Mafia State

Major General Smedly Butler pointed out years ago that the role of the US military was that of a hitman for capitalism.

But surely we have now reached new heights, with the President bragging about successful hits, mass media discussing them without a hint that they may be illegal, and the actual throwing of a body into the ocean! What is this, an episode of the Sopranos?

Even the Mafia didn't brag about their murders. They had the decency to pretend that they were not involved.

Obama "takes out" (more Mafia language) Ghadaffi's son and three grandchildren on Saturday, and then claims to "take out" Osama Bin Laden on Sunday. Quite a weekend for Murder, Inc.

The media plays their role of swallowing the story whole, and then regurgitating their appropriate talking points. Democracy Now focused on the "blowback" theory, in which "terrorist" attacks are payback for US imperialist deaths abroad.

Fox News openly cheers. Vengeance is ours, saith the bimboes.

But. My right-wing Christian co-worker made a point of telling me yesterday that she didn't believe the story Obama and the media were spinning. My liberal Obama-supporting friend didn't believe it either. And a African-American family that were in the ER told me that they didn't believe it either.

Well. That's a pretty wide-spread sampling of opinion, albeit in one small town.

Is it possible that the Obama puppet and his handlers have jumped the shark? Gone too far?

Unfortunately, Harper's Index points out that there were 164 episodes of Happy Days after the one in which their credibility legendarily was blown.

US imperialism has a few episodes left in it, I'm guessing.

What is the point of this announcement, at this time? It certainly can't be an election stunt. That would be an October 2012 assassination.

No. This is something else. I no longer feel qualified to predict with any certainty what the ruling class has in store for us, since I've guessed wrong in the past.

But, since all media is spouting variations on the line of "al queda is going to get us" in revenge, I'm going to guess another "terrorist" attack on US soil. That part isn't too wildly speculative, since you can tell what they want you to believe when all media spouts the same line.

But then what? Here's my wild speculation. The US has used war to get out of economic depression in the past.

The US is in deep economic trouble, and its creditors are starting to bail. There is a due date coming up in June.

The conclusion I draw is that the US will start a massive war rather than default. But I could be wrong.

Things Up With Which We Will Not Put

Let's get this straight. Wall Street speculators gambled with home mortgages, running up trillions of dollars of collateralized debt obligations. Millions of people lost their houses.

Americans were unmoved. They shouldn't have bought houses that they couldn't afford when the mortgages went up.

Wall Street speculators gambled with wheat and rice commodities, leading to widespread hunger and food riots in 2008. Americans paid no attention, even to reports that Haitians were eating mud. Serves them right for living in poor countries.

But Wall Street speculates on oil and the price of gas goes up? Outrage! Even President Obama is moved to make stern noises!

Never mind global warming. Never mind peak oil. Never mind the 50,000+ dead in car crashes a year, the dead bodies along all our roads, the air pollution, the urban sprawl.

Americans have a right to cheap oil!

It's blood for oil, right? That's the bargain? And we've spilled plenty of blood, so where's the cheap oil?

My Planet

I know that I called this planet a lovely jewel floating in an immense universe, but, after the storms last Friday, I have to readjust.

A mind-opening author introduced me to a different way of looking at the "5 billion year history of Earth in one day". I'm sure we're all familiar with the basic plot. The Earth is formed and the day starts. Nothing interesting happens until the last minute, when humans arrive.

That's a little egocentric! Let's look at the rest. A boiling ball of hot lava, eventually cooling, and forming land, involving earthquakes so massive they break apart continents and land smashes into other land so violently that massive mountains are formed. And then, occasionally the planet is slammed by meteors from outer space, throwing massive amounts of debris into the atmosphere.

And then there's the weather. Watching satellite pictures of hurricanes is pretty impressive. Massive movement of air and water, slamming into the ground and blowing everything in its path. And the tornadoes! Swirling winds over 100 mph, moving over the land and picking up and tossing anything that gets into its way.

But, lived experience as a human on this planet, in my alloted nanosecond of time and nano piece of space, is that Earth is a beautiful green place, with blue skies and oceans, and bountiful life. I expect the ground to remain solid under my feet, even though I have lived through 2 massive earthquakes. I expect rainstorms to stay outside of my house, although I can see on TV that that doesn't always happen. I expect things in outer space to stay in outer space. And when I look outside and see the immense power of a storm, I am shocked and afraid, but convinced that it is only temporary.

