I'll Be Back

I am heading to my beloved California...Cally-fornia, as the Governator calls it...and I will be back to this blog upon my return. There is so much to write about...the fake story about Iran requiring minority religious groups to wear a badge, more media failures, the poll re: Americans' desire to re-open the 9/11 investigation...losta stuff.


To coin a phrase..."I'll be back."

NSA Spying and Two Framing the Debate

The Bush Administration is spying. Spying big-time. Not just on foreign calls, not just on suspected terrorists. They are spying on us. All of us.

This story has been developing for years. It began with Iran-Contra luminary John Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program. The TIA was initiated shortly after 9/11 and it was designed to create a massive, cross-referenced database of all sorts of information--financial transactions, phone calls, bank accounts, internet searches and usage--compiled on Americans. Eventually, it would include medical records and, once the data was collected, genetic information. It was Big Brother on steroids.

Congress didn't like that...so TIA was officially "ended." Sort of.

It was broken up and farmed out to private companies in bits and pieces. It lives on.

Then there is TALON, the Pentagon's other spying program which has been monitoring radical terrorists like The American Friends Service Committee, a.k.a. the Quakers, PETA and various peace groups and organizations. This program included human intel...spies going to meetings and collecting license plate numbers, for example. Just imagine how much info on terrorists the Pentagon can get from a meeting of Quakers!

But the Pentagon did have a seemingly successful monitoring and data mining operation called Able Danger. That effort was actually tracking Mohammed Atta and a couple other hijackers before 9/11. But that program got derailed. Derailed before 9/11 and before it could stop Atta and his flying circus. Funny that.

So, when we hear that millions of phone records were handed over to the NSA...it shouldn't come as a surprise. They...the proverbial "THEY"...want to have as much information on us as they can.

Why? To find terrorists?

Perhaps.

But the obvious conclusion is that they want to know what we are up to. The whos and whys and whens and that help THEM understand the population they govern. The population they need to...want to...control and manipulate. To identify "enemies." Not necessarily of the terrorist kind, either. As Brian Ross of ABC just found out, they want to find out who the enemies of their polices are...the people fighting their exercise of control and power. They want to shut up dissenters. Within the government and, based on TALON, those within the civilian population who disagree with them. Perhaps "stop" is too harsh a word vis-à-vis the TALON program. More like...keep tabs. Keep tabs on the arguments made and activates of dissenters.

This could come in handy for targeted efforts to infiltrate, to harass...to create election strategies. To undermine dissent.

But when it came to actually stopping Atta? Well, Able Danger had the plug pulled. But not the domestic spying on ordinary citizens. That is something we need to keep doing. Something the Administration has lied about, and now tries to justify.

Polls and polls and more polls pop up on this NSA thing. People may be uncomfortable, but the cache of stopping another 9/11 has quite a few American accepting the previously unacceptable.

In fact, the lingering fear from 9/11 has allowed the Administration and their minions in Congress to push through quite a bit. A couple versions of the Patriot Act. The accepted use of torture and of holding American citizens, among others, indefinitely without trial. The invasion of a country that posed no threat. Massive budget deficits that are, essentially, a wealth transfer from taxpayers to Bush-Cheney-Rummy buddies in the Military-Industrial Complex.

All to protect us.

It's all about protection. Just like the spying is, most likely, so they can protect themselves from the growing dissatisfaction with the strange road they are driving us down...using $3 a gallon gas to fuel their other buddies in Saudi Arabia and the oil industry.

Just like the $5 million windfall Rummy made off of Tami-Flu...selling his stock in Gilead after the Administration, in and effort to protect us, ordered an orgy of Tami-flu purchases.

Catastrophes are big business. And fear of catastrophe means big bucks and a level of compliance from the governed.

