Efficacy is the capacity to produce an effect. Efficacy measures this
capacity under ideal conditions. It is these conditions that distinguish
efficacy from the related concept of effectiveness, which relates to
change under real-life conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy Efficacy: the capacity for producing a desired result or effect;
effectiveness: a remedy of great efficacy.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/efficacy
Is it OK to torture the child of a suspect person as a enhanced
interrogation technique?
http://www.mediachannel.org/images/jy3.jpg
====================
"...the popular prayers of most people (are) little more than adult
letters written to a Santa Claus God."
--Bishop Spong
Elmo Hoffman, via the Internet, writes to Bishop Spong:
I have read much of your work and met you once at Stetson University in
Deland, Florida, at a pastor's conference. It was the same venue where I
also met Marcus Borg. I am a retired civil trial lawyer and a late-life
seminary graduate, now an ordained Disciples of Christ minister,
although before seminary I was a lifelong Presbyterian (USA) from the
same time frame and section of North Carolina as you. My question, which
gives me a great deal of trouble, is: What is your basic understanding
of petitionary prayer? I believe you have said, "A God who would save
the life of one prayed-for cancer-stricken child and not another would
be a monster." This makes sense but gives me a great deal of trouble in
considering petitionary prayer. (I have read your book Honest Prayer I
find no answer to this problem there.)
Bishop Spong: Dear Elmo,
Thank you for your comments and for your question. Your question on
petitionary prayer is almost always the first question that comes up
wherever I go to lecture. People can talk about their understanding of
God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they
translate their understanding of God into their prayers. More than
anything else, our prayers define our understanding of God. So to talk
about prayer, we have to define who the God is to whom we pray. To say
it differently, "Who do we think is listening?"
Most people, quite unconsciously, approach the subject of prayer with a
very traditional concept of God quite operative in their minds. This God
is a personal being, endowed with supernatural power, who lives
somewhere outside this world, usually conceptualized as "above the sky."
While that definition has had a long history among human beings, it is a
definition of God that has been rendered meaningless by the advance of
human knowledge. This means that for most of us the activity of prayer
does not take seriously the fact that we live in a vast universe, and
that we have not yet come to grips with the fact that there is no
supernatural, parental deity above the sky, keeping the divine record
books on human behavior up to date and ready at any moment to intervene
in human history to answer prayers. When we do embrace this fact then
prayer, as normally understood, becomes an increasingly impossible idea
and inevitably a declining practice. To get people to embrace this point
clearly, I have suggested that the popular prayers of most people is
little more than adult letters written to a Santa Claus God.
There are then two choices. One says that the God in whom I always
believed is no more, so I will become an atheist. People make this
decision daily. It is an easy way out.
The other says that the way I have always thought of God has become
inoperative, so there must be something wrong with my definition. This
stance serves to plunge us deeply into a new way of thinking about God,
and that is when prayer itself begins to be redefined. Can God, for
example, be conceived of not as supernatural person, but as a force
present in me and flowing through me? Then perhaps prayer can be
transformed into meditation and petitionary prayer becomes a call to
action. The spiritual life is then transformed from the activity of a
child seeking the approval of a supernatural being to being a
simultaneous journey into self-discovery and into the mystery of God. It
also feeds my sense of growing into oneness with the source of all life
and love and with what my mentor, Paul Tillich, called the Ground of All
Being. It would take a book to fill in the blank places in this quick
analysis, but these are the things that today feed my ever deepening
discovery of the meaning of prayer.
--John Shelby Spong
Copyright © 2008 Waterfront Media, Inc.
===============
Fundamentalist religion fever
http://www.markfiore.com/political/taliban-fever
Today's god:
Hades (The invisible one)
Origin Greek God of death
Known period of worship
Circa 1500BC until Christianization (circa 400 AD)
Synonyms Aidoneus (Roman); Dis; Pluto; Orcus (Roman)
Centers of cult Restricted to Pylos.
Art references none specific.
