by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Used to be --there was good news and there was bad news. Of late, the bad news is that there is no good news and there may not be any good news in the foreseeable future. Unless things change, there may not be any good news ever!

I know whose fault this is! This is the result and work of American robber barons and right wing militarists who have sold America out to China as they plot more wars of naked aggression for the purpose of seizing the oil fields of the Middle East.

Much of the plan, the legacies of Reagan, Sr. and Shrub, the three henchman of the apocalypse, is already in place.

Reagan's Two Year Long Depression

It was left to Ronald Reagan to usher in a depression of some two years, the longest and worst since Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s. This depression followed quickly on the heels of a the GOP tax which benefited only the upper quintile. Obviously, the 'tax cut' was not an economic stimulus as we were told it would be. The results, in fact, were the two year old depression, in fact a contraction of the economy as a result of the transfer of wealth upward to to the upper quintile. A windfall of this nature is no stimulus to invest but to transfer the gains offshore. There were no net gains in jobs; there were net losses and the actual numbers prove it.

The New National Capital/Capitol: K-street

K-street is where the people get fucked! K-street is the best little whorehouse in Washington, the nation's 'read light district' in which the apparatus of government is pimped! K-street --not Congress --is where the bills, the laws, the policies are written, decided upon. K-street is where the 'Johns' buy the bureaucracy and decide foreign and domestic policies. K-street is where money talks, souls are sold, bullshit peddled.

K-street is where the so-called 'Jewish Lobby' (read: Israeli Lobby) dictates American foreign policy. Some have called a marriage made in hell, in fact, a Faustian bargain, in which the soul of America is bartered. What's in it for the U.S. to continue to support the increasingly fanatic and extremist governments in Israel? The most obvious answer is this: Israel provides the convincing, saleable 'pre-text' for US oil wars in the Middle East. Big oil has said to Isreal or Israel to big oil: 'you scratch my back and I will scratch yours!'.

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status - through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status - was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.

In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn't it?

If you're willing to savage military icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections - and especially after you get away with it every time - you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming opportunists, you're willing to do anything. If you're willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as you're telling the American military's adversaries in Iraq to "bring it on", you're willing to do anything.

--Our Long National Nightmare Isn't Over, It's Just Beginning, David Michael Green

War is a Racket

WAR is a racket.

It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

--War Is a Racket, General Smedly Butler, Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Major General Smedley D. Butler,
USMC, Retired

Conspiracies are how things get done. Some are legal; some are not. A 'corporation', for example, is a conspiracy made legal by 'charter'. Corporations were described by St. Thomas More in his 'Utopia':

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth’s sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws.But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

--Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia

If you are still drinking the Kool-aid, go to Findlaw, where the search term 'conspiracy' of itself will get you 690 cases. Go to the Cornell University Law Library. Type in the single search term 'conspiracy'! Among the hundreds (possibly thousands of cases) you will find No. 03-3156,UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,APPELLEE v.ANTONIO N. TABRON, A/K/A FAT CAT,APPELLANT.

The transfer of wealth upward is deliberate. It's how the the 'pay-offs' are laundered. Initially, it was the top 20 percent who benefited as charts dating to the beginning of the Clinton administration indicate and prove. Clinton succeeded in reversing the trend. It would have been a lasting legacy, Clinton's finest hour, had not the regime of George W. Bush reversed the reverse and resumed the payoff as evinced in the inexorable trend upward.

ýI don't know who it was who said that Satan's biggest 'trick' was convincing the world that he did not exist. The traitors of the 'American' right wing have, in fact, sold out America: to the ruling one percent who alone have benefited from GOP 'tax cuts', tax cuts which are inexorably followed by job losses if not recessions/depressions. The government's own statistics prove the undeniable trend. As there is no defense rational defense, the meme that is drummed into you from the media liars and blow-hards like Limbaugh deride the very existence of 'conspiracies' and, thus, from an over generalized assumption for which there is not a shred of evidence is deduced a specific conclusion: 'conspiracies do not exist'.

This is how the right wing thinks. While sane and/or scientifically inclined people will observe first and conclude later, the right wing impaired will believe based upon prejudices and/or whatever makes them feel good. They will shoe-horn reality into the mold; they will work backward from foregone conclusions. They will literally reverse 'cause and effect' and mistake one for the other. They will shot first and ask questions later! They will not tolerate, in fact, discount a fact that proves them to be utterly wrong. They are not only wrong, they are wrong-headed! And it will prove to be the end of America!

War is a Racket

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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy How the War Racket Means the Beginning of the End for 'America', via The Existentialist Cowboy