reading now -Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
(c) 2013 by Nick Turse

Two people that were close to me were directly affected by the Vietnam War. A Vietnamese refugee and a US Marine who fought over there then.

Update 8:13 pm. I'm pretty sure after reading 4 chapters tonight that I'm going to have nightmares. I'm also pretty sure that the Laotian kid that was so full of hatred that I met at Job Corps in the 80's may have had a reason for that if he ever experienced anything lke I'm reading now.

It's fair, though, and doesn't throw scorn at the people caught up in the war on either side. That is reserved for the dingle-berries who thought the war was a good idea, and those who ordered stupid things from air-conditioned offices in Vietnam and D.C.

David Brooks, Obama Plan Birther -- Daily Intelligencer

What's mind-blowing about Bobo making an incorrect claim?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Bob Goodlatte: Immigration Reform Doesn't Need Path To Citizenship

Can we just cut to the chase here? Those business interests with a need for cheap, disposable labor will always be against that labor becoming US citizens with rights.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Explosion In Kansas City: Blast Causes Massive Fire At JJ's Restaurant (VIDEO)

"...Missouri Gas Energy, which supplies the area, said in a statement that "early indications are that a contractor doing underground work struck a natural gas line..."



Gee, what a familiar story.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Dunkin' Brands Lobbying Against Key Obamacare Provision: Report

What? A company that profits mightily by selling a "food" that is incredibly unhealthy doesn't want to pay for healthcare benefits? Well, will wonders never cease! roflamo
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Meteor Streaks Across Russian Urals, Leaves Nearly 1000 Injured (VIDEO, LIVE UPDATES)

"...One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall on Dec. 21 last year – when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world – but was delivered late by Russia's notoriously inefficient postal service.."



lol
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gun laws may be different in CA than where you'e from, so pay attention

Gun Seizures on Rise in San Diego County
Inside the Sheriff's Crime Lab, there are more than 1300 firearms collected by the department
By Diana Guevara and R. Stickney | Thursday, Feb 14, 2013 | Updated 9:53 AM PST


"...A lot of our cases in the last couple of years have been college students and military personnel from out of state who just didn't know. They're legal in their state but they're not in California..."

It took me less than ten seconds of using teh Google to find this:

FAQ - Firearms - Attorney General CA.


I don't care if you want to be in CA or not, if you are here and you own a gun legally, find out what the laws are here.

Listening to the Grammy nominees

Here

Jebus.Whatta buncha,  juvenile CRAP.  The CIA should use some of these when they torture "enemy combatants."

House of Cards

House of Cards

So I'm barely into the second episode and Spacey's character makes this speech for the camera about power.  See he's just been told to get in line by his lobbyist money dude and he says there is a difference between money and power.  Pffffft, I roll my eyes and say to the teevee, "Excuse me kind sir, but widdout dat money, you ain't GOT no power."

So color me skeptical about this show.

It's raining...again

I'm tried of this winter's rain, January is often nice and warm for the tourists. It's not real rain, just gloomy, damp and drizzly. People in this county still drive like idiots when it rains, not realizing that the roads are so crowded that they are covered with oil, and very slick because we rarely get enough rain to wash the oil off of them.

I'm surprised that the cops had time to come and take pictures of my neighbors car that got keyed. Me, classy lady that I am, asked "Did they fuck with mine too?" The keyed car was parked right next to mine. Jebus, I really should have a cuppa coffee before I present myself to the cops in my doofy pjs, obnoxiously bright slippers and ratty, ancient (but much loved) robe.

Chris Hedges: Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage

Chris Hedges: Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage
by SOURCE on FEBRUARY 5, 2013 ·
in AMERICAN EMPIRE, CIVIL RIGHTS, ECONOMY, HISTORY, LABOR, ORGANIZING
By Chris Hedges / OpEdNews – Truthdig/ February 4, 2013

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night (Feb 2) in Brooklyn at the People’s Recovery Summit.

The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act–and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional–to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens–especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor–from joining our revolt.


