[Peace-discuss] Common opinions - basis for a new politics?

[E.Wayne Johnson]

I liked this article and agree fully with items 2-7, 9 and 10.

I was in China during the election of 2000, and would have stayed there
for sure if Gore had won.  It was one of my contingency points.  I hated
Clinton's Imperialism and GWBush's humble foreign policy sounded good to me.
I didnt like the elder Bush but then  thought that the younger Bush would 
not
be a continuation of Clintonian Wars abroad.  So much for that.

On item 2 I am presently fully convinced that not only did the US government 
know about the 9/11
attack, but there was massive collusion and orchestration which included the 
detonation of explosive and
incendiary devices to effect the catastrophic demolition of the buildings. 
I have rather slowly come to this conclusion.
Explanations other than "9/11 was an Inside Job" might be crazy conspiracy 
theories.

Regarding item 8, there has not been a free market in the US for a long 
time.  I agree that Americans are deranged when not simply asleep.  Most 
Americans seem to be weak Zombies.  Alice says that weak Zombies fall down. 
That seems descriptive enough.











----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:05 AM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Common opinions - basis for a new politics?


> Published on Friday, January 1, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
> The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade
> by Robert Freeman
>
> The media are awash with talking heads bloviating about the top stories of 
> the last decade.  The wired-in society.  The growth of organic food.  The 
> new frugality.  This is the ritual that reveals their true function in the 
> culture: pacification.  It's their way of signaling the masses that Bigger 
> Thinkers are looking after things, so go back to your Wii or Survivor or 
> Facebook reveries.
>
> The amazing thing is how little is ever mentioned about the stories that 
> really mattered, those that affected the very nature of our society, its 
> institutions, and the relation of the people to their state and society.
>
> Those stories paint a picture of danger, of a people who have lost control 
> of their government and the corporations that own it.  But you'll hear 
> nary a word about such difficult truths from any storyteller in the 
> conventional media.
>
> So here, in no particular order, are my Top Ten Stories of the Naughties, 
> the ones that really matter.
>
> [1] The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election.  This 
> isn't even a historical controversy anymore.  Al Gore won the national 
> popular vote by 570,000.  And we now know he would have won the Florida 
> vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme 
> Court.  This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat, so it's 
> understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right" kind of circles.
>
> [2] Bush knew of 9/11 long before it actually happened.  Three years 
> before Bush took office, the neo-cons' Project For a New American Century 
> called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize the nation into a war to 
> seize Middle East oil.  And even before the event itself, 
> Bush-as-president was warned dozens of times of the imminent attack, the 
> most notorious being the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing 
> titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S".  Amazingly nothing was 
> done to prevent the attack.  But even less is it advertised that Bush 
> knew.
>
> [3] Iraq was all premised on lies, yet we're still there.  Saddam Hussein 
> wasn't pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction.  He wasn't involved in 9/11. 
> He wasn't engaged with Al Qaeda.  As with the 2000 election hijacking, we 
> know all these things.  And we know they were false at the time they were 
> proffered.  Yet, there we are, with no intent to leave, our very presence 
> spitting in the face of International Law and the international community 
> we so unctuously pretend to respect.
>
> [4] The Global War on Terror.  Or more specifically, the ease with which 
> the "GWOT" has replaced the Cold War as the justification for the 
> ever-increasing militarization of society.  What happened to the post-Cold 
> War "Peace Dividend"? The U.S continues to spend more on the military than 
> all the rest of the world combined.  It continues to maintain over 700 
> military bases around the world. And it continues to manufacture excuses 
> for foreign interventions whenever weapons makers and military logistics 
> companies need more profits — which is forever.
>
> [5] The fact that 2/3 of all economic growth went to top 1%.  John 
> Kennedy's social contract had a rising tide lifting all boats.  But over 
> the last decade 2/3 of all economic growth has gone to the top 1% of 
> income earners.  Meanwhile the middle class has suffered a $13 trillion 
> writedown in wealth as a result of the housing collapse.  The banking 
> bailout and the health care "reform" debate showed as never before the 
> extent to which corporations have captured government and use it to 
> redirect national wealth to themselves and their owners.
>
> [6] The Neo-Feudalization of the American economy.  The top 1% of wealth 
> holders own 41% of all the assets in the country while the bottom 40% own 
> absolutely nothing.  Meanwhile, workers are saddled with $12 trillion of 