So the governed look at the NSA spying revelations and, according to those aforementioned polls, say, "Hey, I’ve got nothing to hide. If they want to hear me talk to my friends and family...fine. So long as it stops another 9/11"

There is a certain logic in this line of thinking. What can THEY do with tedious information on people who are innocent of terrorism? The "I’ve got nothing to hide" argument is a strong one.

Except when it is reversed. When there is something to hide. When hiding leads to suspicion.

Which brings us to the release of the Pentagon-9/11 “video” yesterday. Video that, according to newsreaders, disproves "wild conspiracy theories" about 9/11. Video that isn’t actually video. It is two frames added to the three frames previously released from one of many video cameras that caught the attack on the Pentagon. It took years and lawsuits to give us those two frames. Two frames that show little more than we saw before.

So, I ask all those Americans comfortable with the NSA spying...what is the Administration hiding? Why not give us the complete video? Not frames, but video we can watch and render comprehensible with slow-motion. Video we know they have.

And what about the video from the Sheraton Hotel or the Pentagon’s gas station or from the Virginia Dept. of Transportation cameras that would’ve shown the plane flying over the highway before impact?

Why, if we have nothing to fear from letting Uncle Big Brother Sam monitor our calls, don’t we ask for the video on the same grounds?

The timing of this release indicates that they are fearful...the THEY...not the American people. Because people are asking questions. Because Charlie Sheen, despite his messy divorce, asked good questions. Because there are films like Loose Change using simple science, photos, anomalies and basic questions to illustrate that something is being hidden.

Something.

The spying and the failure of Able Danger and the obvious lies about WMDs--yes, lies...just do the reading and you'll see that the lying is clear--all these oddities have people scratching their heads about this Administration and their agenda. They seem to be running wild and telling us things that don’t pan out...don’t make sense. They seem like hiding…energy policies, who leaked Valerie Plame’s name, reclassifying declassified documents.

They keep on hiding.

And people are finally waking up to the fact that they are being manipulated.

They...yes, that THEY...have something to hide. They are afraid. That fear led them to release two frames...framing the debate and allowing media cowards to debunk, use epithets and, generally, obfuscate a clear problem. Fear has THEM monitoring millions of phone calls and tracking the activities of peace groups. Fear has them hiding what they are doing.

But don’t expect media cowards to ask the obvious question: What are THEY hiding?

O.I.L. aka Operation Iraqi Liberation

Here's a little vindication for the artificial scarcity thesis.

Today on Democracy Now!, investigative journalist Greg Palast discussed his new book Armed Madness.

Palast is the guy who, after fleeing to Britain in search of a chance to actually report news, broke the story of over 50,000 names purged from voter lists in Florida before the 2000 election. Names that "sounded Black," were in predominately Democrat districts...names with felony convictions in 2007, for example. A purge carried out by Choice Point...a firm hired by Katherine Harris.

Palast has been all over Hugo Chavez and the US-supported coup that failed shortly after the Bushies took office. Hugo’s got some oil, btw.

Palast also pointed out that the acronym for the invasion of Iraq, used by Ari Fleischer in his first invasion press conference, was Operation Iraqi Liberation--O.I.L. I love the Bushies’ sense of humor.

Now, in his new book, Palast gives us the document that proves the artificial scarcity thesis promoted in this blog. Here is an excerpt from today's interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?

GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it's about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn't go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn't get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There'll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.

And so, what I found, what I discovered that they’re very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq's oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It's quite wild. And it's all about a plan to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.

And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you’ll see in next week's Harper's coming out, which is basically an excerpt from the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper's, say, yeah, he's got more oil than Saudi Arabia.



Now, if you gotta understand the relationship between the Bush family and the Saudis, and the Kuwaitis, for that matter. The relationship between Enron and the California energy crisis. The ultimate two-fer that they and their corporate base are now enjoying...the use of war to both profiteer the defense budget and to profiteer the oil market. Plus, it generated a terrorist state where there wasn't one, amplifying the fear they use to preserve power and justify huge budget increases.

