Same Song, Fourth Verse

In the throes of yet another Presidential campaign season, I can only shake my head in wonder as the Republicans trot out one variation after another of the shopworn theory born as Reaganomics in the 80's, that has become more radical and irrational with each passing year. It should have been finally discarded after the Bush '43 debacle, in which our economy came within a hair's breadth of locking up completely in a crisis that most economists say would have dwarfed the Great Depression in its depths and scale.  It was avoided by the great bailout, accompanied by successive infusions of $16 trillions of cash from the Fed, unapproved by congress and unreported in the press, known only because of a Bernie Sanders-sponsored partial audit of the Fed, which revealed that it went to "too-big-to-fail" financial houses, not all of which were U. S. companies. 

Reaganomics - the trickle-down theory, despite its repeated and complete crash-and-burn failures over its sorry life span, refuses to go away. In recent years, its proponents have successively doubled down with each demonstration of its logical and inevitable results, in which the rich who can game the system and purchase the lawmakers and . thereby the laws, wind up with all the money, as the middle class becomes an endangered species. 

In the four years since 2008, as the economy has limped along, the Republicans have pursued their top priority by practicing the purest form of obstructionism and partisan solidarity. What they could not stop outright by filibustering, they watered down by counter-productive amendments, which they frequently insisted on, only to vote against them at the end, simply to deny Obama any credit for an accomplishment. 

The Reaganomics banner is being carried into battle once again by the Romney team, leftovers from the last Bush administration, who oversaw the 2008 debacle.  That they can even show their faces in public after their last disgrace is amazing enough. The Mittster has appointed Paul Ryan their latest champion - his vacant blue eyes fronting for an ideology that would relegate our social safety net to the scrap heap, ending medicare, repealing Obamacare, and completing the raiding of social security, while preserving our abject servitude to a voracious military/industrial complex whose ultimate aim of a constant state of war is now a fact. 

Are our memories that short?

We Are Still Paying the Price for Ignorance and Apathy

Watching Anderson Cooper last week, I heard what Cooper apparently thought was breaking news - firefighters and first responders to the 9/11/01 events in New York are 19 percent more likely to develop cancer than those who weren’t there. This comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the arc of this story, beginning with the fact that when Larry Silverstein leased the former Port Authority site, it was known to have a huge asbestos problem, which precluded a permit for controlled demolition of the out-of-date structure, due to the health risk it entailed.
After the disaster, Christine Todd Whitman, speaking for the Bush Administration, rapidly declared the lower Manhattan air “safe to breathe”.  It was clearly not safe, as illustrated by the respiratory and other problems, including deaths and disabilities suffered ever since by those who responded to the disaster and later labored on the pile. Independent tests showed high levels of asbestos and other toxins in the dust that blanketed lower Manhattan.
So approaching the tenth anniversary of the defining incident of the 21st century, and the lies that kicked off what appears to be the irreversible decline of our economy, our political system, our international reputation, and our way of life, we get a real-time view of the results of official lies and cover-up. As has become commonplace, those who are responsible for the lies are still living the good life, never having ever been seriously questioned about the lies that, in some estimates, will eventually cause a death toll greater than that of the so-called attacks. Certainly our actions taken on the basis of responding to the event have cost lives, world-wide, many times our losses on that day.
On 11 September, 2011, a large number of experts will assemble in Toronto, Ontario, CA to hear, and present, a distillation of the most weighty evidence that 9/11/01 was never seriously investigated, and that the version of events presented by the 9/11 Commission and other government-appointed agencies does not conform to the evidence. Evidence will be presented before an international panel headed by Ferdinando Imposimato, the Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy.  If you want to inform yourself about this panel, or the vast amount of evidence of the proportions and duration of the apparently successful psychological operation against the people of the U. S. and the world, consult Google for the “Toronto Hearings” and Amazon for the works of Dr. David Ray Griffin.

Maturin42

Response to LTE, Daily Times, 5-19-2011

Re: Multifaceted approach is needed if we truly wish to solve our nation’s debt problem - S. Lee Smith, May 19, 2011

When Spring, and the feistiness of Wisconsinites in the face of autocratic heavy-handedness by Scott Walker caused the needle on my hope-meter momentarily to twitch, along comes S. Lee Smith to remind me that conservative snake oil still sells, and that their larder is well stocked with really bad ideas, thanks in no small part to a concerted and effective campaign by monied interests and the corporate media outlets to ensure that we get both the Republican AND the Tea Party point of view. Mr. Smith, if he was a regular reader of the Daily Times back when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were just underway, may have seen one of my letters pointing out that starting expensive wars more calculated to enrich war profiteers and Dick Cheney than serve the vital interests of the United States, and doing it off the books while cutting taxes, appeared to be speeding us down the road to perdition - economy-wise. Well, here we are.

