Yeah right!
Yesterday we had an interesting conversation that makes a joke out of the chief idiots supposed Openness Bill! Simply put, freedom is the absence of government coercion. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and created the least coercive government in the history of the world. The Constitution established a very limited, decentralized government to provide national defense and little else. States, not the federal government, were charged with protecting individuals against criminal force and fraud. For the first time, a government was created solely to protect the rights, liberties, and property of its citizens. Any government coercion beyond that necessary to secure those rights was forbidden, both through the Bill of Rights and the doctrine of strictly enumerated powers. This reflected the founders’ belief that democratic government could be as tyrannical as any King. Few Americans understand that all government action is inherently coercive. If nothing else, government action requires taxes.
If taxes were freely paid, they wouldn’t be called taxes, they’d be called donations. If we intend to use the word freedom in an honest way, we should have the simple integrity to give it real meaning: Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.
All Americans are now imprisoned in a world of lies and deception created by the Bush Regime and the two complicit parties of Congress, by federal judges too timid or ignorant to recognize a rogue regime running roughshod over the Constitution, by a bought and paid for media that serves as propagandists for a regime of war criminals, and by a public who have forsaken their Founding Fathers. Americans are also imprisoned by fear, a false fear created by the hoax of "terrorism." It has turned out that headline terrorist events since 9/11 have been orchestrated by the US government.
For example, the alleged terrorist plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower was the brainchild of an FBI agent who searched out a few disaffected people to give lip service to the plot devised by the FBI agent. He arrested his victims, whose trial ended in acquittal and mistrial.Raising doubts among Americans about the government is not a strong point of the corporate media. Americans live in a world of propaganda designed to secure their acquiescence to war crimes, torture, searches and police state measures, military aggression, hegemony and oppression. This is all true and this ridiculous Bill will change nothing as Bush the Decider will continue to dictate what he feels you should know and what he says is only for his eyes.
Bush is supposedly restoring Government openness! that will never happen under Bush. This editorial says The terrorists lost one recently when the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that more forcefully makes it the official policy of the U.S. government that the information that belongs to the people will be available to them. what? Some might have been forgiven for thinking that such had long been official policy, specifically under the old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Bush is supposedly restoring Government openness! that will never happen under Bush. This editorial says The terrorists lost one recently when the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that more forcefully makes it the official policy of the U.S. government that the information that belongs to the people will be available to them. what? Some might have been forgiven for thinking that such had long been official policy, specifically under the old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
But after the attacks of 9/11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft put out new FOIA rules that encouraged all government agencies to err on the side of secrecy if the release of any requested information might conceivably create a security risk. That crackdown on freedom was just the sort of thing that the terrorists were hoping would happen, a radical departure from our traditions of openness, made in fearful response to acts of terror. The new Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act, makes it clear that government information requested by the media, interest groups, concerned citizens, Cub Scouts or garden clubs is to be presumed open and available unless someone in government can make a compelling and specific case that its release could be a threat to national security.
The open information requirements apply to nonproprietary information in the possession of government contractors. The new law also sets up an office of FOIA ombudsman to make sure that requests for information are handled quickly and correctly. Of course, the current administration and those that follow will always be tempted to hide embarrassing information behind the national security cloak. But granting an exception for legitimate defense secrets need not be a license for secret government. And a free government worth defending will trust its own people with the truth. That's true but Bush is the decider and has to hide what he is really doing and this will change nothing as coercion prevails. restoring openness my eye
Bush signed the bill without comment in one of his final decisions of the year. The legislation is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11 attacks in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security. The law also restores a presumption of a standard that orders government agencies to release information on request unless there is a finding that disclosure could do harm. Government transparency joke
This is just another facade. This will change nothing in this coercive mis-Administration. Bush only signed the bill because it is worthless! He is the sole Decider what he can hide from us so he can follow his hidden agenda. This is just another bad joke and will change nothing!
22 comments:
Just to wish you a happy new year ... I pray your sons will be home in 2008.
I tried warning folks about this regime's secretive nature back when he started blocking access to the Reagan and Bush Presidential Libraries. Way before 9-11.
Their true colors were showing right from the start.
Let's pray this year will bring greater consciousness to the people. Our number is growing.
Hi naj
Thank you and Happy New Year to you! One of my sons is over there right now somewhere and the other is very conflicted as to staying in or not.
Bush has made a mess out of the military as well as everything else. That son is scheduled to train for Iraq again in April. I can only shake my head. I hope all is well with you!
Dave it has been very frustrating seeing this idiot from the beginning for what he is and not being able to do anything about it.
I hope someone wakes up that can make a difference and I think they have. I am just getting ready to answer an Email from one of them, the relentless Liberal who I go to meet on the 8th.