Palast also writes about the continued gaming of elections. The fact that Black voters are, from one election tot he next, finding more and more of their votes thrown out as "spoiled," or as votes unable to be counted. Add Diebold to that and, well, you’ve got a huge consolidation of control over the outcomes of elections.

Now, Palast had to go overseas to do the reporting he does. Reporting that British viewers see. But not us. When he had the Florida election scam by the short and curlies, he took it to CBS and they bought exclusive rights to the story. CBS then, just a few days before the story was to air, told him they would not run the story because it wasn't strong enough...they did not have enough verification. Because actual documents are not strong enough to make a good story. Because they had exclusive rights, the story died there. And the Bush Presidency lived on.

Welcome to our news bubble, my friends.

So, I take Palast's use of an actual document with a grain of salt. The document will be ignored by our mainstream media whores...much like the PNAC's stunning plan for Iraq and the world--Rebuilding America's Defenses.

For those of us crazy enough to ask questions and consider documents, Palast has given us a cool drink of water in a dry and thirsty land. A little refreshment in this choked-off bubble.

Thanks, Palast.

Artificial Scarcity, Gas Prices and You

Iraq is a big success.

Well, it is for US oil companies, defense companies, construction firms and Saudi Arabia.

A ripping good, record profit bonanza. Dividend heaven.

Which may account for the "investor" tax cut House and Senate GOPers just dreamed up. Don't want those profits getting into the wrong hands, after all.

But Iraq doesn't register in the debate about record profits for oil companies, or enter into the equation when babbling heads ponder the source of our gas pump woes.

It's Iraq.

And artificial scarcity.

Here's the deal.

When Bill "He's like a member of the Bush family" Clinton bombed Baghdad in 1998, he forced out the UN inspection team. What we now know comports with what some of those inspectors went on to tell us--that Iraq was nearly in compliance with UN resolutions regarding WMDs. In other words, Iraq didn't have WMDs.

Iraq had destroyed stockpiles for years, but the real kicker is the basic scientific fact that WMDs--biological and chemical--have a really short shelf life. So, anything the inspectors didn't get would be useless by 2000. By 1998, for that matter.

There's Iraq and Saddam, sitting on the verge of ending sanctions and sitting on the world's second largest oil reserves. Second only to Saudi Arabia.

Imagine if you will, a world where Saddam is free of those sanctions...with all that oil...with infrastructure contracts going to Russia and France...with the capability of rebuilding his country and flooding the oil market with a newly opened spigot. Imagine Iraq in charge of its own oil.

Imagine your gas at $1.15 per gallon.

Add to that Saddam's threat to trade oil in Euros. The same threat the Iranians are trying to make good on right now. Silly Iranians.

Imagine oil profits sinking and Saudi Arabia with a real threat to it's dominance of oil markets.

They did. Team Bush, the Saudis, oil companies...they foresaw lean times ahead if Saddam drove the price of oil down to $20 per barrel. Now, there are lean times and there are lean times. No starvation on the horizon for those folks, to be sure. But not the flood of cash they are now seeing. Not even close.

So why did we go into Iraq? It’s money. And in our fake free market...it's fake, believe me...artificial scarcity is the golden goose. The destabilization of Iraq, which is producing less oil now than it did throughout the sanctions, was goal number one of the invasion. Oil rockets up in price. Profits follow. Because the price of getting that oil to market hasn't changed. The supply has been choked and the psychology of the market has been manipulated. Much like the bellicose talk about Iran is doing now. A double whammy for oil prices.

Oil execs know this is a win-win. They get more profits per barrel, and they lengthen the life of the resource. Get that last part? They take a resource that most say is limited--lasting until 2040, or earlier or later, depending on the numbers--and they choke off production. Rather than Iraq, for example, flooding the market and expending their oil for $20 per barrel and, therefore, using it up at a steady rate...they oil stays in the ground and gets to market over a longer period of time at a much higher rate of return.

Simple, pure economics. Artificial scarcity.