Chris Hedges
Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant. Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control. Native Americans, forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods, usually on credit, at agency stores. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment, creating a life of perpetual debt. It soon becomes impossible to escape the mounting interest rates that necessitate new borrowing.

Debt peonage is a familiar form of political control. And today it is used by banks and corporate financiers to enslave not only individuals but also cities, municipalities, states and the federal government. As the economist Michael Hudson points out, the steady rise in interest rates, coupled with declining public revenues, has become a way to extract the last bits of capital from citizens as well as government. Once individuals, or states or federal agencies, cannot pay their bills–and for many Americans this often means medical bills–assets are sold to corporations or seized. Public land, property and infrastructure, along with pension plans, are privatized. Individuals are pushed out of their homes and into financial and personal distress.

Debt peonage is a fundamental tool for control. This debt peonage must be broken if we are going to build a mass movement to paralyze systems of corporate power. And the most effective weapon we have to liberate ourselves as well as the 30 million Americans who make up the working poor is a sustained movement to raise the minimum wage nationally to at least $11 an hour. Most of these 30 million low-wage workers are women and people of color. They and their families struggle at a subsistence level and play one lender off another to survive. By raising their wages we raise not only the quality of their lives but we increase their capacity for personal and political power. We break one of the most important shackles used by the corporate state to prevent organized resistance.

Ralph Nader, whom I spoke with on Thursday, has been pushing activists to mobilize around raising the minimum wage. Nader, who knows more about corporate power and has been fighting it longer than any other American, has singled out, I believe, the key to building a broad-based national movement. There is among these underpaid 30 million workers–and some of them are with us tonight–a mounting despair at being unable to meet even the basic requirements to maintain a family. Nader points out that Walmart’s 1 million workers, like most of the 30 million low-wage workers, are making less per hour, adjusted for inflation, than workers made in 1968, although these Walmart workers do the work required of two Walmart workers 40 years ago.

If the federal minimum wage from 1968 were adjusted for inflation it would be $10.50. Instead, although costs and prices have risen sharply, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 an hour. It is the lowest of the major industrial countries. Meanwhile, Mike Duke, the CEO of Walmart, makes $11,000 an hour. And he is not alone. These corporate chiefs make this much money because they have been able to keep in place a system by which workers are effectively disempowered, forced to work for substandard wages and denied the possibility through unions or the formal electoral systems of power to defend workers’ rights. This is why corporations lavish these CEOs with obscene salaries. These CEOs are the masters of plantations. And the moment workers rise up and demand justice is the moment the staggering inequality of wealth begins to be reversed.

Being a member of the working poor, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicles in her important book “Nickel and Dimed,” is “a state of emergency.” It is “acute distress.” It is a daily and weekly lurching from crisis to crisis. The stress, the suffering, the humiliation and the job insecurity means that workers are reduced to doing little more than eating, sleeping–never enough–and working. And, most importantly, they are kept in a constant state of fear. Ehrenreich writes:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on–when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently–then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

It is time to halt the sacrifice of the working poor. It is time to empower the 30 million low-wage workers–two-thirds of which are employed by large corporations such as Walmart and McDonald’s–to fight back.

Joe Sacco and I spent the last two years in the poorest pockets of the United States, our nation’s sacrifice zones, for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We saw in Pine Ridge, S.D., Camden, N.J.–the poorest and the most dangerous city in the nation–the coalfields of southern West Virginia and the produce fields of Immokalee, Fla., how this brutal system of corporate exploitation works. In these sacrifice zones no one has legal protection. All institutions, from the press to the political class to the judiciary, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. And what has been done to those in these sacrifice zones, those places corporations devastated first, is now being done to all of us.

There are no impediments within the electoral process or the formal structures of power to prevent predatory capitalism. We are all being forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The human cost, the attendant problems of drug and alcohol abuse, the neglect of children, the early deaths–in Pine Ridge the average life expectancy of a male is 48, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti–is justified by the need to make greater and greater profit. And these costs are now being felt across the nation. The phrase “the consent of the governed” has become a cruel joke. We use a language to describe our systems of governance that no longer correspond to reality. The disconnect between illusion and reality makes us one of the most self-deluded populations on the planet.