The “solutions” named by Mr. Smith, mainly consisting of Koch brothers’ wish-list items, are mostly not solutions at all, unless the goal is to accelerate our transition to third-world status - a country of hungry, ill-educated, ill-housed, unemployed peasants squatting among the ruins of our decayed industrial base, ruled over by a robber baron class. Is Mr. Smith’s memory so short that he cannot recall that the Bush regime inherited a budget surplus which he promptly presented to his rich buddies in the form of generous tax cuts, on the repeatedly disproven theory that they would create jobs? They did. In China, and Bangladesh, and India, while our infrastructure and economy trended steadily down until the bottom fell out in 2008.

Flinging wads of money at Wall Street was, we were told, necessary to head off a global financial debacle. The chosen players on Wall Street promptly recovered and awarded themselves huge bonuses, but as high unemployment numbers continue to take their toll on families and young people struggling to find ways to support themselves, the middle class appears an endangered species. The wealthy continue to prosper and the gap between rich and poor grows wider, continuing our march toward a feudal society lorded over by corporations.

The Bush deficits were caused by ill-advised tax cuts exacerbated by un-paid-for wars and unprecedented growth in government. Return to Clinton tax rates, and stop the wars, reduce military spending to that appropriate for defense, not empire-building. Punishing poor people isn’t the answer any more than awarding more tax cuts to rich people. And lying to ourselves about who or what attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001 is one of the things that got us where we are.

Shelton F. Lankford
Salisbury

Excuse my interruption, but...

The last thing I would want to do is be a buzz-kill for the only really good chest-thumping, shoot-in-the-air, “we’re number 1”, party since the days of Shock and Awe, but I feel the need to point out a couple of things that may otherwise get overlooked. Some may recall my claim that Osama has been dead for some time. According to several European newspapers, he died in Dec. 2001 from a lung ailment. At the time, and continuing right up to the recent raid on the Abbottabad compound, the FBI had maintained that the evidence connecting him to the attacks of 9/11/01 was insufficient. “No hard evidence connecting him to the crime” were the words Rex Tomb, FBI spokesperson used. What changed? On Mayday, 2011, late at night, the following events: The CIA and Special Forces on orders of Obama, raided a residential compound 7 days before, I mean that evening, and Seal Team 6 had a fierce firefight, or not, with Osama, or a woman being used as a shield, or not, and shot the terrorist mastermind, or financier, practically in the act of planning new attacks on the homeland of the USA, then spirited his body out to a ship, sailed to an undisclosed location at sea (my personal belief it was in the Gulf of Tonkin) and dumped him overboard, in order to comply with strict Muslim sensitivities, all within a very few wee hours of the morning, after conducting exhaustive and conclusive DNA tests, in what must be record time to make sure that he was “really most sincerely dead”. I have left out some of the variations on the story. The mainstream media immediately joined in a mighty chorus to sing the praises of the “gutsy” call by the Commander in Chief who did his obligatory victory lap around ground zero. Seal team 6 is hailed as heros, medals all around, and the 2012 elections are a foregone conclusion.

Karl Rove famously said that they - the Neocon cabal of the Bush II era, could “create their own reality”. Turns out their reality disintegrated pretty quickly in the face of revelations that WMD’s, nuclear programs, and welcoming of liberators were products of whole cloth, and bore no relation to facts. A lame attempt was made to credit Mr. Bush with setting up the recent action, but that got quickly drowned out by the mighty tsunami of talking points that engulfed the cable shows. It even pushed Donald Trump into the background - not an easy accomplishment. Turns out Rove and company were pikers! Reality creation is a growth industry. At least we are manufacturing something.

After the raid, all the talk about insufficient evidence and the anemic numbers of Al Qaeda melted away. All of a sudden, Al Qaeda was a mighty host, still dangerous to us and our friends, and Bin Laden was, right up to the end, large and in charge. He was always in charge and we must have been nuts to doubt it. Now we can declare ourselves victorious in the waronterra, but first we must guard against the retaliation that is bound to come since we killed Osama, so we have to continue to bankrupt ourselves for a few more decades to keep everyone safe. And here is some white powder just to keep you from getting cockey.