Literary references Odyssey, Illiad (Homer)
Theogony (Hesiod
Hades is the son of Kronos and Rhea and may be perceived as the chthonic
form of Zeus; he is also the consort of Persephone (Kore). Since all
precious metal and stones lie burried in the earth, he is also the god
of riches. He rides in a black chariot drawn by four black horses. His
home in the underworld is the house of Ais. The closely guaded gates of
his kingdom, also called hades are identified in the Odyssey as lying
directly beneath the earth. Thought hades run the rivers Styx, beside
which the gods made their hallowed oaths, and Lethe, with the waters
with it's waters of forgetfulness. In the Odyssey the rivers are
identified as the Pyriphlegethon (Kore), the daughter of Demeter, and
brings her to the underworld to reign as his queen for four months in
every year. he is depicted as a dark-bearded god carrying a two pronged
harpoon or a scepter, and a key. He may be called Plutos, although the
latter is generally regarded as a distinct deity.
One of my favorite gods: Lord Ganesh
http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/1073/ganeshyb5.jpg
Parents and schools do not teach critical thinking, which leaves the
majority of people in the USA living in the world of myth, superstition
and unreason. Children have to be carefully taught.
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/5561/ifriendsk8.gif
God: generic term for any of 2,500+ imaginary supernatural beings in
human history. Note: the majority of voters in the United States
believe in imaginary supernatural beings and expect their elected
leaders to do the same. No agnostics or atheists (god-free rationalists)
need apply. I want my leaders to live in the world of reason where
evidence is required for belief. In the world of faith, NO evidence is
required for belief in imaginary supernatural beings. Faith-based
policies start with the conclusions, then "fit the facts" around the a
priori policies. For instance, the earth is 6,000 years old...or Iraq
has WMD...or only the "right" kind of Christians are acceptable for
public office.
--C Hamilton
================
These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache
By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
May 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/139927/
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about "the misery
wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and
imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine"? Only by ignoring all
this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history
be maintained: "If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous
superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups
apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world." -- Stanley
Fish's Blog, God Talk - - NYTimes.com.
I'm always on the lookout for religion's latest counter-arguments, the
new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for
use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the
moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn't an inherently
irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much
of the world's time and energy as this particular one. It's the
intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure:
you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can
find to fail at growing hair.
This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent
religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his
case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a
recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester
professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling
a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who
gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children.
The esteemed professor's new book is called Reason, Faith and
Revolution, and it's sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature
of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to
give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out
Eagleton's lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one
may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick
his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the
American upper class.
Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in
putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear
arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever. In one speech he takes
issue with what he calls the "Yeti" view of faith as espoused by
atheists, i.e. the idea that religion is based upon the belief in an
object whose existence, like that of the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy, cannot
be verified by observation "in the reasonably straightforward way that
we can demonstrate the existence of necrophilia or Michael Jackson" (one
of a disturbingly high number of Eagleton jokes that nonsensically
reference pop culture figures of at best semi-recent vintage).
Eagleton's response to what he calls this "travesty" of illogic:
For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects
or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of
cognition. it's not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our
not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true
of the Yeti.
Got that? It's not that we can't see God - it's that God is inherently
unseen! Take that, atheists! He goes on:
For another thing, faith of course is traditionally regarded as a
question of certainty. not as a question of probability or speculation
or guesswork, but actually as a question of certainty, which is not to
say that it's not also traditionally regarded as being inferior to
knowledge. But only fully paid-up rationalists think that nothing is
certain but knowledge. Faith, as the author of the epistle to Hebrews
writes, is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things
unseen." Whatever else may define the science of theology, or religion,
it is from a theological view certainly not the question of certainty. I
don't think Ditchkins [this is what Eagleton gleefully and repeatedly
calls Hitchens/Dawkins] understands that.
I listened to this argument at least five times and at the end still had
absolutely no idea what the hell Eagleton was talking about. I thought
at first he might be saying that faith does not require certainty, but
then again nobody who wanted to say that would bother with all that
extra verbiage. Anyway this is the kind of stuff that permeates
Eagleton's work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked
goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and
unnecessary syllables.
Eagelton's main idea, the one trumpeted by Fish in the Times, is an even
sillier piece of syllogistic sophistry than his "God isn't like the
Yeti! We'd be able to see a Yeti!" trick. The basic premise goes
something like this:
Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.
But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve
the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing
man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.
Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen's famous syllogism: "Socrates is a
man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates." And.well, I'm
not going to get into this too much, because taking an axe to some soggy
old Catholic academic is beginning to feel wrong somehow. But something
tells me we're going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no
other reason that whenever money gets tight and the times get nervous
even intellectuals will suddenly start talking about God. You see this
same phenomenon played out on a more crude level in Southern
fundamentalism, where the megachurches are smart enough to send their
missionaries to rehab centers and prisons and everywhere else you find
people stumbling, confused, and vulnerable to a soul-snatching out of
their various existential car wrecks - and now that 21st century
capitalism has hit the wall and yuppies everywhere are flying through
the windshield into debt and foreclosure, the God-hawkers will show up
here, too, to argue that where materialism and science have let your
postmodern liberal self down, religion comes ready with answers.
