition to the People did not surrender in November. Those seeking to render the U.S. Constitution worthless continue to spew their propaganda, as regularly appears in local newspapers across the country, as well as on national hate-talk radio and on the faux TV news channels.

The Party of No – no facts, no rights, no healthcare, no accountability, no security, no jobs, no education, no solutions – is made up of the Republicans, fascists, racists, Federalists, Wall Street barons, members of P.N.A.C., all the unindicted traitors and criminals of the Bush Administration, the war profiteers, and just plain demagogues plotting together and separately to reverse the intent of the Constitution and to further destroy the Nation. Their evil job is not done.

3) The Republican National Debt today stands at 25 trillion dollars. If – and that is still a very big IF – Barack Obama and his team saves America and the world from suffering the decade-long Second Republican Depression that looms on our horizon, then he will have done a greater thing than F.D.R. did, because President Obama has only eight years to rescue the country. The matter is extremely urgent.

4) The economy of America and the world has not yet reached bottom. We have yet to go thru the turmoil that awaits from the Credit Card Crisis. If President Obama makes the right choices AND his plans get enacted in time, then the economy won't get too much worse. If what needs to be enacted is faulty or is blocked or watered down by the Party of No, then the Republican Great Depression of 1929 to 1938 will look like a picnic in the park in comparison.

5) A recent national poll by A.B.C. News found that only 21% of American voters will admit to being registered as Republicans. The Party of No has lost power because their lies are both the cause and the result of believing their own propaganda.

* *          * *          * *          * *

Barack Obama and his team are the only chance that America has to restore Constitutional law, to survive the Republican economic meltdown, and with a little luck maybe even prevent your grandchildren from living as slaves to the Oligarchy.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

May Quotations

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
~~ Peter De Vries [1910-93]

"If you are unhappy before fame, you will probably be unhappy during fame."
~~ Haing S. Ngor [1940-96]

"Part of the loot went for gambling and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."
~~ actor George Raft [1895-1980]

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
~~ John Kenneth Galbraith [1908-2006]

"A nation glued to the television screen ... can fill up every 'unforgiving minute' with enough trash and preoccupation to still forever the deeper voices of the soul."
~~ Adlai Stevenson [1900-65], in 1959

"My activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet."
~~ Alice Walker, in 1989

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-63]

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"News is what someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know. Everything else is advertising."
~~ Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe [1865-1922]

"We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
~~ Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94]

"Oh! what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!"
~~ Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832]

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote."
~~ William E. Simon

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"All good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."
~~ Norman Maclean [1902-90]

"[Sociologist C. Wright] Mills is half forgotten -- perhaps because much of what he said is now taken for granted."
~~ Norman Birnbaum

"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
~~ Cyril Connolly [1903-74]

"This is the worst economy since the Great Depression."
~~ Richard Stengel, Time Magazine

"The problem with 'going with the flow' is that the flow is always downhill."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"The world has been slow to realize that we are in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history."
~~ John Maynard Keynes [1883-1946], quoted by James K. Galbraith in written testimony to Congress, February 2009

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
~~ Washington Irving [1783-1859]

"A useless life is an early death."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1842]

"There is a purpose to our lives that each day tugs at our sleeve as an annoying distraction."
~~ Robert Brault

"When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind."
~~ Seneca the Younger [4? B.C.E. - 65 A.D.]

"Is it weird in here, or is it just me?"
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the price of a song?"
~~ Lou Reed

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valley of silliness."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them."
~~ Frank A. Clark

"Higher education in America is designed to fashion plowshares into doorstops."
~~ G.E. Nordell

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

April News Factoids

ECOLOGY / GLOBAL WARMING

The Pacific Ocean garbage patch is growing ... It's now bigger than the state of Texas.
== AP news headline April 2009

"In 2006, the greenhouse gases produced by U.S. farm animals exceeded the emissions of the iron, steel and cement industries combined."
== Lisa Morgan, The Atlantic September 2008


LOST JOBS IN AMERICA

595,000 jobs lost in January 2009, worst in 35 years
== AP News headline February 2009

Jobless rate jumps to 8.1 percent in February, highest since late 1983; employers cut 651,000 jobs...
== AP News headline March 2009

3.6 million jobs lost since the beginning of the recession

The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since late 1983, as a wide range of employers eliminated a net total of 663,000 jobs.
== AP news 3 April 2009
{double that number for the real figure of 17% unemployemnt}

Americans lost 742,000 jobs in March 2009.
== Air America Radio newsletter


OTHER ECONOMIC CONCERNS

"17% fewer dot-com and other standard web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter of 2008 than in the same period in 2007."
== Time Magazine

Chinese exports dropped 17.5% in January 2009 compared to a year earlier
== Time Magazine

Household debt in the U.S. soared from 60% of income in 1982 to 130% in 2007.
== Time Magazine


THE OLIGARCHY

"Over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent [of U.S. taxpayers] saw their share of the nation's income double, from 11.3& to 22.1%, but their tax burden shrank by about one third [from 33.1 percent to 22.8% percent]."
{ **emphasis added } == The Nation Magazine

"From 1973 to 1985, the [U.S.] financial sector never earned more than 16 prcent of domestic corporate profits ... [During the Bush Administration] it reached 41 percent."
== Simon Johnson, in The Atlantic

Essay #87: The 2012 Hoax

        This whole thing about The World Is Gonna End! on 12 December or 21 December of 2012 is just another manipulation to instill more fear into the population.
        The purpose? A population that lives in fear – about anything, and especially when the fear is about everything – is to that extent paralyzed and diverted from addressing the very real dangers that continually threaten the existence of Mankind here on the Blue Planet.
        War, pestilence, famine, death, cancer, droughts and floods, hurricanes, Chinese toys, exploding auto tires, vampires, unions and-or management, white supremacists, Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, atheist extremists, illegal aliens here to take your job, environmentalists here to take your job, Democrats who want to take your guns, rednecks who carry guns to the grocery store, wolves who eat your stock, deer who eat your crops, homeless people who just want something to eat, bankers who want to foreclose your home, a ‘healthcare’ industry that makes people sick – the list goes on and on.

* *          * *          * *          * *        Remember the Y2K phenomenon? At least that non-event got a few retired COBOL programmers put back to work updating software badly designed so as not to handle the four-digit year and-or the rollover to first digit of 2. Other than that, what actually happened? A peak in sales of bottled water, camping supplies, and Meals Ready To Eat. Lots and lots of fear that ended in a gigantic fizzle.

        And the big frenzy about Jesus Is Coming, soon swept aside by celebu-tart news stories. (My favorite from back then was the “Jesus is coming – and boy is He p*ssed!” bumper stickers.)
        At one company where I worked in the 1990s, some of the Christians spent their weekends up in the mountains training for the End Times; what was most amazing to me was that one of my Jewish co-workers was training with them.
        Nothing really happened, Jesus is still missing, it was all simply another fear-based ruckus in the media about nothing, as will be the increasing hooferaw about the 2012 farce.

        Each of these media-driven programs of fear-mongering will often run for years. The Y2K thing was lengthened by the silly furor over when exactly the Millennium changed. The big Millennium parties were held in Las Vegas and Tokyo and elsewhere on 31 December 1999 (the False Millennium) and then the B Team held further parties on 31 December 2000 – because they could. (The facts are simple: the artificial First Millennium began 1 January in Year One, therefore the Second Millennium began on 1 January of the year 2001. Duh!)

* *          * *          * *          * *        And let us not forget the decades-long Baby On Board fad. This spread to the U.S from Germany about the time that Reagan was running for President, and still flourishes in the U.K. It began during the same time period that the unthinking religionist sheeple masses were first organizing their political shenanigans, and the very unconscious meaning behind the whole deal was connected to the ‘Jesus Is Returning At The Millennium’ myth.
        Using no logic whatsoever, if Jesus returns in 2000 or 2001, then he’d have to be twenty or so, so he’d have to be born anywhere from 1978 to maybe 1980, or if by 1982 then he’d be 18 years old, that could work. So any child of a Christian family could be very, very special, there’s no way to know, so for a couple years, let’s not kill babies and let’s all drive real carefully, because anyone could be the proud parent of a kid who survives being a teenager in America and is revealed by hosts of angels to be the Son of the Christian God-head. (Film at eleven!)
        Logic? What if Jesus comes back as a girl? Or even better, someone born into the LGBT community? And the arrogance of us Americans: we are 6% of the overpopulated planet, any such godling is three times more likely to be Chinese.
        Well, those yellow diamond-shaped signs that were stuck inside millions of car windows got old after a while, but the kitsch-dealers kept it going. ‘Pet on board’ and other variations, then ‘Driver carries no cash’ (as if robbers and car-jackers might obey the sign), which eventually evolved into ‘Baby carries no cash’, which was kind of the end of the silliness here in America.
        We protected all those babies and then none of them grew up to be Jesus. Bummer!