The Weimarization of the American working class, and increasingly the middle class, is by design. It is part of a corporate reconfiguration of the national and global economy into a form of neofeudalism. It is about creating a world of masters and serfs, of empowered oligarchic elites and broken disempowered masses. And it is not only our wealth that is taken from us. It is our liberty. The so-called self-regulating market, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation,” always ends with mafia capitalism and a mafia political system. This system of self-regulation, Polanyi wrote, always leads to “the demolition of society.”

And this is what is happening–the demolition of our society and the demolition of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. In theological terms these corporate forces, driven by the lust for ceaseless expansion and exploitation, are systems of death. They know no limits. They will not stop on their own. And unless we stop them we are as a nation and finally as a species doomed. Polanyi understood the destructive power of unregulated corporate capitalism unleashed upon human society and the ecosystem. He wrote: “In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man’ attached to the tag.”

Polanyi wrote of a society that surrendered to the dictates of the market. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”

The global and national economy because of this “satanic mill” continues to deteriorate, and yet, curiously, stock market levels are close to their highs in 2007 before the global financial meltdown. This is because these corporations have been able to suppress wages, slash social programs and bilk the government for staggering sums of money. The Federal Reserve purchases about $85 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities and Treasury bills every month. This means that the Fed is printing endless streams of money to buy up government debt and toxic assets from the banks. The Federal Reserve now owns assets, much of them worthless, of $3.01 trillion. This is triple what it was in 2008.

And while corporations such as Citibank and General Electric loot the Treasury they exact more pounds of flesh in the name of austerity. General Electric, as Nader points out, is a net job exporter. Over the past decade, as Citizens for Tax Justice has documented, GE’s effective federal income tax rate on its $81.2 billion in pretax U.S. profits has been at most 1.8 percent. Because of the way General Electric’s accountants play with tax liabilities the company actually receives money from the Treasury. They have several billion dollars paid to them from the federal government into company bank accounts–and these are not tax refunds. The company, as Nader argues, is a net drain on the Treasury and a net drain on jobs. It violates a host of environmental and criminal laws. And yet Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, was appointed to be the chairman of Obama’s Jobs Council. Immelt’s only major contribution to the jobs initiative was to get rid of 37,000 of his employees since 2001.

Jim McNerney, president and CEO of Boeing, who also sat on the Jobs Council, has cut over 14,000 jobs since 2008, according to Public Campaign. The only jobs the CEOs on the Jobs Council were concerned with were the ones these CEOs eradicated. The Jobs Council,which Obama disbanded this week, is a microcosm of what is happening within the corridors of power. Corporations increasingly terminate jobs here to hire grossly underpaid workers in India or China while at the same time stealing as much as fast as they can on the way out the door.

As Michael Hudson has pointed out, financialization has created a new kind of class war. The old class warfare took place between workers and bosses. Workers organized to fight for fair wages, better work hours and safety conditions in the workplace as well as adequate pensions and medical benefits. But with a country of debtors and a government that must also borrow to continue operating, Hudson says, we have changed the way class warfare works. Finance, he points out, controls state and federal policy as well as the lives of ordinary workers. It is able to dictate working conditions. The financiers, who insist that cuts be made so governments can repay loans, impose draconian austerity and long-term unemployment to, as Hudson told a Greek newspaper, “drive down wages to a degree that could not occur in the company-by-company clash between industrial employers and their workers.”

The former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, testifying before Congress, was quite open about the role of debt peonage in keeping workers passive. Greenspan pointed out that since 1980 labor productivity has increased by about 83 percent. Yet real wages have stagnated. Greenspan said this was because workers were too burdened with mortgage debts, college loans, auto payments and credit-card debt to risk losing a job. Household debt in the United States is around $13 trillion. This is only $2 trillion less than the country’s total yearly economic output. Greenspan was right. Miss a payment on your credit card and your interest rates jumps to 30 percent. Fail to pay your mortgage and you lose your home. Miss your health insurance payments, which have been spiraling upwards, and if you are seriously ill you go into bankruptcy, as 1 million Americans who get sick do every year. Trash your credit rating and your fragile financial edifice, built on managing debt, collapses. Since most Americans feel, on some level, as Hudson points out, that they are a step or two away from being homeless, they are deeply averse to challenging corporate power. It is not worth the risk. And the corporate state knows it. Absolute power, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, depends on fear and passivity.