The questions surrounding 9/11/01 are just as valid as ever. The explosives residue in the Manhattan dust is every bit as damning as it was the day the results of the analysis were published. The evidence on the ground at the Pentagon is no more supportive of an airliner crash that it was when CIT teased the threads of the only plausible explanation out of the eyewitness testimony of the only witnesses in a position to know. The juggled timelines of the various generations of NORAD revisions are no more persuasive than they were the first three times they told them, and the stink of standdown and cover-up still hovers over the whole dismal affair. Pantomiming a hollywood-style “24” raid on a forgotton boogeyman didn’t change that.

Have they given up yet?

When President Obama's friend and legal scholar, Cass Sunstein, authored an essay about ways the government might deal with a steadily growing 9/11 Truth Movement, I read it eagerly to find out what we might expect from this "liberal" administration. It was already evident that the policy of "containment by ignoring" would continue to apply, and that no investigative efforts were forthcoming. When Prof. Sunstein seemed to be suggesting that blatantly unconstitional measures to counter the truth movement - a cointelpro for our time - would be appropriate, I discussed it with friends familiar with the '60's programs against the anti-war crowd, and we all pretty much agreed that it was highly likely that such programs were already in place and had been for some time. Most who have written in discussion groups on 9/11 Truth are accustomed to the one or two trolls that always seem to show up to drop little disinformation pellets among the offerings and are always there to keep the controversies alive. I don't offer that as proof, simply as an observation growing out of many years of participation in such discussions - Amazon reviews being one such place. Having been a long-time fan of Dr. Griffin, and having read Dr. Sunstein's piece, I ordered the book in order to close the loop, not expecting to learn a great deal.

I was pleasantly surprised. Dr. Griffin's careful analysis suggests a line of argument that makes it almost possible to believe that Sunstein's essay deliberately contained its own pre-planted explosives, requiring only a slight twist of the argument to turn it back on itself, blowing the entire structure of the official myth to smithereens. To those of us who have steeped for years in the strong brew of evidence that the official myth is unstable and is sustained only by a brittle structure of power and inertia propped up by a calcified and corrupt media establishment, it is like finding the cherry cordial in the center of an otherwise unremarkable piece of candy. Nicely done, Dr. Griffin!

To say that this book destroys the arguments of the sustainers of the 9/11 official myth is to put it mildly. It may be that the myth sustainers think they have won and don't even feel a need to respond to this book. I notice that apparently not a single reviewer is on hand (to date) to offer any of the usual ad homenim attacks or insults in defense of the official myth. The silence is somewhat spooky and a bit unsettling. I am aware that they have long since run out of ideas - can it be that they have finally realized it?

Professor Sunstein's name has been spotted on lists associated with possible Obama Supreme Court nominees. Those of us who consider such a possibility with the revulsion appropriate to the idea of a big fan of undermining popular opinion by government cointelpro-style actions ascending to the bench (yet again!) should breathe a bit easier knowing the original essay and this devastating treatment reside in Professor Sunstein's file.

Is Living a Lie Bad For the Country?

On the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 debacle, there are events taking place in many cities to point out the continuing absurdity of a 9-year war based on a collosal lie - that we were attacked on 9/11 by a raggedy bunch of Islamic fanatics.
The evidence says otherwise.

Did Muslim fanatics somehow plant enough nano-thermite in the World Trade Center to level the place? Where would they get it? It comes out of secret laboratories, like Lawrence Livermore. See http://journalof911studies.com/.

I spoke to a friend this week about 9/11 and asked him what he knew about Building 7, the Soloman Brothers building.
His answer was approximately “Building What???” Everyone knows about the towers. Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper adjacent to the World Trade complex, took the plunge at 5:20 on 9/11/2001, after most of its few mysterious fires were burning out. Never hit by a plane, It went down in the exact fashion of an old Las Vegas casino, complete with a count-down. It achieved free-fall for 2.3 seconds by the government’s own measurements (after a high school physics teacher pointed it out to them). Free-fall means that the steel offered NO resistance. That is only possible by use of explosives to get the building supports out of the way.

So, this weekend, think about what it means that we have never had a real investigation of 9/11/01.
Could it possibly be that believing and living by a collosal lie is bad for us?

Daily Times can't handle this much 9/11 Content

Let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late... Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Nine years have passed since the debacle of 9/11/01, when the unthinkable happened. My mourning for the lives lost is abstracted. I did not know any of the almost 3000 people who died. I have since become friends at long distance with some of the survivors, and learned the stories of those who labored on the steaming pile, searching in vain for a miraculous survivor, then shifting to the grim job of sorting out bits of the victims from the pulverized debris. Some of those workers are, even now, fighting to survive the effects of repeated exposure to air the EPA fraudulently termed “safe to breathe” - a political judgment fatally substituted for science.