It's coming soon Jim:
By Juan Santos
"The signs of war on the horizon are clear. The war, like fear, also has a smell. And now we can begin to breathe its stench in our lands. In the words of Naomi Klein, we need to prepare ourselves for the shock." - Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN –
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas is a poet, but he is not just any poet: he’s a poet armed not only with words, but with bullets – and not only with words and bullets, but with the heart of the Mayan people of Chiapas. He is a poet and a revolutionary who abandoned the ivory tower for the jungle – for the Selva Lacandona - to live with, to fight with, and to die with los de ‘bajo – the people on the bottom, who lives are crushed beneath the weight of the pyramid of Empire. He has taken their part, their lot, their future as his own.
Naomi Klein is a writer, one who sees with the eyes of her heart, one who backs the knowledge and vision of the heart with the most rigorous research - research she uses to build the sharpest and most aggressively articulated and documented of cases, a case developed as if our lives depended on it. They do. And Klein, like Subcomandante Marcos, has taken sides, the side of the poor. Marcos has said her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “is one of those books that is worth having in your hands. It is also a very dangerous book.”
“Its danger,” he says, “resides in that it is possible to understand what it says.” In the clearest terms, The Shock Doctrine lays bare the vicious nature of capitalist globalization, and shows us how and why our world has been so radically transformed over the last half-century; Klein spills the blood of the lie that “free markets” mean free people. She builds and proves a solid - often breathtaking– case that the global “free market” has been imposed around the world through terror. She calls it “shock” – with all the graphic undercurrents of electric shock treatments, torture and deep trauma that the word implies – spelled out in exquisitely researched detail. Her tale is the tale of the rise of “corporatism” – a technical word for the economic and political system called fascism – on a global scale. While a few Left pundits like Alexander Cockburn almost dismiss Klein’s work for ignoring the precedents of capitalist terrorism prior to the era of globalization, they miss entirely that her book is focused on a particular period of history and on stripping bare the real meaning of the time we have lived through over the last generation. They also miss the power of the writing and the sense of values and the heart-felt methodology that guides and informs it.
Subcomandante Marcos is right when he says that the book’s danger for the rulers “resides in that it is possible to understand what it says.” Klein has written a book on global political economy – one that is as gripping as the best murder mystery, as well researched as the best investigative journalism – on a par with the work of a Seymour Hersh. The Shock Doctrine is as accessible as a history by Howard Zinn, and nearly as evocative in some of its storytelling as the writing of Eduardo Galeano.
That’s why The Shock Doctrine – surprisingly for a scathing and in-depth leftist critique of globalization – is already on the best seller lists in six countries. Klein tells a meaningful and fully comprehensible story in human terms that makes sense of the world we have lived in. It’s the global story of our lives, one that contextualizes, crystallizes and personalizes the meaning of what we’ve lived through and often only dimly understood. She brings our recent history, the world around us, and thus our lives themselves, into sudden clarity and focus.
Klein’s central metaphor – yes, this is a book on fascism and global political economy that has a central metaphor – is shock treatment; its development as a means to wipe clean the meaning of a human personality and to replace it with a newly programmed persona, one in line with the electrical master’s wishes. At the outset of her book, she talks in depth with – she encounters - a survivor of electroshock - one of the victims of the early experiments that would be used by the CIA to write manuals on torture - as the woman struggles daily with the problems of reclaiming a memory that has been erased, and with reconstructing a life, a history and a personality that has been wiped out by a man - call him a doctor, call him a torturer -sworn to heal her, by a man sworn to do no harm.
In The Shock Doctrine the personal and political are inseparable. The lies, betrayals and brutal political manipulations of its antagonists (who seek to wipe the slate clean in “maladjusted” countries and bring them under their own control the way that experts in electroshock and CIA torturers seek to wipe out human memory and personality) and the valiant and often tragic resistance of its protagonists, are told with an immediacy that is lacking in any kind of “charitable” pity or condescension. Instead, the immediacy and vividness of her story is empowered and made more compelling by a consistently rigorous research that, in Klein’s hands, nails the truth and that makes its emotional impact inescapable.
Although she doesn’t bore us with the “correct” theoretical arguments that critics like Cockburn would seem to prefer, Klein is dealing in The Shock Doctrine with one of the core contradictions of capitalism, the relationship between bourgeois dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, and she shows us, through example after compelling example, how, under capitalism and imperialism, the reality of bourgeois dictatorship trumps the illusion of bourgeois democracy every time.