* *          * *          * *          * *        This whole Mayan calendar 2012 myth is just more of the same, a waste of time designed to distract and divert the populace from Reality.
        Forests will be cut down to report opinions for and against this Mayan myth from dozens of uninformed opinion-mongers who will promote their worthless books on the boob-tube and will draw millions of dollars out of the pockets of the ever-eager fools and idiots that live right in your neighborhood.
        Nothing much can be done to prevent the meaningless frenzy, as the idiots are too many among us. It will all play out as the previous such phenomena did, including the people with nothing better to do who will buy tickets and take time off work and get happily drunk at End of The World parties around the globe – “Fox News On The Scene, Live!” – and when they wake up on December 15th they will still feel hangover-ish, and in the next week or so will receive the charges for their excesses on their credit card billing statements.

        If you want to have a little fun with these dolts, then any time anyone brings up the subject of 2012 as The End of The World, offer them ten dollars for their automobile or $100 for their house, based on a written & notarized contract that becomes due on, oh, January First of 2013. If they won’t sign such a contract, then they are fools for promoting a mythical event that they don’t really believe in. And if anyone does sign such a contract with you, then they are truly major idiots who deserve to be thinned from the herd, and they truly deserve their comeuppance in 2013 when you show up with the paperwork to collect your new house or car.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

April Quotations

{{ NOTE: This is post #150 on this blog }}

"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]

"Gluttony is not a secret vice."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]

"Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?"
~~ Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University

"I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay."
~~ Pres. Barack Obama, 23 February 2009

"Real hell is there in the office."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

"Nothing in this life happens without a before and after."
~~ Doris R. Meredith

“We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.”
~~ author Philip Pullman

"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ George V. Higgins

"People try to alter my grumpy, curmudgeonly ways by telling me that 'You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar'. But why would I want to attract flies at all?"
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, nbut not against art."
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]

"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."
~~ actress Shelley Winters [1920-2006]

"It's okay to be fat. So you're fat. Just be fat and shut up about it."
~~ Roseanne Barr

"We rarely repent of having eaten too little."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness is the reward of character."
~~ George Santayana [1853-1962]

"Life, of course, is without meaning, and if you find something that gives it meaning, you're very fortunate."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]

"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]

"Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years, arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist

"Stay alert: The Republicans and the fascists lost the election in 2008, but they did not surrender."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The world is illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and [real] in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of comprehending. Our business is to wake up."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

"Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect."
~~ Thomas S. Monson

"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself. The height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. And this law is: the expansion of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [1452-1519]

"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62] (in the "Pensées")

"Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]

"For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world."
~~ writer Dawn Powell [1896-1965]

"The logic of business is coersion, monopoly and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice' or 'service' or universal affluence."
~~ Thomas C. Frank

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"Where there is no vision, the people will perish." ~~ Proverbs 29:18

"In Hollywood, they'll forgive you if you're two-faced, but not if you're two-chinned."
~~ actress Colleen Dewhurst [1924-91]

"Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names."
~~ David O. Selznick [1902-65]

"A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car."
~~ Kenneth Tynan

"When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected."
~~ Shirley Temple

"When I was young, I was terribly concerned with what people thought of me. But now I'm more concerned with what I think of them."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
~~ Lucille Ball [1911-89]

"A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself."
~~ actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are deliberate works of art."
~~ actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]

"To survive [in Hollywood] you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony."
~~ actress Billie Burke [1884-1970]

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."
~~ Colette [1873-1954]

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. ... The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
~~ Ken Kesey [1935-2001] (in 1994)

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #86: “Reason-Based Taxation (Redux)”

        What was brilliant about the creation of the United States of America, beginning from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was the boldly inventive statement that the individual always has the right to act in his/her best interest.
        This is also the root of Objectivism.
        But Man's inherent right to the good services of his/her government, along with other basic and unalienable rights, is prevented by the intentions of the extant Political System, in each & every country across the globe, in each & every hamlet, across each & every national border.

        Present government institutions seldom get the job done, whatever their stated purpose: the most grievous misfeasance here in America has been in the schools and in the Legal Industry. An entire generation are now adults who on average cannot read or write effectively and cannot think their way out of a paper bag. The American Legal Industry's top leaders in December 2000 and again in December 2004 handed over the U.S. Presidency to a usurper who sold his term of office to the oil & timber monopolies, and to who knows what other special interests.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        One percent of the population now owns 60 percent of everything in America. Twenty years ago, they owned only 35 percent of everything in the country: in the years since Dr. Ravi Batra established that base-line, the One Percent – the Oligarchy that rules this country, also known as 'The People Who Count' – accrued 25% more of the totality of the assets in this country.
        But they do not have enough: they want it all.
        This One Percent, the Oligarchy, has spent millions of dollars to prevent any levy that might approach having them pay their fair share, the result being the Bush Tax Giveaway that was fast-tracked thru the U.S. Congress, and the Republican National Debt that today stands at twenty trillion dollars.

        What is the Oligarchy's fair share? The calculation is quite simple and direct:
        The U.S. Defense Department spends certain monies for doing their job. which includes protecting the 60% of all the land and property and assets owned by the Oligarchy, so therefore the Oligarchy should pay 60% of the Defense Department budget every year.
        The Oligarchy would insist that they are good patriots, so they should be willing to pay a 60% share of the Interior Department budget every year.
        The Oligarchy owns 60% of all business concerns, big and small, so they should pay 60% of the Commerce and Transportation and Energy and Agriculture Department budgets every year.
        The Department of State probably goes overboard in fulfilling the wishes of the Oligarchy, but I say that the Oligarchy need only pay a 60% share of the State Department budget every year as well.

        The Oligarchy, the One Percent, should be paying 60% of the entire federal budget every year. The same calculation applies to every U.S. federal department and bureau and section.
        This principle applies also to each and every country, to each & every state or province or canton or arrondissement, to each & every local government entity, down to each & every school and water district.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The Oligarchy that rules this and other countries owns sixty percent of everything, so they should pay 60% of the taxes required to supply the benefits that they derive from government in all its overlapping jurisdictions. Any other plan or assessment will concede to them the means to achieve their ultimate intention, which is to own one-hundred percent of everything – a return to feudalism. After the Oligarchy has achieved that intention, they have only your 'soul' – your Self – to take away from you and yours.
        The Oligarchy has already taken away your vote, "without firing a shot", in the ChadGate fiasco of 2000: the U.S. Supreme Court anointed George Dubya as President of the U.S. of A. in complete disregard for due process or for the will of the people, based on the wrong-headed certainty that it was right to do so and in the clear knowledge that no one could stop them.
        They ignored the U.S. Constitution in a 'dog and pony show' that was broadcast on national television and radio. Most Americans made no effort to watch or listen to this show, settling instead for the 'sound bite' camouflage served up by – you guessed it – the media conglomerates owned by the Oligarchy.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Previous iterations of class are disappearing, and are being replaced by a structure of Economic Class. The Oligarchy has replaced the Aristocracy, while assuming the same attitude of Divine Right that triggered the French Revolution of 1789.
        The lower economic classes, the 'proletariat', are defined as those who have no capital, nor means of production, and thus are required to sell their labor in order to survive. The Upper Middle economic class deals with the lower classes only while the latter are employed as servants.
        The entire economy works – or does not work – on the backs of the middle and lower classes, whose primary role in the latter XXth Century evolved into that of the Consumer Class: Notice that virtually every middle class American household is in constant debt (even disregarding mortgage payments), which means that they are encouraged – maybe 'required' is a better term – to spend more than they earn, so that the Oligarchy can reap their Divine Right profits on goods that the Consumer Class does not need and cannot in truth afford. The Consumer Class has an envious lifestyle, but in actuality owns less and less: because the Oligarchy owns more and more.

        This is not exactly news. The system of Economic Class ensures the giving away of power to the Oligarchy, in the form of debt, under the constant and compelling threat of job loss. If the middle class worker does not purchase 'the latest', then the economy will collapse and the Consumer will be out of work and thrown into survival among the lower economic classes. The Consumer Class has been taught to spend in order to earn.
        This is in effect worse than the 'indentured servitude' that was common around the time of the U.S. Revolutionary War. A British or other freeman could get passage to America or an apprenticeship in a trade in exchange for an agreed-upon term, often three to five years. The difference between indenture and today's economy is that the Consumer Class owes the Oligarchy and there is no expiration date on the deal: The Consumer Class is required to stay in debt by the pressures of the consumer economy, of which the primary beneficiary is the Oligarchy. (Think not? Did your real net worth – exclusive of housing – increase by anywhere near 50% since 1985?)