The only way to break this fear and passivity is to organize workers to break the cycle of mounting debt. And the first step to achieving independence from debt–the primary form of political control by the corporate state–is to raise the minimum wage. There are other solutions–forgiving mortgage and student debt, instituting universal health care, establishing a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s Third World infrastructure, and green energy–but none of this will happen until we are able to mount a sustained mass movement that discredits the corporate state. This mass movement will arise, as Nader says, when we mobilize around the minimum wage.

The lowest-grade worker at the General Electric plant that makes high-tech health care devices outside Paterson in Totowa [New Jersey]–a pay grade known as the D 04–was just raised to $14,555 a year. That is under $8 an hour. The plant’s highest-paid hourly employee, known as D 16, earns $22,000. Immelt makes over $11 million a year. This vast disparity in income, and this wage abuse, is played out in every corporation in the country. No one in Washington intends to challenge it.

Only 11.3 percent of workers in this country belong to unions. This is the lowest percentage in 80 years. And nearly all these unions, and especially the AFL-CIO, have been emasculated by corporate power.

Nader is right when he warns that we are not going to be assisted in this effort by established unions. Union leaders are bought off. They are comfortable. They are pulling down at least five times what rank-and-file workers make. Nader says we have to mount protests not only outside the doors of Walmarts and General Electric plants, not only outside congressional offices, but outside the doors of the AFL-CIO. There is no established institution inside or outside government that will help us. They are all broken or complicit. But there are the 30 million working poor who, if we organize to break the system of debt peonage that holds them hostage, may be willing to rise up. We are bound with many chains and shackles. We will have to break them one at a time. But once we rise up, once we are able to threaten the corporate systems that keep us supine through fear, we will unleash a torrent of energy and passion that will confirm the worst nightmares of our corporate overlords.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio. The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Tar Sands Activist Interrupts Texas Oil & Gas Conference

Tar Sands Activist Interrupts Texas Oil & Gas Conference
by Puck Lo, CorpWatch Blog
January 31st, 2013

The Spy Factory

I'm pretty sure I watched this show when it was on PBS 3 years ago, but I watched it again just to see if I'd missed anything.

Nope, spying on Americans, men and their pissing contests instead of being able to cooperate, it's all there. Yup, just read a Joseph Wambaugh book where two law enforcement agencies have to work together on a case and you'll suss out how 9/11 happened. I wonder if all the fucking spy agencies have yet figured out that HUMINT be mo important than SIGINT. Friggin ijjits.

Men are so fucking busy trying to piss around their territory that they don't realize that half the problems in this world today might better be solved by providing basic human needs and educatiing females.

Doctor Killed In Examination Room Of Orange County, California, Medical Office

So dude was 75 and upset that it was time for Depends? Jebus.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Your ugly sweater story?

Almost mother-in-law kept giving me these She knows I hate sweaters. She sells Avon and I regifted her the ugliest 15-yr-old Avon cake plate ever. The insulting X-mas gifts stopped. (She also finally got that just because I had a kid with her son I was never going to marry him.)
What's your best mischevious X-mas story?

Roxanne Rubin, Nevada Republican, Accepts Plea Deal After Committing Voter Fraud

roflmao
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

A stain on the justice department

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

I'm watching this and wondering who the fuck this little weasel Lanny Breuer is and so I pull up his wikipedia page. Jebus, no wonder he was as useless as teats on a boar.

"He represented...Moody's Investor Service in the wake of Enron's collapse, Halliburton/KBR in a hearing conducted by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform..."

It's hard for me to watch this stuff. I had never seen a mortgage file in my lfe before May of '06 and I figured this shit out. I never said anything because I couldn't at the time.

The Trillion-dollar Coin: Joke or Game Changer?