Otherwise, I'd be a quivering mass of protoplasm, hiding in a hole in the ground, awaiting disaster.

The Troubles in the Middle Kingdoms

The uprising in Egypt is followed by the uprising of besieged labor unions in Wisconsin. People are eager to make connections and equate the two, but they have different causes.

The Egyptian uprising in Tahir Square was a classic "People's Power" celebration of the replacement of one ruling class puppet for another. You can tell that the US was ready to back a new puppet by the corporate media coverage of the events. They made it look like a spontaneous uprising, not in any way influenced by the typical CIA Color Revolution program. It's always inspiring to see millions of people coming together in collective joy to celebrate the end of a murderous dictatorship. Unfortunately, they often don't notice that the new boss is the same as the old boss, and the powers that select the figureheads remain in place,

Our version of that was the exciting Election Day, 2008, and the joyous Inauguration Day of 2009, when the Washington Mall was packed with ecstatic people cheering the end of the Bush-Cheney era.

Heck, most of the world was celebrating. Even the Nobel committee was inspired enough to give the new President a Peace Prize, which he accepted, and then gave a speech in which he gave a Just War defense of American militarism.

When the Egyptian uprising began, I asked my Egyptian Facebook friend what was going on. He replied that he didn't know, but that Egyptian Army generals were at the Pentagon, at that very minute. Hmmm.

Then we got stirring pictures of the Egyptian Army soldiers refusing to fire on the protesters, and protesters riding on tanks. How inspiring! But odd, unless you want to make a guess what the Generals were told at the Pentagon.

Then we are told that Mubarak was going to make a speech in which he would step down. Hallelujah! But just how did corporate media "know" what he was going to say?

But he didn't go along with the announced script. He said that he was planning on staying until the elections in September and that no foreign power could change his mind. Hmmmm.

And then he disappeared. The next day his vice-president appeared and announced that Mubarak had changed his mind. But where was he? They told us that he flew to a resort. Or that he was in a coma.

Whatever. The TV switched to the dancing crowds in the streets, busily celebrating the military takeover of the government. (Although, as Chomsky pointed out, the military has been in control for decades).

And then the military announced that the Emergency Laws would be lifted as soon as possible. But not now. And that strikes were prohibited, and that people needed to leave the Square, because the revolution was over, and everything was OK now.

And most of the people did. Just like in the US, while Obama continues Bush policies of war, torture, (hey, how's that Guantanamo closing coming along?), government secrecy, hand-outs for the rich and cut-backs for the poor, and even re-opens Bush policies that failed - the most obvious being attacks on Social Security-there are still millions of Democrats who blindly accept these policies as tolerable, as long as the President claims to be a "Democrat", instead of a "Republican".

The same thing happened in the Eastern European countries, the first to have People's Power revolutions. Once the party was over, a whole lot of people missed their guaranteed jobs, houses and food. Now some of them have had their own IMF riots. It turns out that punching a ballot every four years doesn't actually give you a lot of say over your life. How about that? About half of voters in our country remain stubbornly sure of the same thing, refusing to vote no matter how much pro-voting propaganda is aimed at them.

So what, then, is the uprising in Wisconsin, if not a People's Power revolution?

Well, it's the American version of the IMF riot, the expected revolt of the people when faced with cutbacks, privatization of public property, layoffs, and more, to pay for the debts run up by the wealthy.

Here's a quote from "The Sorrows of Empire", by Chalmers Johnson, about Argentina, and its IMF riot.

"By 2002, Argentina held the unenviable record of having accumulated the largest amount of public debt by any single country in history-some $160 billion. Its national income shrank by nearly two-thirds in the space of a year; more than half of its largely middle-class population found itself living below the poverty line; and no politician of any orientation dared appear on the streets for fear of public lynching.