        The Oligarchy has done such a good job of fulfilling their devious intention that labor union membership in the U.S. has been down to 15% of the work-force for a long time. President George Dubya honored his idol, Ronnie Reagan, by ordering the Northwest Airlines mechanics union not to strike, just as Ronnie busted the air traffic controller walkout in August of 1981. And the media soon began reporting that George Dubya would prevent a strike at Delta Airlines.
        The later years of Bush's ignoble reign saw the entire economy collapse, in the U.S.A. and around the world. (American consumers no longer have jobs or spare money to spend or save, and U.S. consumer spending accounts for 25% of the world economy.) Dubya's agenda included looting the U.S. Treasury, and he did such a thorough job of screwing up America's future that (in typical Dubya incompetence) he screwed up the screw-up. The subprime lending debacle caused the banking crisis that caused the disappearance of half the net value of the stock market indexes, in a matter of months after the election. And the almost-funny part is that Dubya was supposed to leave the mess for his successor, but he screwed up so badly that the collapse happened before the November 2008 election, and Barack Obama swept into the White House charged with cleaning up Dubya's mess.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Until the structure of the Economic Classes is redesigned so that the middle class, the now 'Consumer Class', is able to acquire wealth as a result of their labors, then matters can only get worse. The only remedy is to increase the taxation levied on the Oligarchy so that they pay their share for the government services that they receive, all down the line.
        The One-Percent, the Oligarchy has already acquired more than half of this country's total assets; the Wealthy Class (the top 20% of taxpayers) owns 85% of this country's total assets. The Wealthy Class have more than enough money to bribe Congress and local officials to do their bidding, but We The People showed the world in November 2008 that true Power lies with us. The Wealthy Class will fight 'tooth and nail' against Change, so Americans must remain steadfast and vigilant and never back down.

        Like it or not, America and the world are now engaged in Economic Class War.

Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

March 2009 News Factoids (catching up)

LAW & JUSTICE
Bush and Cheney and Rove et al did not get impeached, but there is NO statute of limitations on their major crimes, which include treason, murder, and willful violations of the Geneva Conventions.


U.S. ECONOMY
Retail sales fell 3% in October 2008, the biggest drop on record.

The U.S. lost 240,000 jobs in October, raising the unemployment rate to 6.5%, the highest in 14 years; the rate will probably peak in late 2009. ~~ AP Radio News, 7 November 2008

Employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years; the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

New unemployment claims rose in December 2008 to 26-year high as layoffs continue.

U.S. auto sales tumbled 18% in 2008.

Retail sales plunged far more than expected {2.7%} in December, a record sixth straight monthly decline as consumers were battered by a recession, a severe credit crisis and soaring job losses, none of which are likely to ease anytime soon.
~~ AP News headline, 14 January 2009

[The U.S.] economy shrinks at faster-than-expected 6.2 percent pace in fourth quarter, worst in 25 years.
~~ internet headline, 27 February 2009


WORLD ECONOMY
"Japan's economy shrank 3.3% in 2008, their worst performance in 35 years."
~~ Air America "The Wire" ezine

February 4th, 2009 headline: "Panasonic in Japan cutting 15,000 jobs and closing plants"


THE STOCK MARKET CASINO
Stocks tumble, losing 10 percent in 2-day rout.
~~ AP Radio News item, Thursday 6 November 2008

Both the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes have lost about half their value since hitting record highs in October 2007.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 26.72 (-3.47%) to 743.33 on February 23, the lowest close since 11 April 1997.

On 2 March 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index tumbled below 7,000 for the first time since October 1997.


OTHER NEWS
The W.H.O. Report On Healthcare for 2008 states:
• • The U.S. is ranked 37th in quality.
• • The worldwide average cost per capita for people with healthcare is $2929; the U.S.A. is twice that at $6096.
• • U.S. life expectancy is lower than 13 major first world countries at 78.06 years.

The LionsGate movie studio deal with the City of Rio Rancho, New Mexico that was documented here in 2006 has officially expired.

Per various news sites, now when a celebu-tart does something dangerously wild and crazy, they are 'doing a Britney'.

February Quotations

"Under Bush, no violent acts against the U.S. have occurred since 9/11. But the cost has been a legal and spiritual 9/11 every day since."
~~ Abraham Sategh (Time Letters 12/2008)

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."
~~ Martin Buber [1878-1965]

"Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today."
~~ President-elect Barack Obama

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."
~~ Ray Bradbury

"Whatever competence I may have comes from my having trained myself to be out there with what I am dealing with instead of being in here trying to deal with what is out there."
~~ Werner Erhard

"Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread."
~~ Pablo Neruda [1904-73]

"Waterboarding is torture."
~~ Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General-designate testifying before Congress 15 January 2009

"The average inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90 percent of earners was lower in 2006 than it was back in 1973."
~~ David Cay Johnston

"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether government works."
~~ President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address 20 January 2009

"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
~~ Tom Stoppard

"When somebody farts out loud, an angel gets its wings."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"If we would learn what the human race is at bottom, we need only observe them during an election."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment".
{"Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif."}
~~ Cardinal de Retz [1613-79]

"Not often in the story of Mankind does a man arrive on Earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect."
~~ poet Carl Sandburg [1878-1967], describing Abraham Lincoln before Congress in 1959

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"Those who don't build must burn."
~~ Ray Bradbury (in "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)

"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens."
~~ Epictetus [circa 55-135 C.E.], Stoic philosopher & crippled former slave

"The trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"By far the greatest threat to private life is the obscene disproportion of private wealth."
~~ Garrett Keizer

"[When you] let the fear of poverty govern your life ... your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"We are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams."
~~ Roald Dahl [1916-90]

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Parody is a game; satire is a lesson."
~~ Vladimir Nabakov [1899-1977]

"You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself."
~~ W. Clement Stone [1902-2002]

"We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only six percent of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every problem."
~~ John F. Kennedy (1961)

"Homeland security patriotism ... has turned the neo-cons' idea of loyalty into a loveless lock step and their democratic creed into Orwellian sloganeering."
~~ Jim Sleeper

"Hope is a fine sentiment, but it's not a plan."
~~ George Dunn

"What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."
~~ Thomas R. Marshall [1854-1925]

"Exploration and the pursuit of knowledge have always paid dividends in the long run."
~~ astronaut John Glenn, testifying before Congress 26 February 1962

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
~~ Alfred Hitchcock [1899-1980]

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
~~ Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong."
~~ Peter T. McIntyre

"You become a writer by writing. It is a yoga."
~~ novelist R.K. Narayan [1906-2001]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

2008 Year-End Website Statistics

white space due to blogger editor software bug (work-around not yet found)

WEBSITE / subsite	2007 pages	2007 covers		2008 pages	2008 covers
GENordell.com website	69	162		83	177
Rick Walker Novels	15	25		18	29
BlackHat Mystery Bookstore	37	709		41	907
Western Bookstore	35	738		40	903
Magic Lantern Bookstore	86	1,922		135	3,033
Spirit of America Bookstore	70	1,849		100	2,395
Maison d'Être Bookstore	42	1,335		46	1,449
Earl / addURL subsite	13	none		15	n/a
G.E.N. Website Design	5	none		5	n/a
GEN TOTALS	372	6,740		483	8,893
Working-Minds.com	160	474		187	523
Working Minds Solutions	9	160		9	174
WM TOTALS	169	634		196	697
TOTALS of both domains	541	7,374		679	9,590

Essay #85: “Open Letter to the Attorneys General”

You are granted authority – and assigned the duty – by the U.S. Constitution to remove criminals from free Society.

This must include the traitors, blackmailers and killers that have done such great damage to America during their various terms in office within the eight-year debacle that has been the Bush administration.

George W. Bush has run up more debt than any other person in the history of Mankind. And with his guidance, the Bush administration has pissed on the environment, ransacked the Treasury, shat upon America’s good name, filled the gap between Church and State with the stench of sanctity, and stomped on the Bill of Rights.

Their many specific crimes include shredding official documents, disobeying Congressional subpoenas and federal law, decimation of the Commonwealth, violations of the Geneva Convention, war profiteering, illegal wiretapping of Americans and foreigners, egregious invasion of privacy, and torture of civilians and enemy combatants.

It is a Historic Damn Shame that the Bush Gang will not be impeached during these last few days of their tenure.