Now, when you look at who got us involved in this Iraq bullshit it's obvious there is a cui bono, or "who benefits," question that is easy to answer. Hello...it's oil companies, Saudis, construction companies. Simple, simple, simple.

But we hear about ANWR, refining capacity, the huge American appetite for oil. We hear about China sucking up oil.

Not Iraq.

Remember when we were told Iraq's oil would pay for our invasion, for their rebuilding...remember that?

What a joke. What a lie.

They knew it wouldn't work that way. They didn't want it to work that way. This is what they wanted. An Iraq in turmoil. Oil markets spooked. Saudis getting rich. Oil companies getting rich. A permanent military presence in Iraq. Once the country is poisoned with depleted uranium, the population is in tatters and the country in a long, seething civil war...big oil can begin to extract the oil and sell it at $70, $90, or even $100 per barrel.

But that comes later.

When China is desperate for oil to make us plastic shit we buy at Wal-Mart with credit floated by their banks...when China is desperate enough to pay those massive prices.

And when we are desperate here at home. When any last shot at the middle-class American dream is eaten up by the consumption culture we've bought into...and we pour those ephemeral dreams into the gas tank to fill up our must-have vehicles. Vehicles we need to get to work to earn money to pay the monthly minimum on our credit cards, to pay those rising mortgage rates...to drive to Wal-Mart to buy more plastic shit.

Iraq is the linchpin of the long-term strategy of sucking the life and money out of the middle class. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but civil war is good. Divided populations are good. Hey, it worked for the Romans.

The Iraqis will never be able to manage their oil like, say, the Venezuelans. Or the way the Iranians wanted to under Mossadeq...until we overthrew him and put the Shah in power.

That oil belongs to the rich. To the investor class. To those who will get yet more tax cuts on their dividends. Not to those who provide the children and the dollars to fund their expeditions into the brave new world of geopolitics and petropolitics. We get artificial scarcity, the daily struggle to make ends meet and the sort of power that is afforded to those without the money to buy influence.

In other words…not much.

It works. It worked in California. Enron and other energy corporations screwed the market, created artificial scarcity and shut down electricity generation. The country gasped at the rolling blackouts. Cheney got his Energy Commission. Corporations got their handouts and deregulation. And now California has power plants that they don’t need. But construction companies sure made out. And we got the rationale for the Bush-Cheney energy policy. A policy of profiteering.

But keep on thinking it's about refining capacity. Even though, in this supposed free market, it’s up to oil companies to build those refineries...not taxpayers. Why haven’t they built them? Hmmm. Maybe it's artificial scarcity?

Keep thinking we need hybrids. Even though Honda made a gas-only car in the mid-80s...the CRX HF...that got 60 miles per gallon. More than most hybrids get today. Artificial scarcity, perhaps?

Keep thinking it's about ANWR. Even though every oil analyst knows that any oil pulled from that reserve will be shipped to Asia, not to the domestic market. Artificial scarcity?

You see, we don't have a free market. We have capitalism. And capitalism is run by a small oligarchy that uses the system, uses government, to monopolize and profiteer. They manipulate the market. They get their cronies and agents elected. They get taxpayers to fund resource grabs and to undercut their own power as consumers. They use artificial scarcity to increase their profits which, in turn, increases their power by giving them more money to buy political influence.

When you go to the pump and bitch about the high price of gas, just think about the high price paid by tens of thousands of Iraqis...many of them children...who’ve died to keep those prices high. Think about the price paid by thousands of soldiers...their lives and their limbs...to keep those prices high.

Think about a power system that has the gall to try to extend tax cuts to the investors who are making money hand over fist because of artificial scarcity.

Think, for Christ's Sake.

Colbert Exposed the Whores of Babylon

Revelations 17:13
These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

Last Saturday a one-man vice squad rolled into town and, using a killer set of elegantly written jokes, exposed the DC Media Scrum for what it is...a bunch of whores.

The Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. Washington DC, thrives on intellectual, ethical and financial prostitution. The power elites pimp out their whores--politicians, lobbyists and, woefully, journalists. We are expected to buy their services. Most of us do get screwed, after all. And we certainly pay for their "services" with copious amounts of taxes, gas prices and other forms of consumerism.

But the vast majority of Americans have no idea of how incestuous, how totally whored-out the media is. They watch, read and listen...hoping against hope that journalism happens. Will happen. That they'll get some semblance of the truth. That the "journalists" actually give a damn.

Enter Stephen Colbert. The Mock O'Reilly, the faux uber-journalist...the comedic babbling head of Babylon. Well, he's based in NY...but you know what I mean.

Colbert was invited to DC's annual clusterfuck...the White House Correspondents' Dinner. A special event at which "the covered" and those "who should be covering them" get together and glad-hand, share cocktails, suck up and back-slap. A night when DC can be Hollywood...glammed out and ready go down on each other on their way up.

It's a night the Prezzie and the Pressies try to laugh at themselves. Good natured ribbing. Like W's routine a couple years ago about looking for WMD under a desk in the Oval Office. You know, while ten of thousands are dying. Funny stuff, that.

It's usually a tame affair. They invite a celeb to come and toss some soft jibes...you know...jokes that caress their egos with the touch of importance.

But this year they got Colbert. And Colbert's mock media-whore persona was a perfect foil, an ironically appropriate messenger...an unsullied voice speaking truth in one blistering joke after another. Ripping, funny, biting comedic genius.

It was a truly funny set. Just on the merits of comedy writing. He killed. Because good comedy must be based on an element of truth. It's the bitter truth at the center of a good joke that makes that joke so damn funny.

And Colbert had losta truth to work with.

But all that truth and comedy has caused a stir. The media has blacked out his appearance, not mentioning it or showing it on television, preferring to show W and his impersonator. No mention of the seethe on W face while Colbert hammered him.

Meanwhile, print journalism is in an uproar. Journalists and opinionistas are ranting and raving about Colbert...his rudeness, his lack of graciousness...his supposed lack of humor. That last one is the most specious of the arguments. Colbert was damn funny.

You see, it wasn't just that Colbert attacked a sitting Prezzie with his rapier wit, but Colbert also skewered the press. The supine and facile bunch of whores who suck face with any official source who can make their career. Who get in bed with the power elite and do what it takes to preserve their access...to stenographic interviews, to self-congratulatory dinner parties...to the high-life of perceived importance that makes America journalism the joke that it is.

The joke that Colbert told over and over again all night long.

But it hasn't been covered in the mainstream media...they won't show the jokes...and they are trying to bury him. Because they are the real whores...all Jeff Gannons of one sort or another. They care far more about keeping their status and their paychecks and their kids in elite private schools than a vague, quaint ideal of journalism. They do, however, like to prostitute the idea that they are journalists. Meanwhile, they serve the corporate pimps who keep them on the streets.

Colbert's shtick encapsulates all that is wrong with media whores. His faux attack on "truthiness" and on the "well-known liberal bias" of reality...and his generous heaps of sycophantic praise for the Administration. Colbert's shtick mocked the utter and complete lack of real reporting by the White House Correspondents' and the vast majority of DC's media whores.

And they cannot stand to see themselves for what they are...on the one night they all get together to celebrate the very sense of importance and entitlement that makes them the whores that they are. Colbert's media whore persona offers Americans far more "truth" that they get in a month's worth of news from the crowd se faced that night.

So, they've come together to banish Colbert into the margin, to minimize and trivialize and criticize. Because they want to keep turning their tricks. Because they've been shamed.

Not surprisingly, the internet is buzzing with praise for Colbert. People, despite the media's best efforts, realize that they've been getting screwed for years and they are responding to Colbert's appearance. Because he was funny. Because he was ballsy and bold in front of a bunch of cowards. Because he was right.