The IMF agreed to help the Argentine government meet its debt service payments and then made exactly the same mistake it had in 1997 in East Asia. As a condition for its loans, it demanded an austerity budget that involved firing large numbers of government workers, cutting pensions, reducing wages, and eliminating fringe benefits. Rioting and a fierce police reaction brought the country to a standstill. In December 2000, the IMF provided nearly $40 billion to Argentina on the condition that the government continue to pay foreign debts by intensifying its squeeze on the poorest elements of the society. No government could meet these terms and avoid revolution. Argentina went through five governments and six economic ministers in

fourteen months, but the IMF decided that the country was still not being tough enough and was, in any case, of little strategic importance to the United States. It therefore pulled the plug, and refused to supply any more loans. Double-digit monthly inflation resulted, the peso fell ion value by 220 percent, and social order collapsed. Argentina, once the most prosperous country in latin american, became a basket case-thanks to neoliberalism, globalization, and the IMF."

This being the American version, there is craven acceptance by the workers of the "need" for cutbacks, and the focus turns to peripheral concerns. In this case, the right of collective bargaining. Of course, it's important, but one of the things it's needed for is to protect workers from wage cuts and give-backs! What good is it to have a union if you all agree to the corporate agenda?

The public workers meager demands remind me of the Republic Windows workers, who occupied their factory. Unlike their Argentinian counterparts, they did not operate it as a cooperative. No, they simply demanded what was DUE to them under the LAW, and it was hailed as a great victory when the owners paid them what they were owed! Pitiful!

We'll see if Mr. Johnson was right and "no government" could withstand revolution when cutting out social spending and attacking workers.

This is America! We are brainwashed to hate on command, and it works on our fellow citizens as well.

Welfare mothers, prisoners, homeless people and minorities have been hated for years. The campaign against teachers, prison guards (ironically) and other public workers has just started, but is coming along swimmingly. (The prison guards, of course, are not being attacked for their brutality to the caged, but for their sick time and pensions).

We'll see what develops, as more and more people lose everything.

No Patient Left Behind

Clear Skies, Healthy Forests, No Child Left Behind, Health Care Accountability - gosh, our ruling class gives us so many wonderful things!

I started working as a nurse in 1979. At the time, it was a fairly good job. The pay was about equal with other blue collar jobs, like factory work and construction.

Then the attack on unions started, and out-sourcing blue-collar jobs began. In the meantime, medical care became big business.

So, now we have nursing paying more than other blue collar jobs, what there are left of them.

What is to be done?

For a few years now, there has been a concerted effort to get more young people educated as nurses. Articles in the corporate media, "news reports" on TV, advertisements everywhere, even Jon Stewart had a segment on the "need for nurses".

And, as we've been flooded with eager new nurses, ready to work for almost half our pay, we older nurses have been increasingly threatened with being fired. My old supervisor told me that she was under a lot of pressure from her immediate boss to get rid of her experienced nurses and hire new grads. She was resistant, arguing that an ER should be run by people who know what they're doing, but they made her life so miserable that she quit.

Now we are told that the new "health care" Act calls for cuts in Medicare to hospitals which don't perform up to standards.

Well, who could be against that? It's like children not learning in school. Surely we want good health care, just like we want our children educated.

How's that No Child Left Behind thing working out for you? Is all our children learning now? (As Bush would say).

That's what is coming with hospital care. They are going to base Medicare pay, on which most hospitals depend, on core measures.

Some of them are worthwhile, like making sure that heart attack victims get aspirin promptly, and making sure that people with pneumonia get antibiotics.

But there also is a Press Ganey part. There is a corporation that mails out cards to patients and asks them to rate their care on a 1-5 scale. Then they grade the hospitals on a curve, based on the responses.

So, just like schools are continually expected to improve their scores ( a mathematical impossibility), hospitals which fall below others will have their funds cut off.

And hospitals can turn around and blame their nursing staff for the problem, laying off whomever they choose. (Hmmm, I wonder who that will be?)

More and more hospitals will close, lowering the cost of medical care, since more and more people will go without.

And nursing wages will be forced down to every other blue collar worker's wages, just a couple of decades after the rest.

Conversation with a Non-Racist

I walked into the utility room and four of my co-workers, ER techs, were there.

Two were doubled over with laughter, one was sputtering, and the other had a pained, but game, smile on her face.

What was so funny? The one co-worker had walked into the room and announced loudly - "I'm tired of being the nigger around here". Which the two convulsed in laughter found wildly inappropriate, since the fourth co-worker was in the room, and she is African-American.