"...We may rail against the banks and demand change, but nothing will change until we grasp their fundamental secret, the foundation of their power: that those who create the nation's money control the nation. By mechanisms explained elsewhere, nearly the entire money supply today is created by banks..."



Thank you Ms. Brown :)
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Maddow Va GOP shameless in drive to rig elections in their favor

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Teach your Children

Django Unchained

So my friend and my husband saw Lincoln, and I decided to see Django Unchained. They were blown away and I saw a bunch of people get blown away. I wish I had seen Lincoln with them, I've had appreciation for Daniel Day Lewis since My Left Foot. Although I appreciate why this movie had to go over the top with violence because slavery was a nasty, ugly business that this country is just starting to recover from, it's still Quentin Tarantino's peculiar brand of gratuitous violence that frankly, bores me. As do gunfights, car chases, martial arts fights and other typical "guy stuff."

Eric Cantor Makes Debt Ceiling Offer

“If the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time, members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing to do their job. No budget, no pay.”

Before Cantor gets too excited about this plan, however, he may want to familiarize himself with the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened..." http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/01/18/1471191/the-republican-debt-ceiling-gambit-is-unconstitutional/
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Insurers Telling Only Part of the Story in Attempt to Gut Important Consumer Protections

"...Here's what you need to know that isn't included in any of the industry's talking points:



Young adults comprise the largest segment of the uninsured. That's primarily because they either don't have jobs that offer coverage or they don't make enough money to pay the premiums insurance companies charge..."



I think we all owe Mr. Potter a debt of gratitude.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Massive Human and Moral Cost of Gun Violence

It's so tiring to try to have a conversation with people who have made up their minds that the answer to gun violence is more guns. *sigh*
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone

Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone
Draft report from NCA makes clear link between climate change and extreme weather as groups urge Obama to take action

The Invisible War

“The Invisible War” examines the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. It also looks at the institutions that cover up the violence, and the profound consequences it has for its victims. We interviewed director Kirby Dick as well as two of the film’s subjects, Kori Cioca and Trina McDonald. Cioca, who served in the Coast Guard, was beaten and raped by a supervisor, and then charged with adultery because he was married. McDonald was drugged and raped by military police on a remote Naval station in Alaska. We aired the interview in January on the heels of a military survey showing the number of reported violent sex crimes jumped 30 percent in 2011, with active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21 accounting for more than half of the of the victims.
Watch Interview


The One Oscar-Nominated Movie You Must See
By Alyssa Rosenberg via Slate
Posted Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013, at 2:53 PM ET


As someone who grew up in a county which is basically one huge military base I am certainly not stunned or shocked by anything in this documentary. I'm just so glad that these people got to tell their stories and Sec Def Panetta saw and heard them. I worked on a base and the harassment was incessant, but I was lucky, I was a civilian employee and I lived within walking distance of police headquarters. I knew women who were not so lucky, and watching this brings back painful memories that I thought were dead and buried.

Meh

Why can't I find anything to read that interests me in the least?

My friend posted this though, it's worth a watch.

Endless War Is a Feature – Not a Bug – of U.S. Policy

Endless War Is a Feature – Not a Bug – of U.S. Policy

I like the title of the article, but frankly I didn't read it because I don't give a shit.  And the wealthy and powerful have always used fear to control the masses and war is some scary shit.  Some bloody, awful, stupid, scary crap.

fun with teh Google

Finally screwed up the courage to Google someone from many years ago.  Turns out this person has been dead for 2 1/2 years.  Funny how life goes sometimes.

A jawdropping headline...at first

Africa: Where black is not really beautiful


South Africa is a land of diverse cultures and races, the country is marketed to the world as Mandela's rainbow nation - where everyone is proud of their race and heritage but for some black South Africans there is such a thing as being too black.

"...most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want "white skin"...

A nasty by-product of centuries of white Euro-trash abuse of Africans in Africa and economic domination by "the higher classes" in EU and their colonialism I'd say.  I'm not saying that the BS doesn't extend to the US' history of economic control of Latin America either.