She shows us in vivid examples the reality behind the theory, how “democracy” and negotiation and the power to make decisions over our lives is reserved for the capitalist and imperial elites, who then impose the end result of their of their debates - their desires - on those who are most vulnerable to them, and how they do so, consciously, just at the moments when we are most critically vulnerable. As “free market” economist Milton Friedman put it, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The logic, actually, the pathology, Klein exposes, is the now-global pathology of the rapist, the serial killer, the fascist, of the torturers of Abu Ghraib; of the Hannibal Lectors in business suits who both run and gorge themselves on the world. Here the essence of the world capitalist, who, as Marx put it, is the “soul of capitalism personified.” The brutal pathology and machinations of these men are shown, in concrete example after example, unmistakably for what they are; the pathology and methodology of torturers whose aim is not mere terror, but the gutting of people’s lives and livelihoods - the gutting of the world for their own enrichment. Klein doesn’t rely, as such, on the terms for them that I’ve just used. She’s not name-calling or breathing hell and damnation. She lets the stories she tells and the documentation that backs the stories - the documentation that makes them coherent extensions of one another across decades and vast distances – speak for themselves. They do just that, and the conclusions to be drawn from the picture the stories reveal are unavoidable.
What do the iconic events of our era - Pinochet's coup in Chile, the death squads throughout Latin America, Tienanmen Square and the capitalist conversion of China and Russia, the strangulation of the liberation struggle in South Africa, NAFTA, the birth of a new spirit of resistance in Latin America, the planes slamming into the towers in New York, the “Shock and Awe” unleashed against Iraq, the so - called "War on Terror," and the preparations for fascism in the US have to do with one another? What are globalization and neoliberalism, and how and why did they arise? Klein lays it out in stunning detail. See the finely produced short film that introduces the book at the link below.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film
For all the horror and overwhelming power of the global elites that Klein depicts, her conclusion is as hopeful as it is realistic. She tells us, in effect, that systems based on shock, terror, repression and exploitation cannot be sustained. She puts the matter simply and with concrete examples from around the world: Shock wears off. The story returns, memory, continuity, coherence and meaning return. The soul returns. The victim of torture can come to her senses once more. Submission can be cast aside, the will to resist, the will to live, reasserts itself. Lives, homes, cultures and economies shattered by crisis and repression – wiped out by shock- can be restored. “Information,” she tells us, “is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”
This is what Bush is causing:
From hyperpower to new world disorder
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s? A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone and the U.S.
By David Olive
01/01/08 "Toronto Star " -- -- "We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way."
Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.
It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.
The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.
That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic "stagflation" that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.
This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn't abide Washington's sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America's destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.
All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.
The resentment of what the French labelled "the U.S. hyper-power" in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.
The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here's Tony Blair, who revered Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. "A single-power world is inherently unstable," Blair said back in 2005. "That's the rationale for Europe to unite.
"We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S."
The euro has been the world's strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People's Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world's undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)
It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America's deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.
America now is the world's largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.
As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it's difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.
World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman's cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.
But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America's staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.
As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush's soulmate excoriated the U.S. for "an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts."
America's foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington's full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country's supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.
"No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush," says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.
America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a "New World Order" of universal peace and mutual prosperity.
Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.
Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers' next target.
In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the "E generation," as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.
Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the "benign hegemony" that still shapes America's regard of its impact on the world.
And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton's view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that "America is the indispensable nation." In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, "The American people now know something they've never known before. In their bones they know that there's almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way."
Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America's lone-superpower status, has warned that "Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
"They must have one," the London-based global military analyst wrote. "Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies."
Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world's second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world's largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia's regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country's entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.
The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America's respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as "the shining city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan invoked.
With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today's America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were "declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."
Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its "unsustainable" disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. "It's time to learn from history," Walker said, "and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time."
Welcome to Third World, U.S.A.
By Arthur Donner & Doug Peters
"What we're seeing (in the U.S.) isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: Income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite ... It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates." – Paul Krugman, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006.
01/01/07 "The Star" -- -- In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street Journal delivered the classic insult to this nation when it called Canada an honorary Third World country.
Indeed, at that time Canada's economy was coming out of a period of relative difficulty.
Our balance of payments was shaky, the federal government had posted a long string of budget deficits and the Canadian dollar was weak.
Adding to these economic woes, as of the mid-1990s, Canada also had a long history of posting substantially higher inflation rates than in the United States.
Now, however, the trade and fiscal deficits situation has been turned on its head, with the United States incurring huge fiscal deficits and borrowing enormous amounts of foreign capital to balance its hefty international trade deficit. In fact, in a relatively short time span, the U.S. has become the largest debtor nation in the world.
And as Paul Krugman and many other economists have pointed out, U.S. income disparity is obscenely large and increasing, while higher education is not overcoming the polarization of income and the shrinking of the middle class.