But here are two points of Law that should be remembered by the current and the next U.S. Attorney General, as well as by all the present and incoming Federal Attorneys across this Nation:

1} There is NO Statute of Limitations on treason or murder, nor on certain provisions of the Geneva Convention.

2} President Bush cannot pardon himself. This principle in law also prevents President Bush from pardoning anyone with whom he conspired to commit a crime. Though he may attempt to initiate such documents, they are null and void.

Thus Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Robert Novak, Scooter Libby, David Addington and others can and should be prosecuted for Treason. Thus Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard B. Myers, Geoffrey Miller, Conda- leeza Rice, John Negroponte and too many others to mention can and must be prosecuted for their crimes against America and against Humanity.

* *          * *          * *          * *
The American People elected Barack Obama to be our 44th President, voicing our demand for Change. That Change must include a return to Constitutional Law, which was buried under the lies and stealth practices and false ‘national security’ shield of the Patriot Acts, and behind the pretense of George Bush’s record thousand-plus signing statements.

The Law has been ignored and battered and twisted and corrupted for eight years.

The American People want an end to corruption, an end to unfettered bribery, an end to civil rights abuses, and an end to corporate-fascist license to profit by the raping and pillage of what once was the Best Country On The Planet.

These criminals need to be prosecuted for their crimes, and sentenced to the maximum punishment allowable, for the American People need this to be done, to restore the Soul of America

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

December Quotations

"Exaggerate the essential; leave the obvious vague."
~~ Vincent Van Gogh [1853-90]

"It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered."
~~ Aeschylus [c. 525 - c. 456 B.C.E.]

"Life is all about how you handle Plan B"
~~ gag t-shirt

"Even true things shouted from loudspeakers start to sound like lies."
~~ Leonardo Sciascia [1921-89]

"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience."
~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-94]

"Idiots are everywhere. Many have degrees."
~~ Terry Black

"Dare to be indifferent"
~~ gag t-shirt

"Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost."
~~ Thomas Fuller [1608-61]

"One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one's troubles does not make it any better."
~~ Cesare Pavese [1908-50]

"Life is one long process of getting tired."
~~ Samuel Butler [1835-1902]

"There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing."
~~ Anthony Powell [1905-2000]

“The most important thing in acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
~~ George Burns [1896-1996]

"I listen to Beethoven every week, and to Bach twice a week, but to Mozart every day."
~~ Igor Stravinsky [1882-1971]

"[The Jesuits] appear to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation."
~~ Thomas Macaulay [1800-1859]

"The primary reward for human toil is not what you get by it, but what you become by it."
~~ John Ruskin [1819-1900]

"Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
~~ Virginia Woolf [1882-1941]

"The more serious the face, the more beautiful the smile."
~~ François-René de Chateaubriand [1768-1848]

"To die of love is overdoing it."
~~ French proverb

"A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough."
~~ quoted by Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"If you marry, you will regret it; if you don't marry, you will also regret it."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]

"Having a good wife and rich cabbage soup, seek not other things."
~~ Russian proverb

"Possibilities are like the wings of birds; they allow man to soar and to climb to the heavens. And facts are like the atmosphere against which those wings must beat, and without which the soaring bird will surely plummet back to earth."
~~ Ivan Petrovich Pavlov [1849-1936]

"McCarthyism has not disappeared from the American scene."
~~ André Schiffrin (2008)

"Only people destroy beauty."
~~ Michael Collins

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system."
~~ George W. Bush (C.N.N. interview 16 December 2008 AFTER the meltdown-recession-depression)

"All that you have is your story."
~~ voiceover narration of the movie "Australia" [2008]

"The wise man never has to lie."
~~ Jesuit maxim

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”
~~ Flannery O'Connor [1925-64]

"The pen is mightier than the sword."
~~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton [1803-73] (in stageplay "Richelieu", 1839)

"Endeleya mbele!"
~~ Kimani

"The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent fishing."
~~ Old Saying

"The world is run by C students."
~~ basketball announcer Al McGuire [1928-2001]

"The color of truth is gray."
~~ André Gide [1869-1951]

"For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack."
~~ Rudyard Kipling [1865-1936]

"Three things make up a nation: its land, its people, and its laws."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Two things are wanted by a true man, danger and play – therefore, he seeks woman as the most dangerous play."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"It ain't bragging if you can back it up."
~~ baseball player Dizzy Dean [1910-74]

"An artist must learn ... that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval."
~~ Erica Jong

"Never take stupidity too much in earnest."
~~ a 'Chinese proverb' invented by Jacques Maritain [1882-1973]

"Lying about the future produces history."
~~ Umberto Eco

"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account."
~~ Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]

"[Writing] is like driving a car at night. You never see farther than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
~~ E.L. Doctorow

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

November Quotations

"You can never do a kindness too soon, because you will never know how soon it will be too late."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"Home is the place where, when you go there / They have to take you in"
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery."
~~ George Scialabba

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism."
~~ Gore Vidal

"All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts."
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon."
~~ Henry de Montherlant [1896-1972]

"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"37 seconds well used is a lifetime!"
~~ Mr. Edward Magorium character, as written by Zach Helm

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
~~ Edna Ferber [1885-1968]

"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to
be relished."
~~ William Wordsworth [1750-1850]

"Writing a book is an adventure: It begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma."
~~ Hendrik Willem van Loon [1882-1944]

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have had."
~~ Marlene Dietrich [1901-92]

"My father showed me his library, which was very large, and told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me, I should immediately put it down."
~~ Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986]

"Morality is all right, but what about dividends?"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm II [1859-1941]

"Have nothing ... that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
~~ William Morris

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]

"Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse."
~~ Hannah Arendt [1906-75]

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Trust your editor, and you'll sleep on straw."
~~ John Cheever [1912-82]

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money."
~~ Robert Graves [1895-1985]

"Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him."
~~ Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.)

"Henry [Kissinger] does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature."
~~ Helmut Sonnenfeldt

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness."
~~ Jane Austen [1775-1817]

"The knowledge that the aristocrats take for granted, we must pay for with our youth."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Every gun that is made ... signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

"I am so tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed, when it comes to the relation of man and woman. All I see in our vaunted civilization is men and women smashing each other emotionally and physically to bits, and all I ask is that they should pause and consider."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]

"The sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"The domination of women by men has lasted for fifty thousand years. Why can't it last just fifty more?"
~~ grafitto in Berlin, Germany

"[Mankind is] a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy, and show."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand, but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"[Poetry] is not so fine a thing as philosophy – for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth."
~~ John Keats [1795-1821]

"Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt."
~~ Allan Bloom

"The superior man is distressed by his want of ability."
~~ Confucius [551-479 B.C.E.]

"Why not make the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him."
~~ Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character. Happiness does that sometimes; but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

"You have to choose: live or tell stories."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Truisms are best."
~~ Noam Chomsky

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

November News Factoids (with election predictions)

PREDICTIONS

Barack Obama will win by a landslide 60% to 40% over John McBush in tomorrow's national election – UNLESS the Rove-bot machinery of the Republican Party manages to steal another election, in direct conflict with The Constitution and the Will of The People.

The once-red state of New Mexico will switch all five Congressional seats to Democratic. Bingaman continues as Senator; Udall replaces disgraced longtime Sen. Domenici; and Martin Heinrich & Harry Teague & Ben Ray Lujan sweep the House seats.

OTHER NEWS

Influenza kills about 36,000 people each year in America.
~~ A.P. Radio News

My local power company P.N.M. included a chart in the billing last month that defines their fuel sources as 41% coal (San Juan Generating Station), 16% nuclear, 22% natural gas, 8% wind, with solar a small part of 13% other. So New Mexico is basically up to speed with a lot of what T. Boone Pickens is after with his energy plan.
~~ sign up with the Pickens Army at www.PickensPlan.com

"One result of the Bush policies that erupted in the Russia-Georgia miniwar is that Russia now controls the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline."
~~ The Washington Spectator

"The [U.S.] military budget, now nearly $600 billion, is almost as large as the combined military budgets of the rest of the world. We outspend China by a factor of ten to one, Russia by sixteen to one, and Iran by almost ninety times."
~~ The Nation Magazine (Oct 2008)

THE ECONOMY

George W. Bush has run up more debt than any other person in the history of Mankind, i.e. fifteen trillion dollars (to be paid off by U.S. taxpayers).

The $700 billion subprime market bailout is the largest money bill ever passed by the U.S. Congress; it is also more money than it cost to fund the VietNam War.