Fish/Eagleton spell out the failures of science and materialism as
follows:
Science, says Eagleton, "does not start far back enough"; it can run its
operations, but it can't tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a
corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is "too skin deep a
creed to tackle what is at stake"; its laws - the laws of entailment and
evidence - cannot get going without some substantive proposition from
which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a
non-starter in the absence of an a priori specification of what is real
and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind
of faith.
First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from
his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there
some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and
clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles ("Pus,
Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall's Descent into Septic Shock") and
lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases?
Weird. As for the actual argument, it's the same old stuff religious
apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell -
namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of
existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without
religion, therefore we must have religion.
But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous
about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at
the world unless it's through the prism of some kind of belief system.
They seem to think that if one doesn't believe in God, one must believe
in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable.
And maybe that's true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem
actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto
itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable
not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality
of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers
we have inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and
Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in
heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto
itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to
disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work
on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They'll tie themselves
into knots arguing this, and
they'll probably never stop. It's really strange.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
© 2009 True/Slant All rights reserved.
===============
Hey Americans, the Pundits Blame You for Bush and Cheney's Torture
Policies
By Rory O'Connor, MediaChannel.org
May 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/139994/
What is it about torture that is so seductive to our mainstream media?
First, our leading (and often "liberal") commentators and analysts,
writing in supposedly respectable publications such as Newsweek and The
Atlantic, tried to appear as tough-minded believers in realpolitik by
siding with such REALLY tough-minded believers as Dick Cheney when he
led our country over to "the dark side."
Then multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Friedman -- ever consistent and
persistent in his excuse making for the powerful -- hailed, in a recent
column, Barack ("Split the baby") Obama's "torturous compromise" to
expose, but not prosecute, those responsible for violating our
Constitution and international law by torturing in our names. This
despite the fact that, as Friedman accurately noted, "more than 100
detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of
those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to
death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees,
and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of
U.S. officials."
Then Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group,
agreed with Friedman's contention that there should be no torture
prosecutions because we had all "acquiesced" in the Bush-Cheney Torture
Agenda; we were all "the President's accomplices," and thus "pursuing
criminal charges would be too hard legally and politically and too easy
morally.' According to Weisberg's twisted morality and logic,
"Prosecuting Bush and his men won't absolve the rest of us for what we
let them do."
His explanation for this astounding conclusion is simply that "everyone
knew" about the torture -- so no one should be prosecuted for it:
<snip>
As revealed by Will Bunch in his excellent Attytood blog, the Inquirer
now "defends the indefensible" with its warding of a monthly column to
Yoo, author of the infamous 'torture memos' that in 2002 and
2003 gave Bush and Cheney "the legal cover to violate the human rights
of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now
mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such
torture practices did not apply." As Bunch noted, "Working closely with
Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal
actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul."
Not deep enough, however, to prevent Bunch's "colleagues upstairs at the
Philadelphia Inquirer" from signing Yoo up for a regular monthly column.
"The Inquirer thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a
hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism," Bunch pointed
out. "To write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department
investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo
and has led international prosecutors as well as millions of politically
engaged Americans" to consider him worthy of charging with war crimes.
"Yoo's immoral guidance," Bunch says, "aided the United States in
sanctioning the torture practice known as waterboarding -- used in the
Spanish Inquisition, by despots such as Pol Pot and by Chinese
Communists in the Korean War to obtain false confessions from
Americans -- as well as slamming detainees into walls, part of a harsh
interrogation regime that has been linked to the deaths of at least a
dozen U.S. detainees and possibly more. But apparently the Inquirer
didn't get the memo on Yoo."
Or maybe they did - and that's why they hired him. After all, defending
torture -- and the torturers -- is now a long accepted practice in
American journalism, one that brings you much acclaim and access to
power, bylines, headlines, prestigious awards, and lucrative contracts.
Plus there are all the reader benefits to consider as well! As editorial
page editor Harold Jackson's stated, Inquirer readers now "have been
able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects
concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White
House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the
objective of newspaper commentary."