The latter point is somewhat surprising, since most Western democracies see the elimination or reduction of economic inequality as a good idea. Indeed, it is a generally accepted principle that the underlying causes of economic inequality based on such non-economic differences as race, gender, or geography should also be minimized or eliminated.
In other words, there is a strong predilection in most Western countries to level the economic playing field as much as possible. This seems not to be the case in the United States.
The United Nations publishes a Human Development Index that ranks countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. The latest published data were based on 2005 statistics. The U.S., despite its vast wealth and power, placed only in the 12th position among industrial countries. The top four countries were Iceland, Norway, Australia and Canada. These top four countries still pay some lip service to income distribution as an important economic and social goal.
Ironically, the U.S. today has many more features in common with Third World status than Canada ever did back in the mid-1990s.
What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.
But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations' fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.
The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.
Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.
Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative.
Guess what country we are talking about now?
Watch this Jim:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8252175042329977626
Jim, very well written. I agree with you whole-heartedly, as per usual. The government has usurped enough power so that even if we, the people require the government to disclose all information - they don't have to if they don't want to.
What's stopping them? We are on the cusp of some very real, and very troublesome changes that span society and government. One wrong move, one wrong turn, one catastrophic event or tragedy and we will be living in an entirely different country.
Damn I hate thinking about it!
The FOIA was a pain in the *ss even under the original guidlines. They could, and did, stretch out the requests for a year or longer.
When the President signed the Open Government Act of 2007 in the 11th Hour, he did nonetheless crack the door. It will take a full year for Government to become “open,” with the built in 12 month delay in the in new law, but it will open the door.
For the first time since the original act was implemented, federal government officials can be held accountable for violating the law. Had this new act been in place last year, the officials that used and twisted the act to keep documents out of the hands of a Coast Guard employee would be on a Federal Court Docket trying to stave off fines and jail time. TJ
Larry it is coming closer every day and it will not be avoided as we discuss often. I bet I can guess where that book is a best seller.
Also as we discuss often the world is uniting and ramping up to take on Bush's militaristic gliobal capitalism.
I am afraid this is the year and their are so many triggers now it is only a matter of which one is pulled before Bush leaves so he can stay in power. Damn!
Larry
The advent of Bush ushered in the absolute end of the US as the lone super power. I have been discussing Bush's created new world(dis) order for years and people at kos were very angry with me but it is true.
It is obvious to me that we share Superpower status and are slipping fast thanks to Bush and it is his goal to fight that militarily and that is what is happening , why the world is headed to war, and it will not be avoided.
We are the world's superpower only in Bush's little mind. He knows it but has to ignore reality as he does everyday to take on the world. This year Buddy, unbelievable!
larry
Of course it is a hidden agenda and will be laughed off but I wrote about this years ago and Bush is doing it on purpose. He is widening the disparity between the haves and have nots for his new order one world economy and Government. World war is desired and needed to wipe out his purposely created deficits. Hell Happy New Year!
larry
It blows me away that, that kind of irrefutable proof can just be laughed off. We will all pay for it. You know I have all of that and a lot more in my manifesto to the world but it is dumbfounding that the truth does not make a difference and is only laughed off. Bush Damn!
anok
You know I feel the same way as you do1 This will tell you why we are powerless. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8252175042329977626
That is irrefutable yet worthless and it blows me away. I included all of it and a lot more in my manifesto to the world a couple of years back and it is just denied and laughed off.
Brother trust me it will be a lot worse now. This is just another facade so Bush can follow his plan. This is old and a small part of my manifesto to the world but Larry submitted it yesterday. Listen to this it will blow you away! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8252175042329977626
TJ
Glad to hear from you. Funny but like everything else of supposed cosequence it takes affect after the idiot is gone. This is just another facade as the chief idiot and decider is the only one to decide wht you need to see or not.
Here's a good companion article to the Buchanan Bush-Nazi video. There's no escaping one's roots.
As the French writer Balzac said, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime."
http://www.geocities.com/bushfamilynazis/
dave
Thanks for the video. I'll check it out as soon as I take a breather. I just tried to do my story with a gazillion linKs. after redoinG it a dozen times I just erased it and lumped it all on one link. Check out Fraudulent electione. I was stupified at what I just learned. I just don't understand how they get away with this.We are in trouble this year!
That's good dave! you know what pisses me off? It was known in 1942 and Prescott was not prosecuted. Nothing was ever known.
It is extensively documented now and nothing is being said about it. Instead Bush is nazifying America as his Grandfather wanted and he is getting away with it. I don't friggen get it! Did America say Uncle and bow to the inevitable?
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