September data on job losses in America show that we have lost jobs for nine months in a row.
~~ A.P. Radio News

There were 5.6 million jobs lost or displaced in 2007.
~~ Economic Policy Institute (Sept 2008)

Over the last 25 years, the percentage of obese children in America has doubled.
~~ www.EarthShare.org

"[Wall Street] had a party / Now you're going to pay"
~~ subhead of Time Magazine cover story (cover date 29 Sept 2008)

"The S&P Case-Schiller Index of house prices in 20 [U.S.] cities has been falling since February 2007. And the decline is accelerating. In June [2008], prices were down 16% compared with a year earlier."
~~ Time Magazine (Sept 2008)

As-of October 2008: The S&P 500 Index was down 33% for the year; the Nikkei Index fell to its lowest in 26 years; the Chinese stock market was down about 60% for the year; Germany's DAX Index was down 38%; the BM&F-Bovespa Index in Brasil was down 40%; Shanghai's S.E. Composite Index was down 60%; Russia's RTS Index was down 67%.

ENVIRONMENT

Worldwide, species threatened or extinct: birds, 1 in 7; amphibians, 1 in 3; mammals, 1 in 5.
~~ Time Magazine chart 10/2008

Due to global warming and to irrigation use during the dry season, the rivers Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, Nile (and many others) no longer reach the ocean.

"Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"Environmental crisis is gathering as ... the result of a system of political economy - today's capitalism - that is profoundly committted to profits and growth and profoundly indifferent to nature and society."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"We are losing the planet ... Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are gone. Half the planet's wetlands are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone and 75 percent of marine fisheries are overfished, fished to capacity, or depleted. ... Twenty percent of the corals are gone, another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing about 1000 times faster than normal."
~~ James Gustave Speth (in 2008)

"[In the United States,] forty percent of ... fish species are threatened with extinction, a third of plants and amphibians, 15 to 20 percent of birds and mammals. Half of U.S. lakes and a third of the rivers still fail to meet the standards that the 1972 Clean Water Act said should be met by 1983."
~~ James Gustave Speth (in 2008)

Essay #84: Your Future Is Foreclosed

        You are now a slave. The change took place on Sunday September 7th. Everyone in the United States of America, every man and woman and child in America – You are now a slave.
        You were charged on that date with paying off FIVE trillion dollars added to the Republican National Debt. The folks who took the money are the same Corporatist-Fascist-Federalist pirates who took control of the machinery of government in 2000, and now they have taken total control of the U.S. economy.
        And you are their slave.

        The full Republican National Debt stands at TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS. (Republican George W. Bush already ran up more debt than any other human being in the history of Mankind.)

        Your personal share of that debt, as a resident of the U.S.A., is $70,000. Every child too young for HeadStart owes the same amount, though they are not yet potty-trained.
        Alternate computation: Your personal share of the Republican National Debt as a taxpayer or voter (half the population) is twice that, so $140,000. And a duplicate amount is owed by your spouse or partner or other taxpayer or voter in your household.
        Look that debt amount in the eye. You owe that amount.
        You are a slave to the Master Class because they will not allow you to pay off the Republican National Debt in your lifetime, so your children and grandchildren are slaves as well. Today. Now.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The Middle Class in America is gone, and in danger in all other countries around the world. Jobs were and are being off-shored, the Bush Economic Meltdown is just beginning, savings and other indicators have been negative all year, and because the Middle Class has no money (the Oligarchy took it all), the economy is grinding to a halt.
        So you are a member of the Working Poor, the economic class below the Middle Class. And as a member of the Working Poor, you will never be able to pay off that $70,000 share of the Republican National Debt.
        Every adult and every grandchild in America, every preschooler, every Senior on a fixed pension or Social Security, and every teenager has received the ‘gift’ of that debt from the Reagan-Bush-Bush dynasty, from the damaging policies of the Republican Party, in cahoots with the Corporatist-Fascist-Federalist Master Class.
        Ordinary Americans will never be able to pay off that $70,000 – or $140,000 or $280,000 per person, depending on how it is divided up. Ordinary Americans no longer can look forward to owning their home. Vacations are a practice of the past. No one else can afford your once-precious boat (or other toy) and you cannot afford the payments.
        You are a slave to the Master Class until the entire Republican National Debt has been paid off – to the Saudis and the Chinese and the Russian Mafia.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        When H.G. Wells wrote his novel “The Time Machine” in 1895, he predicted a future where the human race split into two descen- dent races: the simple and frail and handsome eloi race, who have no intellectual curiosity, and the morlock race, who are muscular and hairy and brutish and live in the dark and run the hidden machinery that provides for the easy life of the eloi.
        And the morlocks are always hungry, so whenever they find an opportunity to capture and eat one of the eloi, they do so.
        It is possible that Wells was prescient, but only half right. If the Master Class succeeds in taking over the entire planet, then Mankind will likely split into two directions from that point in time.
        But the Master Class are the Brutish Branch, and the Working Class are the Good Guys. Workers don’t produce much Art, or discuss Serious Matters. But give the Working Class a job that needs doing, and they are right there with sleeves rolled up. But we seem to be no match for the brutish and cannibalistic Master Class.

        The Class War is perpetual. It could very well continue to the year 802,701 A.D. (as per Wells).
        The Master Class is winning this Class War. THEY have your $70,000; they have the $70,000 owed by each and every grandchild in America; and in fact, the Master Class has the entire TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS stolen by the Republican Party – and what you get in exchange is slavery.
        How d’ya like that deal?

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The Master Class owns your future. Just like they own the petroleum futures, and set the price. And you pay.
        The Master Class controls grain steel and copper and gold futures. And you pay.
        The Master Class has a free ride because they control grain futures and agri-business. And you pay.

        The Master Class began the ethanol futures market in March 2005. If you have ethanol to sell, the Master Class sets their price to you and always sell at a profit – a profit to themselves (as handlers) and also a profit to the oil monopoly.
        And you pay at the pump.

        The next futures market will be water. And you will give your allegiance to the Master Class – you will agree to continue your slavery – or you will have nothing to drink. The Master Class will charge higher prices to small farmers and to small towns, gleefully watch them collapse as viable businesses, and then buy them up to add to their monopolistic corporations.
        What the Master Class does not control, they want. And they have become very skilled at getting what they want. The Romans provided ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the masses compliant, and the equivalent today is ‘fast food and cable TV’ – you are all compliant slaves, so-o-o-o surprised at Bush’s Economic Meltdown, how could such a thing happen and what does it mean. O.M.G!

        The Mandarins are the Master Class in China. They took back control and now use the Communist Party as the means to have what they want – a pseudo-capitalist economy based on slave wages and social cannibalism. The Chinese people have never been free, nor have the fellahin (peasants) of the Middle East, so they see no reason to complain, as long as they perceive their lives to be gradually improving.
        But Americans sold their freedom to the Reagan Machine. And YOU are going to pay the bill, slave.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        You are not likely to see this situation reversed, since almost half of American voters are emulating the lemmings of Scandinavia – follow the leader, right over the cliff. If the voters of America can’t muster the will to take back the helm of governance on November 4th and every election thereafter, the will to restore ALL the lost provisions guaranteed by the Constitution of 1787 (as amended), then slavery will be the future for you and all your family and every person that you know.
        Your future is a commodity, just like ethanol or oil, and the Master Class owns that future – as the paper contracts for the Republican National Debt of TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS.
        The Master Class grabbed a mere FIVE trillion dollars on September 7th in exchange for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac junk bonds. The Master Class – be they Mandarins of China or ‘oilagarchs’ of America or greasy princes of Arabian sheikdoms – will continue to use coercion and stealth and televised propaganda to achieve their aim, which is to have it ALL!
        Then there will be no need for them to pretend that the U.S. Constitution is anything but a piece of paper.
        A mortgage is a written contract. A governmental constitution is a written contract. But each such contract is only as good as the integrity, the absolute Word of the parties involved. The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’.
        Never did.
        The only guarantors of constitutional rule (in each country) are We The People.
        And We The People are not doing that job. Not in America, and not elsewhere.

        The Master Class has hijacked the judicial system, and the legislative system, and the Executive Branch, and now the economic system.
        You are a mere slave tenant in their world, the Master Class are the owners (the Oligarchs), and when they decide to foreclose . . .