Oh good -- just what we need from our leading media - further discourse
on why torture is a good thing from a columnist who is also America's
top defender of the practice. And of course let's remember, while we're
at it, never to prosecute Yoo for actions that have shredded our
democratic values. After all, we're all his accomplices if you believe
the media!
Weisberg, Friedman and their ilk should be ashamed of themselves. Kudos
instead to Will Bunch, who had it right when he concluded:
"For a much-honored newspaper like the Inquirer to pay someone like Yoo
to write a regular column is surely the exclamation point on a dark
period in which most of my profession flunked its greatest moral test.
As an American citizen, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our
government tortured people in my name. As a journalist, the fact that my
byline and John Yoo's are now rolling off the same printing press is
adding insult to injury."
Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is the author of "Shock Jocks:
Hate Speech and Talk Radio" (AlterNet Books, 2008). O'Connor also writes
the Media Is A Plural blog.
© 2009 MediaChannel.org
==================
On the efficacy of torture
One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured
Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO
READ
May 14, 2009
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/05/one-of-main-sources-for...
A special report from NBC news states:
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx
The NBC News analysis shows that more than one quarter of all footnotes
in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al-Qaida operatives
who were subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques. In
fact, information derived from the interrogations is central to the
Report's most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of
the attacks. The analysis also shows - and agency and commission
staffers concur - there was a separate, second round of interrogations
in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the
Commission.
9/11 Commission staffers say they "guessed" but did not know for certain
that harsh techniques had been used, and they were concerned that the
techniques had affected the operatives' credibility. At least four of
the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report
have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way
to stop being "tortured." The claims came during their hearings last
spring at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...
Fourteen of the highest-value detainees had their initial hearings this
spring before the Pentagon's Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The
tribunal acts as sort of a grand jury, charged with determining if a
detainee should be held over for trial. Four of them said they gave
information only to stop the torture. Although details were redacted in
all the detainees' testimony, the tribunal permitted the inclusion of a
letter from a detainee's father in one case, citing what he claimed was
American torture of his son.
This torture only stopped when Majid agreed to sign a statement that he
wasn't even allowed to read.
Indeed, as legal experts have pointed out, and 9/11 Commission Director
Zelikow tacitly acknowledges, evidence based on torture is not reliable.
As the NBC news report states:
<snip>
"If you're sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the high-powered
lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask what happened
rather than guess," said Ratner, whose center represents detainees at
Guantanamo. "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted
historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information
gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect."...
Zelikow adds that one particularly telling position was the agency's
refusal to let the Commission interview the interrogators.
"We needed more information to judge reports we were reading," he said.
"We needed information about demeanor of the detainees. We needed more
information on the content, context, character of the
interrogations."...
Ratner argues "if they suspected there was torture, they should have
realized that as a matter of law, evidence derived from torture is not
reliable, in part because of the possibility of false confession.at the
very least, they should have added caveats to all those references."...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/top-interrogation-experts-say-...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/5-hours-after-911-attacks-rums...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/self-confessed-911-mastermind-...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/witness-who-fingered-911-maste...
==============
Chalmers Johnson on the Cost of Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090514_chalmers_johnson_o...
May 15, 2009
By Chalmers Johnson
In her foreword to "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against
U.S. Military Posts," an important collection of articles on United
States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the
prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject
failures as a government and a democracy: "There is virtually no news
coverage-no journalists' or editors' curiosity-about the pressures or
lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of
Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access
would be good for their countries." The American public, if not the
residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of
the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against
women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental
pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people
forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic
and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an
antidote to such parochialism.
Catherine Lutz is an anthropologist at Brown University and the author
of an ethnography of an American city that is indubitably part of the
American military complex: Fayetteville, N.C., adjacent to Fort Bragg,
home of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School (see "Homefront, A
Military City and the American Twentieth Century," Beacon Press, 2002).
On the opening page of her introduction to the current volume, Lutz
makes a real contribution to the study of the American empire of bases.
She writes, "Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian
employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and
territories" She cites as her source the Department of Defense's Base
Structure Report for fiscal year 2007. This is the Defense Department's
annual inventory of real estate that it owns or leases in the United
States and in foreign countries. Oddly, however, the total of 909
foreign bases does not appear in the 2007 BSR. Instead, it gives the
numbers of 823 bases located in other people's countries and 86 sites
located in U.S. territories. So Lutz has combined the foreign and
territorial bases-which include American Samoa, the District of
Columbia, Guam, Johnston Atoll, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto
Rico, the Virgin Islands,and Wake Island. Guam is host to at least 30
military sites and Puerto Rico to 41 bases.