> national debt, an effective indentured servitude that will bind them to 
> their corporate masters for the rest of their lives.  This is the working 
> definition of feudalism, where the rich own everything and everybody else 
> has nothing but their proffered labor and their obligations to their 
> masters.  The Hapsburgs, the Tudors, and the Bourbons would be jealous.
>
> [7] The surrender of civil liberties.  Despite the Fourth Amendment 
> supposedly protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, the 
> government can now read your email and listen to your phone calls without 
> any probable cause.  The Obama administration has gone to court to prevent 
> the re-institution of Habeas Corpus, suspended during the Bush 
> administration.  We are much less free, much less protected from 
> brutalization by our own government than we were just ten years ago.
>
> [8] The failure of "the free market" to sustain prosperity.  The "free 
> market" has long been an ideological dodge used to resist real government 
> regulation of the economy.  Still, the ideal was supposed to deliver 
> prosperity in a stable, sustainable matter.  Now we have the greatest 
> global economic collapse since the Great Depression, with the government 
> transferring $11 trillion to the banks to cover their sociopathically 
> greedy bets that went bust.  All in the name of deregulation, with future 
> regulation vigorously resisted.  Is this a deranged country or what?
>
> [9] The collapse of the media.  We once imagined it would guard the hen 
> house. Yet that was an anomaly, a freak event around Vietnam and Watergate 
> when it slipped its leash.  Since then, sixty independent media outlets 
> have consolidated into five, all retailing the ideology of the powerful, 
> the perpetrators, laundering their lies, covering up the truth, and 
> harassing the truth tellers.  In every story mentioned above, the 
> mainstream media have worked to ensure that the people didn't know the 
> truth about the forfeiture of their government, their wealth, their 
> security, and their rights.
>
> [10] The meaninglessness of elections.  This is the most embittering 
> revelation of all.  Despite the greatest electoral majority since Johnson 
> crushed Goldwater in '64, Barrack Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. 
> In every case where he had the opportunity to confront power — in 
> financial bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military 
> spending, utilities and global warming, national surveillance — Obama has 
> sided with the rich and powerful against the interests of the American 
> people.  He has probably engendered more cynicism, more disaffection with 
> government than any president since Richard Nixon.  It will deal a 
> staggering blow to the hopes of mobilizing masses of people again for a 
> real takeback of government.  And he's not even one year into it.
>
> History paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The 
> Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the 
> time when Americans Lost Their Country.  It was the decade when all the 
> institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the 
> courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact betrayed 
> them. It will forever more be a different country.
>
> But not just yet.  Did I tell you about the big move to locally-grown 
> produce?
>
> [Robert Freeman writes on history, economics, and education. Email to: 
> robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com.]
>
> Comment
>
> SeriousCitizen January 2nd, 2010 9:33 am:
>
> This essay has a dramatic US-centric perspective. This essay essentially 
> says that we Americans have been too lazy or too stupid to control our own 
> institutions, and therefore we feel "betrayed" and are victims. The top 
> ten stories of the decade should include things like:
>
> 1) We Americans killed one million Iraqis for no real reason and made four 
> million into refugees.
>
> 2) We Americans bombed and invaded Afghanistan because we refused to 
> accept the Taliban government's offers to extradite Osama bin Laden.
>
> 3) We Americans refused to curb our carbon consumption in accord with the 
> world community's agreement in the Kyoto Accord, and now millions of poor 
> people in other parts of the planet will starve or will find their 
> communities going underwater.
>
> 4) We Americans made junk mortgage bonds, gave them AAA+ ratings, and sold 
> them all over the world.
>
> 5) We Americans gave Israel the money and illegal weapons (like white 
> phosphorus and tungsten bombs) to wage war against an impoverished and 
> trapped population in Gaza, most of whom are children under age 15.
>
> 6) We Americans violated the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners 
> because we had scared ourselves with our own propaganda.
>
> 7) We Americans allowed our own cities to be attacked on Sept. 11 ... in 
> order to scare ourselves into waging war on the world and destroying our 
> own freedoms. This kind of list can go on and on. If we Americans do not 
> somehow control our own institutions and make them be lawful, honest, and 
> just, then we hurt and kill millions of people. We are not the victims of 
> our institutions' failings, we are the cause of our institutions' 
> failings.
>
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/01-0
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