If all goes as planned, I will stand on the steps of New York City Hall on Thursday, 9 September, and deliver a version of this message to a contingent of press, alongside a distinguished Danish scientist who, with 8 other scientists from the U. S. and other countries, analyzed dust samples from Manhattan that revealed fragments of a military-grade, high-tech explosive, and tell-tale signs of the combustion of that explosive. We will be joined by a celebrated actor, and a well-known political activist, and we will be calling, again, for a real investigation of the events of 9/11.

This research, repressed first-responder testimony, video, and other evidence shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the towers were brought down by a controlled demolition so powerful that the masonry, furnishings, concrete floor pans, office equipment, and the people still inside were pulverized. The steel infrastructure of the towers - massive columns that stood up to an intense fire in 1975 with no damage whatever, were blasted apart. Steel beams were thrown up to two football fields away horizontally, impaling themselves in surrounding buildings. Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper not struck by a plane, was announced on the BBC as having collapsed at 5:00 PM EDT while the building smoked live on the screen behind the spokesmodel. The video was taken down just in time to prevent the miracle of the predicted collapse coming true on live TV, when Building 7 finally did come down at 5:20 in text-book controlled demolition style.

My mourning for the country I live in is not abstract, but real and very immediate. Since the unsolved crime of 9/11/01, I have seen our republic descend into darkness, as we used the lie of 9/11 to justify aggression abroad and repression at home. We officially become a torture state. Accountability for egregious crimes at the highest levels is non-existent. Only a whistle-blower who attempts to interfere or throw light on their actions needs to worry. The “made men” running this protection racket on America never have to fear, because the people are asleep or frightened into silence.

Only when the truth of 9/11 is uncovered will we begin to heal.

Prepared as an OP ED for Sept. 11 to the Daily Times. The DT made the decision that they just couldn't squeeze in this much 9/11 content on 9/11, and cut me to a 250 word letter to the editor, in the following post. SL

Jesse Ventura on American Conspiracies

I was not always a big fan of Jesse Ventura. I am certainly no fan of wrestling - never have been, and big, loudmouthed superpatriots are not my cup of tea either. Jesse was formerly a big fan of the right wing, but the corruption and fantasies spun by and around the 2nd Bush dynasty found in Jesse a fundamentally honest man who, it turns out, has a brain. A good one. He reads - a lot - and when something doesn't make any sense, he looks further into it, which is a good practice for anyone, and you might say is a fundamental duty of American citizens who want to see our country live up to the ideals that were ingrained in us way back in grammar school. Those ideals are worth striving for, but that does not mean that you have to cling without question to the unadulterated crap that passes for the accounts of the landmark events of our history.

In the version of contemporary history being foisted on the American people, conspiracies have no basis in fact. They rarely happen, and they are never, ever, the product of the actions of our government. The word only gets exercised when its pejorative meaning is trotted out, coupled with "theories" or "theorist" to cast aspersions on alternative views of events. It is used as code to discredit alternative views of events and those who would consider them.

Jesse and his co-author Dick Russell have taken on several of the dominent myths surrounding events that arguably changed the course of the history that us seasoned veterans of that history either were taught in school or lived through. He does so in a blunt and forceful way that makes it readable and engaging. It appears to be well researched, and, in contrast with Jesse's companion television series of a similar title that aired on TruTV, is relatively free of the bombast and dramatic flourishes that, to my mind, somewhat marred that production. I questioned whether his tendency to fall back on testosterone-soaked bombast to punctuate his points would undermine the facts he was bringing out.

I have followed Jesse's public pronouncements since he returned from his NBC-financed "exile" in Mexico, where he was paid to breathe by the network which found the subject matter of his infant TV series, " Jesse Ventura's America" not cool. So not cool that they bought out his contract and said "do what you want just stay off TV". So he used the money to finance a two-year vacation and a villa in Mexico. He returned, and got a lot of attention with his questioning of 9/11. His celebrity meant he was sought by the talking head shows of mainstream media but he had the disturbing tendency to ask questions his hosts preferred remain unasked or unmentioned on their light entertainment shows.

If you have no clue what I am talking about, pick up American Conspiracies and read. If you can't handle Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", this is a more digestible nugget.

If your mind can't handle alternative views of this country we all love but which some of us love enough to look at without rose-tinted lenses, then turn on the TV and forget I said anything.

American Conspiracies by Jesse Ventura A Review by Liam Scheff
www.lewrockwell.com
"People prefer to be lied to ably, than be told the truth, boldly. We prefer a colorful and clever story to a documentary filled with sharp and damning evidence; we prefer gossip to investigation. Human kind delights in metaphor when facts get in the way of our passions and pursuits. "