Combining the two numbers is a good idea. Some of the most deplorable
conditions in the American military empire exist in U.S. territories,
notably in Puerto Rico, where the citizens fought a long battle to stop
the naval bombardment of Vieques Island, and in Guam, where the
government plans to relocate more than 8,000 Marines from Okinawa
together with a $13 billion expansion of Air Force and Navy facilities.
The result will be an almost 15 percent increase in Guam's population,
which will significantly exceed the capacity of the island's water and
solid-waste systems. (See "U.S. Military Guam Buildup Spurs Worry over
Services," San Diego Union-Tribune, April 12, 2009.) In the book under
review here, Lutz also includes an essay on the state of Hawaii, with
its 161 military installations (in 2004) covering 6 percent of the
state's land area (22 percent of the state's most densely populated
island, Oahu). The military is easily Hawaii's largest polluter,
including the secret use of depleted uranium ammunition at the Shofield
range, evidence of which was uncovered in 2006.
<snip>
One other subject that Lutz touches on in her introduction and that
cries out for a book-length study is the political machinations that
every American embassy and military base on earth engages in to
undermine and change local laws that stand in the way of U.S. military
plans. For years the United States has interfered in the domestic
affairs of nations to bring about "regime change," rig elections, free
American servicemen who have been charged with extremely serious
felonies against local civilians, indoctrinate the local officer corps
in American militarist values (as at the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga.), and preserve and protect
the so-called Status of Forces Agreements that the United States imposes
on all nations with U.S. bases. These SOFAs give our troops
extraterritorial privileges such as freedom from local laws and from
passport and travel regulations, and they absolve the U.S. from a
country's anti-pollution requirements, noise restrictions and
environmental laws.
<snip>
These two propositions-misogyny in the official education of American
troops and hypocrisy in describing the benefits to locals of foreign
military bases-are significant. I believe that they should inform future
research on the American empire around the world to see if they can be
verified in many different contexts and to further develop their various
implications. Meanwhile, these erudite essays should cause Americans to
reflect on the nature of U.S. imperialism just at the point where it is
most probably starting to decline due to economic constraints and
popular exhaustion with the wars and deaths it has caused.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of "Blowback" (2000), "The Sorrows
of Empire" (2004), and "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"
(2006), and editor of "Okinawa: Cold War Island" (1999).
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
======================
Who Rules America?
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22611.htm
May 14, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- -What do you suppose it is
like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your
power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?
A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid
off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees,
and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office,
like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.
Fighting the special interests doesn't pay and doesn't succeed. On
April 30 the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated
yet again. The Democrats' bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage
foreclosures and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by
permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, was defeated in
the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats. The
banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.
These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter
irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans' retirement savings,
sent the economy into a deep hole, and threatened the US dollar's
reserve currency role. It is difficult to imagine an interest group
with a more damaged reputation. Yet, a majority of "the people's
representatives" voted as the discredited banksters instructed.
Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the
banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite
for homeowners, the US Senate stuck with the banks. The Senate's motto
is: "Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners."
If Obama was naive about well-intentioned change before the vote, he no
longer has this political handicap.
Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged the voters' defeat by
the discredited banksters. The banks, Durbin said, "frankly own the
place."
<snip>
The same Congress that can't find a dime for homeowners or health care
appropriates hundreds of billions of dollars for the military/security
complex. The week after the Senate foreclosed on American homeowners,
the Obama "change" administration asked Congress for an additional $61
billion dollars for the neoconservatives' war in Iraq and $65 billion
more for the neoconservatives' war in Afghanistan. Congress greeted
this request with a rousing "Yes we can!"
The additional $126 billion comes on top of the $533.7 billion "defense"
budget for this year. The $660 billion--probably a low-ball number--is
ten times the military spending of China, the second most powerful
country in the world.
How is it possible that "the world's only superpower" is threatened by
the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan? How can the US be a superpower if it
is threatened by countries that have no military capability other than a
guerilla capability to resist invaders?
These "wars" are a hoax designed to enrich the US armaments industry and
to infuse the "security forces" with police powers over American
citizenry.
Not a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes, but
hundreds of billions of dollars to murder Muslim women and children and
to create millions of refugees, many of whom will either sign up with
insurgents or end up as the next wave of immigrants into America.
