Skip to main content

Failed States: America and Iraq, Rotted by War Crime

from Empire Burlesque - by Chris Floyd

“Where should we go now?” he asked. “Death faces us everywhere.”
And so the great historical presidential campaign of 2008 is finally at an end. By every reasonable and legitimate measure, Barack Obama will be the winner. But of course "reasonable and legitimate measures" mean little when dealing with deliberately fomented chaos and chicanery of the American electoral process, the laughingstock of the rest of the world, whose people stand in slackjawed amazement as they watch and wait -- in dreadful impotence -- to see which hegemon will emerge from the stormcloud of filth, lies, ambition and money that howls around the campaign trail.

It has been, as usual, a bizarre, even lunatic experience, completely untethered from reality, obsessed with trivia, gossip and spin, and emptied, again deliberately, of anything resembling substance. Vague hope is offered by one side, vague, wiggly fear by the other. "Change" is the universal mantra, but both sides have fully and unashamedly embraced all the fundamental tenets and practices of the current power structure: militarism, corporatism, authoritarianism. Both candidates enthusiastically support the so-called War on Terror and the so-called War on Drugs, with all of their horrendous violence and corruption. Both champion unrestricted surveillance on ordinary citizens, and draconian punishments for the millions incarcerated in cramped and increasingly privatized prisons, where the poor and luckless are abandoned to the depradations of gangs and the brutality of ill-paid, ill-trained guards. Both back the inexorable growth of the death penalty to cover an ever-wider array of offenses, even non-lethal crimes. Both support the so-called "bailout," the gargantuan redistribution of wealth from working people to the fraudulent rich. Keep reading here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

NBC anti-life?

I would boycott NBC, if I ever watched it that is. I actually never watch anything on the old line networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX. Everything I watch is on the cable only stations... do they still broadcast over the air? Ah well, this story is about the fact that it seems NBC refused to air an ad put together by some Catholic outfit that features an embryo and all of the hardships it faced in early life ending up with the revelation that they were talking about Obama. Here is the ad , check it out and see how unoffensive it is. Like I said, if I watched them I'd quit now. :-/

Wikileaks and police state censorship

I saw an article today on SF Gate about some nit wit Bush appointed Federal Judge ordering a website I'd never heard of called Wikileaks shut down because they were publishing some bank documents from some corrupt Swiss bank. The amusing thing is that they can't actually do it! Even more amusing is that this just draws attention to the site and makes it that much more visible, yay idiot goons! :-) There are mirror sites all over the world and it's almost impossible for thuggish police state goons to figure out how to close off all of the leaks :-) One mirror site is here: http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks The US site they tried to close down is still here: http://88.80.13.160 "Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe,

Child Driven Education

Here is a Ted Talk with Sugata Mitra on Child Driven Education... very unschooling-like I think.  :-)  I've seen videos of him before, this is an update on his research on letting groups of kids learn on the internet, mostly without any supervision at all.  Posted via email from The Angry Gnome