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

October Quotations

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

"Education is a better guard of liberty than a standing army."
~~ Edward Everett [1794-1865]

"He who opens a school door closes a prison."
~~ Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"I'm an idiot, I'm a fool, I know ... but I've been a good read, right?"
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005] in his suicide note

"I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably, or even usually, dirty business."
~~ Richard M. Nixon [1913-94]

"The feminist movement is just something for ugly women to do."
~~ ugly male Limp Rushbaugh

"There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to fish and a time to cut bait."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63] (improvising from Ecclesiastes)

"Time has convinced me of one thing: Television is for appearing on – not for looking at."
~~ Noel Coward [1899-1973]

"Why not?"
~~ Robert F. Kennedy campaign slogan

"Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad."
~~ Byron Darnton, New York Times reporter (about W.C. Fields)

"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
~~ Red Sanders, football coach at Vanderbilt University {long before Lombardi)

"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
~~ Wm. Tecumseh Sherman [1820-91] (in 1884)

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history [that] we make today."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947] (in 1916)

"No one on his deathbed ever said 'I wish I had spent more time on my business'."
~~ Arnold Zack (quoted by U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas)

"[New York Tribune editor] Horace Greeley himself could not give a young man better advice than "Go west, young man'."
~~ John B.L. Soule, editor of the Terre Haute, Indiana Express (in 1851)

"Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living."
~~ Jean Kerr [1922-2003]

"The Bush-Cheney administration [has] been the worst in modern American history – a failure at home and abroad, [and] intellectually and financially corrupt."
~~ Lou Dubose

"To my mind, pretty much everything besides bread is a dietary supplement."
~~ Corby Kummer, senior editor at Atlantic Monthly

"Never invest in any idea [that] you can't illustrate with a crayon."
~~ Peter Lynch, Wall Street tycoon

"I was always an independent, even when I had partners."
~~ movie producer Samuel Goldwyn [1879-1974]

"Life can only be understood backwards. It must be lived forwards,"
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]

"Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for."
~~ Earl Warren [1891-1974]

"It is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the strets [in America], given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans."
~~ Larry Elliott, economics editor at The London Guardian

"The basic question of philosophy ... is the same as that of the detective novel: Who is guilty?"
~~ Umberto Eco

The Law of Louis XIVth: The reason that real antique chairs are often uncomfortable is that the comfortable chairs get used, and get worn out – and are replaced.

"The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion [that] Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island."
~~ Maurice Maeterlinck [1862-1949]

"Civilization involves subjection of force to reason, and the agency of this subjection is law."
~~ Roscoe Pound [1870-1964]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #83: New Homeland Assault Force

        The Army Times newspaper has published several articles recently mentioning the new assignment for the Third Infantry Division, First Brigade Combat Team, set to begin October First for twelve months.
        That unit spent 35 months out of the prior 60 months fighting in Iraq, and they are battle-hardened and glad to be home.
        But this new assignment is the first-ever permanent allocation of a military unit for a domestic military mission. Technically, the unit reports to NorthCom {U.S. Army Northern Command), but their orders will actually come from the Department of Homeland Security.

        Based at Fort Stewart in Georgia, the 3ID-1BCT is already preparing for sudden deployment anywhere inside the U.S.A. to enforce security or manage humanitarian efforts in the event of natural or man-made catastrophe, or maybe to put down any sort of insurrection or civil unrest or mass demonstrations that the federal government wants quelled – especially if such mass protest is triggered by bad-faith actions by that same federal government.
        (Civil unrest would normally be addressed by state governors calling out the National Guard. But two problems pertain: the National Guard in many states is depleted from service in Iraq, and not all governors kowtow to the President.)

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Why is this option suddenly available?
        The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was cancelled with passage of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act for 2007, signed into law in October 2006. After much uproar, that reversal of the 1878 law was revoked in the Defense Authorization Act for 2008, but in January 2008 President Bush issued one of his infamous ‘signing statements’ declaring broadly that provisions of the new act might inhibit the authority of the President.
        And the assignment of the 3ID-1BCT under Homeland Security is one result.

        The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was put in place to prevent certain excesses of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, and in fact the issue has a long history, back as far as the English Civil War (circa 1642).
        That act of 1878 prevented the use of federal troops as law enforcement, the use of combat-trained soldiers against the people of this country, as military action per se.
        But the Federalist Society and P.N.A.C. and other components of the Corporatist-Fascist conspiracy to revoke the U.S Constitution feel the need for armed troops with loaded weapons as a tool in the implementation of their plan for totalitarian (i.e. ‘unitary executive’) rule of this country.
        The Republican Party forced the issue in Congress (with the usual stealth manipulations), and the weak-kneed cowards of the Democratic Party buckled and allowed the present situation.
        The new assignment of the Third Infantry Division, First Brigade Combat Team is AS posse comitatus.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        Meanwhile, the Pentagon has positioned seven U.S. Navy battle groups (major vessels and all their support ships) inside the Strait of Hormuz, i.e. off the coast of Iran. (The prior sentence is not a breach of national security: the Iranians know, and the Russians & Chinese have satellite photos, of course.)
        Three of those battle groups are aircraft carrier groups, which can deliver American W.M.D. by air far into the interior of Iran (for example) or just install mini-nuke warheads on Tomahawk missiles and do damage from offshore.
        Operation Sitting Duck? The narrowest part of the Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles across, which is less than from Catalina Island to San Pedro or Long Beach harbors in California. The seven battle groups will be accomplishing a great thing merely by not bumping into each other, and even more of an accomplishment in managing NOT to ‘accidentally’ violate Iranian territorial waters.
        The war-hawks in America get what they want the easy way if Iran sends even a teeny boat to attack or confront the U.S. fleet – but the leaders in Iran are not that stupid.
        The present leadership of America is, however, either stupid or incompetent or both, or possibly worse. The massive U.S. military presence off Iran’s coast is a threat to them – intended and perhaps perceived as such – and a happy result for the war-hawks would be any kind of incident where shots are fired.
        Accident? Provocation? Who fired first? Black-flag assault on them or us? Any one of these crises will work, and the facts will be left to historians prevented from access to any actual records for ‘national security’ reasons.

* *          * *          * *          * *
        The terrible and likely scenario in the coming weeks and months is that a tiny mouse-size event occurs, the war-hawks declare Pearl Harbor III, and that is all it takes to begin World War III and Armageddon and The End of Civilization.
        Something happens to the ‘sitting duck’ fleet off the coast of Iran, Dubya or McCain shoots from the hip and uses W.M.D. without authorization from Congress, Congress collapses in a Constitutional crisis, and riots or protests follow.
        And waiting in the wings is the 3ID-1BCT, now Homeland Security’s Domestic Assault Force. The President calls them out to ‘restore order’, U.S. citizens die in the streets of America from federal bullets, and the President declares himself dictator per Presidential Directive 51 (still up on the White House website).
        And the United States of America ceases to exist as either a democracy or as a republic, but instead metastasizes into the Federalist-Corporatist-Fascist heaven, a dictatorship.
        With twenty-trillion dollars in debt, tanks and APCs patrolling the big cities, no jobs, no food, and no Constitution.

        Vote carefully on November 4th: Your life and your country are at stake.
Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #81: Your Vote Is A Gift

      The Founders of the United States of America established in the Constitution that each and every citizen has the Right and the Duty to exercise their will in the act of voting. {While the Founders believed in the principle of We The People, the unenlightened times reserved voting for only white male landowners, or about 3% of the population. We The People have since extended the reach of that concept.)
      Voting is a right and a privilege and a gift and a duty. If you do not vote (and you are eligible) then you demean the U.S. Constitution.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      The act of voting is so important that the Corporatist-Fascist machine (i.e. the Republican Party) is removing voters from the rolls. The Secretary of State of Colorado (Republican, of course) removed 20% of registered voters statewide – without notifying those voters. This brings intentional hassle to every disenfran¬chised Colorado voter, and a serious problem for voters who take no action and show up to vote in November at their polling place and are turned away. (Provisional ballots are worthless.)

* *          * *          * *          * *
      How you have Power is you give it away; how you have Love is you give it away; how you have Freedom is you give it away.
      Your vote exists only when you cast it – at the ballot box and elsewhere. Your vote is a gift that you must give, to yourself and in behalf of your loved ones. And to your enemies.

      Many sheeple say that they don’t vote in elections because their vote doesn’t count, doesn’t matter, is wasted effort.
      All that proves is that they bought into the propaganda.
      What is true is that each of these non-voting sheeple has decided that he/she doesn’t matter. They each surrendered (at best) and are often-times soon semi-innocent tools of the vast Corporatist-Fascist Oligarchy. They blindly obey orders and trudge unhappily toward a meaningless death.
      Each and every citizen matters when they vote. When they vote they have done something that matters – therefore ...