This is the way the American government works. And it thinks it is a
"city on the hill, a light unto the world."
Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous
criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed
America's reputation and financial solvency and serve no public
interest. But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the
military/security
complex. War is not being ended, merely transferred from the unpopular
war in Iraq to the more popular war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Obama,
in violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, continues to attack "targets" in
Pakistan. In place of a war in Iraq, the military/security complex now
has two wars going in much more difficult circumstances.
Viewing the promotion gravy train that results from decades of warfare,
the US officer corps has responded to the "challenge to American
security" from the Taliban. "We have to kill them over there before
they come over here." No member of the US government or its numerous
well-paid agents has ever explained how the Taliban, which is focused on
Afghanistan, could ever get to America. Yet this hyped fear is
sufficient for the public to support the continuing enrichment of the
military/security complex, while American homes are foreclosed by the
banksters who have destroyed the retirement prospects of the US
population..
According to Pentagon budget documents, by next year the cost of the war
against Afghanistan will exceed the cost of the war against Iraq.
According to a Nobel prize-winning economist and a budget expert at
Harvard University, the war against Iraq has cost the American taxpayers
$3 trillion, that is, $3,000 billion in out-of-pocket and already
incurred future costs, such as caring for veterans.
If the Pentagon is correct, then by next year the US government will
have squandered $6 trillion dollars on two wars, the only purpose of
which is to enrich the munitions manufacturers and the "security"
bureaucracy.
The human and social costs are dramatic as well and not only for the
Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani populations ravaged by American bombs.
Dahr Jamail reports that US Army psychiatrists have concluded that by
their third deployment, 30 percent of American troops are mental wrecks.
Among the costs that reverberate across generations of Americans are
elevated rates of suicide, unemployment, divorce, child and spousal
abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and incarceration.
http://www.truthout.org/051209J?n
In the Afghan "desert of death" the Obama administration is constructing
a giant military base. Why? What does the internal politics of
Afghanistan have to do with the US?
What is this enormous waste of resources that America does not have
accomplishing besides enriching the American munitions industry?
China and to some extent India are the rising powers in the world.
Russia, the largest country on earth, is armed with a nuclear arsenal as
terrifying as the American one. The US dollar's role as reserve
currency, the most important source of American power, is undermined by
the budget deficits that result from the munition corporations' wars and
the bankster bailouts.
Why is the US making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing
whatsoever to do with is security, wars that are, in fact, threatening
its security?
The answer is that the military/security lobby, the financial gangsters,
and AIPAC rule. The American people be damned.
====================
Philosophy with pictures and music
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=a8a7fed2e6d49db0d2db6fb9a8902bda
Tornadoes, window boxes, trash-can potatoes
http://campaign-archive.com/?u=3a44d786956aa578740994626&id=7497c218f...
Animated tale of love
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x97j5e_manifestations-an-animated-ta...
Nothing compares 2 U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO8JWbG6bVw
War does not prove who was right or wrong, only who is left
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7500/realityfantasy.gif
This means something and is very well done...does evil exist in this
world? How about politicians who lie to start unnecessary wars against
a country which was no threat and not responsible for 9-11.?
http://vimeo.com/4265644
Frog backed securities (Fiore)
http://www.markfiore.com/political/leverage-me-tender
Time for reflection...as Bush said "we do not (call it) torture. (Fiore)
Bush lied and thousands have died
http://www.markfiore.com/political/fuzzy-conciliation-caterpillar
Bush/Cheney violated international law and Article VI of the
Constitution
Time for accountability for illegal immoral unnecessary wars and human
rights violations.
Champions...the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive wars
http://www.vimeo.com/941446
Farewell to the worst President in American history: George W. Bush
Olbermann | 8 Bush Years in 8 Minutes
16 January 2009
http://www.truthout.org/011809Z
video link and transcript
The best way to support our troops
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5821/supporttroopspk6.gif
Chains we can believe in...or will there really be accountability
for violations of US and international law?
http://www.markfiore.com/chains_we_can_believe_0
Purify the GOP
http://www.markfiore.com/political/party-purifier
Old vs new media
http://www.markfiore.com/political/old-vs-new
C Hamilton
a moderator of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/new-continuum/
adult humor/opinion/pictures
If you want to change what your government is doing,
contact those who are acting in your name:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/misc.html
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