I expressed mild disapproval, and "D", the first one, explained, in her defense, "I didn't mean "nigger" in a bad way. I didn't mean Black! I meant that I'm treated like a pack mule around here".

My Black co-worker kept smiling, but it looked more strained. Luckily, her shift was over, and she got to go home.

Later, D came out to explain herself further to me. She again said that she didn't mean "nigger" in a bad way, not as a term for Blacks.

I said that she actually used it in a revealing way, that she was acknowledging that Black co-workers were treated with disrespect and asked to do a lot of work.

"No!" she said. "I've heard all that 'victim' stuff. I don't believe in that. That's bullshit."

I again pointed out that the way she used the term had justified the "victim" label.

She became agitated and told me to look up "nigger" in the dictionary. I would find that the dictionary definition of "nigger" is "low-life", not black person.

I refused. We don't have a dictionary in the ER, but I actually am quite sure that if the word is in the dictionary, it won't be defined as "low-life".

(Another of my co-workers, in 2008, informed me that Obama and Clinton, then running against each other in the primaries, had both voted in the Senate to make English a second language in the USA. I challenged that statement, and she told me she read it in the Congressional Record, and I should look it up. I didn't do it. Sometimes you just don't have to).

But here's the kicker. After we discussed it a little more, "D" said "I'm not racist. My best friend in high school was black. And I didn't like it when people insulted her. We're all just people".

Taxing my Patience

The farce being played out by Obama and his Merry Band of Cowardly Quislings, in which they pretend to be helplessly tied down by the Republicans, Present and Future, is too much for me to take.

How can people swallow this bullshit? Isn't it getting to be a bit much?

In order to give a pittance to SOME of the millions of unemployed Americans, they must fork over $700 billion to the very rich? No other choice? The Big Bad Republicans who are coming in January made them do it?

And Obama plays his stance as a populist standing for the little guy? This is why people call him a Republican in Democratic clothes - because he's shameless!

Let me go all Warren Buffet on these fools.

Tax me. Go ahead. Take my $300 a year, if it means restoring the Clinton era tax system.

Or, better yet, bring back the Eisenhower tax rates, when the top rate was 90% and corporations paid 49% of the taxes.

Or. Let's get real. People only care about high taxes because they are told that taxes are the reason that their incomes are dropping.

They can't do anything about their wages, or risk losing their jobs to China, or one of the unemployed. Every year insurance costs go up, but the choice is pay it, or lose it, so a lot of people pay it.

They still believe that they live in a democracy, so they feel that the only way to increase their income is by lowering taxes.

We are lied to without shame. Obama, who appointed a commission to "reduce the deficit" which conflated Social Security and the Federal Budget, then turned around the very next week and shamelessly added $700 billion to the Federal Deficit by making a deal with the ruling class to extend the tax cuts.

AND - they are selling it as a way to improve the economy!! The economy which has had said tax cuts for the last 10 years and has deteriorated to Great Depression depths!

Social Security is not part of the Federal Budget. You can look at your own paycheck, if you still have one, and see this.

There is Federal income tax withheld and there is FICA withheld.

The Federal tax is nominally "progressive" and the rich are supposed to pay more.

The Social Security tax is a flat tax, paid only by the poor, and their employers. Anyone making more then $106,800 doesn't pay ANY Social Security tax on the excess income. And on my paycheck, it's almost as much as the Federal tax, already.

So, here's an easy fix. Raise the damn federal withholding tax, as scheduled.

But make the SS tax cover everyone! As a flat tax, the way the right wingers want.

And stop taxing more than is paid out, as they've been doing since Ronald Reagan cut the income tax and raised the SS tax, using the excess to cover his expenses. They have been using money collected for Social Security not just to pay to the elderly and disabled, but to prop up the Federal budget, promising that the money would be repaid later.

Except that now that we're getting close to having to pay it back, they don't want to do it. So they lie and say that the money owed is not owed. So quit collecting it and loaning it! If a deadbeat announces that they aren't going to pay you back, why would you keep loaning them money?

If the Social Security tax were levied onto everyone, and it was only used to pay for current expenses, then we could LOWER the tax rate and still cover everyone, thereby increasing take home pay for workers, which is all we care about anyway!!

Simple solution, but the ruling class will not even let it be discussed.