      Each vote is registered in the Universe as an event, as an overt act. Many other overt acts also constitute a kind of voting, such as each and every monetary act – where you buy your groceries or your fuel or your clothing ultimately matters.
      Which is why advertising exists, to manipulate the masses of sheeple into trading with the Oligarchy. The reverse is a very powerful form of protest: Keep your dollars away from the Oligarchy – Wal-Mart, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the Agribiz monopoly, Big Media - and they will starve.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      Who says that you cannot fight/beat City Hall? City Hall, of course. The entrenched bureaucracy wants no opposition.
      Who says not to discuss politics or religion? The same entrenched regressive folks who use religion and politics as their excuse for dastardly deeds. They use religion and politics as their stealth weapon, and don’t you dare use open discussion of religion or politics back on them. Don’t you dare discuss religion or politics as if they are not closed issues, cast in stone in the dogmatic form that the regressives want enforced.
      (Knowledge gives light. Only bugs under rocks fear the light.)

      You vote when you attend religious services. You vote if you keep a promise. You vote when you smile at a stranger – or smile at a loved one.
      You vote when you drink a six-pack. You vote when you go to bed early. You vote when you obey the speed limit. You vote when you litter – or when you recycle.
      Every overt act performed by all citizens, even the sheeple, is a vote for or against some Value, some program, some political intention. Likewise, avoiding taking any action is still a vote, albeit a vote against the result of such an action.
      Vegging out in front of the tube is an action and a vote. Mindless chitchat or texting for endless hours on your cell-pod-P.D.A. unit is an action and a vote (for vapidity). Hours spent absorbing actual information at the library or on some wiki is an action and a vote. Visiting bed-bound old folks is an action and a vote – for connection and for service and for unlimited & unexpected experience.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      And another big vote is participating in the General Strike on Thursday September 11th. A major vote. And asking all your friends and family to participate in the General Strike is a vote in itself. The plan: Stay home, buy nothing, make no phone calls, skip the TV and radio for just one day.
An army of aware, progressive activists in Manhattan are planning to spend Strike Day out¬doors and in the streets, joining with their neighbors in demon¬strating Solidarity, showing that the People have the Power, that the Power is indeed inherent in the Individual.
      You can also do this wherever you live. The official website is www.votestrike.org.

      Voting is not about winning. The win is in the act of voting itself. By each act of voting we each protect the Right to Vote, the Privilege that there is in voting, we both give and receive the gift of voting.

      Anyone who is not living their Life AS a series of votes is missing out on the Gift given to the world by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. Your vote, the series of votes made by your actions in your Life, determines whether Freedom exists for the next generation and forward in History.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Essay #82: The National Election is Contaminated

      Karl Rove has not yet been convicted of his many crimes and locked up in prison. His job is to mess up the U.S. national and local elections because the Republican Party cannot win on the issues important to American voters. So the Republicans have given Rove the covert task of inventing new ways to subvert the Constitutional election process in America, so that the Corporatist-Fascist leaders of the Republican Party can continue their rape of the American people and economy.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews were recently removed as scheduled anchors on MSNBC’s coverage of the upcoming national debates and of election day and evening on November Fourth; the reasons given are spurious. The scheduled replacement is Karl Rove’s dancing partner (indeed!) David Gregory. So that gives election coverage by Karl Rove on FOX (‘the faux news channel’) and coverage on MSNBC by his close buddy Gregory – with Olberman and other legitimate journalists left to radio and the blogosphere (if their contracts even allow such).

* *          * *          * *          * *
      The Secretary of State in Colorado, Republican Mike Coffman, removed twenty-percent of Colorado’s voters from the rolls during 2008 – without notice to the voters. Reason given: to prevent voter fraud, when instead the act was another case of Republican election fraud. At best, each of these summarily-disenfranchised voters will have to visit their local County offices to fight for restoration of their Right To Vote. The intended result is that the mostly-Democrat disenfranchisees will show up on November Fourth and be surprised to find that they are not allowed to vote. Period. (Provisional ballots are worthless.)

* *          * *          * *          * *
      Republican John McCain approved and executed an even more nefarious election fraud, across seventeen key states. Under his signature, bogus absentee ballots were mailed out to registered independent and registered Democratic Party voters asking them to vote for McCain, but if they still wanted to vote for Barack Obama, no hard feelings, here’s a convenient absentee ballot. The number of these bogus absentee ballots was as many as a million in some of the 17 states.
      But when the ballots arrived at the County offices, all were rejected. McCain’s stealth tactic was to have one extra box printed on all of the myriad versions of absentee ballots, so that each and every McCain-approved ballot was disqualified. In all seventeen states.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      Having thus committed election fraud in seventeen states, Republican John McCain has disqualified himself from ever holding any further elective office in America. When the Democrats restore Constitutional Law in America in January 2009, and the new Attorney General begins the plethora of impeachment hearings and prosecutions long stymied by the Republican Party’s control of the filibuster in Congress, then Republican John McCain will be held to account for his desertion of his oath of office and his criminal acts in this election.

* *          * *          * *          * *
      Any vote besides the Democratic Party candidate for President or for Congress and Senate is a vote for the continuation of the Corporatist-Fascist agenda that has destroyed the American economy, killed millions of people here and abroad, and made the world that your children and grandchildren will inherit a mean and nasty world, with the United States of America seen around the world as The Bad Guy.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

September Quotations II (The Sequel)

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
~~ Carl Sandburg [1878-1967]

"Vice has this defeat: It cannot be truly intelligent. It's very motives are its weakness."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"One has to buy [immortality] with the blood of one's heart."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"Knowledge always brings responsibility."
~~ P.D. James

"Every soldier who ever died was innocent."
~~ David Baldacci

"The worst crimes ... are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"As a high school English teacher, I can testify that ,,, [television] is so poisonous and hypnotic that the disease of illiteracy is rampant."
~~ Robert G. Arthur of Kings Park, NY (circa 1984)

"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."
~~ Frank Herbert [1920-86]

"A poet doesn't choose his subject, it chooses him."
~~ P.D. James

"Life is, in fact, a battle ... Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916] (in 1878)

"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process."
~~ Jean Piaget [1896-1980]

"Live all [that] you can; it is a mistake not to."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this [only] after they are in the nursing home."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"I don't seek, I find."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"What kept me going was maybe stubbornness and a lack of good sense."
~~ Oliver Stone

"Every stick points in two directions, one opposed to the other."
~~ Isaac Asimov {attributed}

"Man was born to be rich or inevitably to grow rich through the use of his faculties."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832]

"The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place."
~~ Gary Zukav

"A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose."
~~ Chinese proverb

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
~~ Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]

"Those who wish to sing always find a song."
~~ Swedish proverb

"Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-1983]

"What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"All utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical."
~~ A.J. Ayer

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-1865]

"An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision."
~~ James McNeill Whistler [1834-1903]

"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."
~~ Frank Lloyd Wright [1867-1959]

"Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end ... but not necessarily in that order."
~~ Jean-Luc Godard

"Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors."
~~ Eugene O'Neill [1888-1953]

"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other."
~~ Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961]

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
~~ Woody Allen

"Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences."
~~ Sherlock Holmes

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
~~ physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]

"The present is pregnant with the future."
~~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646-1716]

"I have a naive trust in the universe ... that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.”
~~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and grsvity we shall harness the energies of Love. Then, for the second time in the history of thr world, man will have discovered fire."
~~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881-1955]

"I think our own hearts can teach us no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts to make the world a place to live in instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] {quoted by Felix De Cola on his deathbed}

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so [that] I can have a word with him?"
~~ Chuang-Tzu (circa IVth Century BCE)

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

September Quotations

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny."
~~ Ben Franklin [1706-90]

"Man must learn to think for himself, rather than follow blindly what he has been taught."
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."
~~ Michael Mukasey, figurehead U.S Attorney General, 2008

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits."
~~ Thomas A. Edison [1847-1931]

"Without risk there is no possibility for glory."
~~ David Baldacci

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing. But I couldn’t give it up because by then I was too famous.”
~~ Robert Benchley [1889-1945]

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
~~ Dr. Seuss {Theodor Geisel 1904-91}

"The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."
~~ Frédéric Bastiat [1801-50]

"True believers are always wrong, whether they are Christians, Muslims or Jews."
~~ Janet Maker of Los Angeles, CA

"If death is truly the worst that can happen to a man, there is nothing to fear. But death is not the worst."
~~ Edward Abbey [1927-89]

"Don't ever let anyone monkey with your swing."
~~ baseball great Ted Williams [1918-2002]

"To lay blame is an abdication of power."
~~ Jeff Herman

"The province of art is ... all experience."
~~ Henry James [1843-1916]

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from Himself."
~~ Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"It is the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time."
~~ Tallulah Bankhead [1902-68]

"Every man has his price? That is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Nothing is so detrimental to quality as success."
~~ J.M.K. Nyks

"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."
~~ William Hazlitt [1778-1830]

"The great rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you."
~~ Katharine Whitehorn

"A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished."
~~ Zsa Zsa Gabor

"Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"I require only three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often needed but seldom minded."
~~ Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield [1694-1773]

"The best answer to anger is silence."
~~ German proverb

"Most women are not so young as they are painted."
~~ Max Beerbohm [1872-56]

"Sometimes I write sober and revise drunk, sometimes I write drunk and revise sober."
~~ Welsh poet Dylan Thomas [1914-54]

"Small things amuse small minds."
~~ Doris Lessing

"Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level."
~~ Quentin Crisp [1908-99]

"Paradoxes are verbal, they do not exist in the real world."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"Liberty is always dangerous, but the safest thing [that] we have."
~~ Harry Emerson Fosdick [1878-69]

"Most of us edge forward, painfully advancing, yard by yard; [the truly creative] parachute behind enemy lines."
~~ P.D. James

"We have at times to be willing to be guilty."
~~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer [1906-45]

"No man is lonely while eating spaghetti."
~~ Robert Morley [1906-92]

"If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done."
~~ anonymous

"To kiss the lips of women, love the gods, do justice, laugh, and know [that] the world is mad."
~~ motto of director Oliver Stone

"Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"There is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation."
~~ John D. MacDonald [1916-86]

"Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self; the passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"Art and morality have little to say to each other."
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]

"A true realist demands the impossible; a true idealist demands the impractical."
~~ Marilyn vos Savant

"The most pitiful human ailment is a birdseed heart."
~~ Wilson Mizner [1876-1933]

"What comes to perfection perishes."
~~ Robert Browning [1812-89]

"The flowing river never ceases, yet the water is never the same."
~~ Kamo-no Chomei [1155-1216]

"After a while you realize that if you're a real writer, then, like all writers, you're finally at the mercy of your readers. And giving yourself up to them, you just write."
~~ Michael Ventura

"Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold."
~~ André Maurois [1885-1967]

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Essay #80: Rebuttal To The Rove-McCain Virus Email

1) Each & every person who forwarded this email is politically brain-dead.

2) The content of this email is fascist propaganda, i.e. false information. {FASCISM: the takeover of a government by corporate & military interests, as opposed to government By The People}.

3) The current U.S. National Debt is TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS, and somebody will have to pay it off, probably your grandchildren. What is unreporte4d (not on the books) includes the fact that Dubya has set aside ZERO dollars for bringing the troops home, and in fact, no money is designated for any military programs past fiscal 2010

4) If Republicans spend nothing more, the National Debt will STILL grow by TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in interest each year, which is basically extortion money paid to the Oligarchy (out of the workers/taxpayers' pockets).

5) Each and every person in America owes a National Debt portion of $70,000, including newborns and seniors with no income.

6) The Republicans spent the money, so let's give them the bill; that is $250,000 owed by each and every Republican (who get to keep their mealy mouths shut until they devise a plan to pay that debt).

7) Obama's ACTUAL plan is to CUT TAXES for the Middle Class by $1000 each and CANCEL the freebie Bush Tax Cuts deal for the Wealthy Class; McCain's plan is to give FURTHER tax cuts to the Wealthy Class.

8) The mis-named Death Tax does NOT affect you, only the wealthiest 100 families in the U.S; the über-rich Walton family has spent over $100 MILLION to propagandize the sheeple -- which is working quite well, since their expected benefit is in the BILLIONS (and nothing for you).

9) The Dividend Tax does not affect you unless you earn over $100,000 in unearned income / dividends in the tax year. DO YOU?

10) The 2008 election cycle gives all American citizens the chance to choose between a fascist dictatorship and a constitutional republic. That is the only choice before you, no matter your location – democracy or fascism?

11) If the actual cost of health care in the United States is counted as a tax, then American taxpayers pay the highest income tax rate in the world - for faulty health care. Every industrialized nation except the U.S. has a version of single-payer healthcare, and in each case, the system works and the people live longer. Cost of healthcare in America is 16% of G.D.P., double any other country -- for faulty health care and 40 million not covered for any such care. Any single-payer or everybody-is-covered health plan here will reduce that cost, period.

12) "Congress is controlled by the Democrats" is simply a Republican lie.
           The House is currently 236 Dems to 199 Republicans: 56% to 44% is not that wide a margin.
           The Senate is 49 to 49, with independents Bernie Sanders & 'Traitor' Joe Lieberman; votes often hinge on bootlicker Lieberman.
           The 110th Congress last year DOUBLED the previous record for filibusters -- Republicans preventing any action by the Democrats-- and the number will likely break that record this year.
           The sad truth is that Congress is controlled by lobbyists of the Corporatist Party: There are 66 lobbylists in Washington, DC for each member of Congress.
           The two-part solution is campaign finance reform and enough Democrats to prevent such toddler-tantrum filibustering.

13) The budget is determined by the President, modified & passed into law by Congress. In Dubya's case, there is much spent that is truly off-budget, such as military funding (over & over) and the trillion-plus annual interest on the Republican National Debt.

14) America does not "tax corporations to death". Corporations are doing quite well, paying 15% in tax, while the dying Middle Class pays 28% or more. The last two years, savings in America has gone negative (and that is including what the Wealthy Class set aside) – the first such condition since the Republican Great Depression. Hmmm.

15) You forget (or never learned) that "Labor is the source of all wealth".

16) "We are a Republic, based on capitalism". You obviously failed Civics Class. The United States is a representative democracy, or was until the Reagan Revolution, which changed America into a fascist-corporatist Oligarchy.
           The Oligarchy now owns 65% of everything in America (similar around the world), and the Wealthy Class own 90%. The Middle Class is near dead, labor unions are prevented by law from organizing, and the goal of the Oligarchy is slave wages, a rubber-stamp Congress, and elections based on Fox News propaganda.

17) I am not a liberal, nor is liberal a dirty word. I am a progressive, and the Republican Party is told what to do by the Corporatist-Fascists, as delivered to them by the lobbyists of K Street, etc.

           Disregard this Rovian propaganda and vote in November. But be very clear about the choice that you are making: If you do not vote to restore constitutional democracy, or if you do not vote at all, then you have voted for the Corporatist-Fascist Oligarchy.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

August News Factoids

"97% of the music business in America is foreign-owned."
== Thom Hartmann (7/2008)

"The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the we're going to have to spend $1.6 trillion over the next five years to rebuild our infrastructure."
== Janet Kavinosky, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

ENERGY CONCERNS
The local energy company here in New Mexico reported in the July billing that the per-therm cost of natural gas increased 63 percent from last July.

"Twenty-five percent of all bottled water sold in the U.S. is transported from overseas, and that transportation uses 50 million barrels of oil [annually]."
== The Santa Fe Reporter

JOBS
U.S. Jobless Rate Rises to 4-year High of 5.7 Percent
== Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1 August 2008

The U.S. has lost 458,000 jobs since January First.
== Time Magazine, July 2008

Between 2001 and 2007, the trade deficit caused the loss or displacement of 2.3 million jobs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including 366,000 last year.
== Economic Policy Institute, 1 Aug 2008

THE U.S. ECONOMY
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said in August that the economy continues to be in a recession, by his definition, and will continue to be for at least several more months. He's confident the nation will be doing better five years from now, but the economy could be worse five months from now.

"Overall U.S. credit card debt grew by 435 percent from 2002 to year-end 2007, from $211 billion to approximately $915 billion."
==Danny Schechter

6% of U.S. homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments.
== Time Magazine, July 2008

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 11% and the S&P 500 is down 10.5% since January First.
== Time Magazine, July 2008

Consumer prices rose at double the expected rate ... jumping 0.8 percent in July ... inflation rising at fastest rate in 17 years
== news headlines 8/2008

Wholesale prices rose at fastest pace since 1981
== news headline 8/2008
"The Labor Department reported that wholesale prices shot up 1.2 percent in July ... more than twice the 0.5 percent gain that economists expected."

ECONOMIC UPDATE
Congress is raising the U.S. National Debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion. The U.S. economy also carries the burden of the subprime mortgage meltdow, with Federal agencies Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac separately owing or guaranteeing $5.2 trillion. Plus at least $3 trillion in off-the-books spending (nothing is allocated for the cost of bringing troops home from the Middle East, the infrastructure is collapsing, etc.), and more than a trillion dollars each year in interest must be paid on the Republican National Debt (basically extortion money paid to the corporatist Oligarchy).

That adds up to almost $20 trillion of debt foisted on the American taxpayer by the Republican policies of 'cut taxes on the rich' and 'spend & borrow'. Comparing the country's debt to the current U.S. economy measured at $14 trillion per year, the U.S. is clearly bankrupt.

Copyright 2008 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved