The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog
Thoughts & Observations, on Sociological, Environmental, And Political Happenings (Best View = 1024x786)
posted by The Old Hippie @ 6:23 AM
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- 'Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages' - The Borg? “Resistance Is Futile.”
- “Everyone We Fight In Iraq Is Now ‘al-Qaida’” - Update II - Linked Here -
- Just a Reminder - The Full Movie -
- 1984 -
posted by The Old Hippie @ 9:55 PM
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Remember what our old friend Thomas Jefferson said:
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
posted by The Old Hippie @ 4:02 PM
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Dylan was correct, the times they are a-changin’ - But the changes are proving to be more dangerous, than interesting, so far. From long before the 2000 “selection/election,” we on the left have reported on, and predicted the many now realized dangers our nation, and the world, collectively faced from the ongoing take-over of our American Constitutional Democracy by the corporatists. I'm not into schadenfreude, or I-told-you-so, but damn it, every single dangerous prediction has come true, with most of the early predictions being realized faster, and more strongly, than when first predicted, e.g. global warming, and/or the destruction of the balance of powers, and/or the turn toward a theocratic corporate manipulation of manufactured fears, etc... These times are dangerous, more so each day. The following is reprised from earlier postings, as this info is not new at all - Is it?
 {-The Way Many Picture Me-} | We who banged our heads against the wall of denial took abuse as Chicken Littles, were laughed at as conspiracy nuts, called un-American for “questioning” the obvious dangers, ignored as if the danger was over-blown, derided as agitators, accused of being weak-minded or wrongheaded on the terrorist threat, or worse - mislead by liberal propaganda into being supporters of the terrorists, and against our troops. And now here we collectively are. . . The start of the summer of 2007. . . The ice is melting, faster. The oceans are rising, faster. The species, both plant and animal, are disappearing, faster. The whole of the planet's peoples are turning against us, faster. Corporate privatization of all nation's natural resources is happening, faster. America “allowed” America to become, and to this moment is still denying that America has become... |
An incorporated nation of corporate-supporters/collaborators, and “allowers,” to the point of planet wide destruction, faster. And due to the “denial of the allowing,” my America remains almost completely blind to our own self-destruction. There's always hope - Until reality is “allowed” to smack you in face, and says not anymore. . . Meanwhile the 1%'ers are still sneering at your denied “allowing” all the way to their banks in their protected enclaves. . . When the destruction reaches you, and you need a place to hide from it, do you think they will “allow” you in?
[ A Typical YouTube Video - You Know What To Do - ]
Mr. Olbermann is correct, ...betrayal... is the most accurate description, particularly within the reality of these dangerous times.
posted by The Old Hippie @ 3:50 AM
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We're Not The #1 Nation Anymore?!? [Except In Military Imperialism]
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We used to have the freest press. We now rank 52nd. And you allowed it. Didn't you?
We used to be the #1 fighter against military tyrannies. Now we are the #1 aggressively military imperial tyranny. Currently over 40% of our budget goes to the military-industrial corporations. We now spend more on military than all of the other nations on the planet combined. And increasingly more and more of “our” military needs are being out-sourced to private for profit, un-regulated, “Christian” corporate military forces, (mercenaries,) like Blackwater, et al, that are even being used within the United States - Like in New Orleans during the aftermath of Katrina.
We used to be the #1 defender of habeas corpus. We are now the only 1st or 2nd world nation that has done away with this law, that almost all nations have held sacred since the Magna Carta of 1215.
We used to be the #1 “land of the free.” We're now the most incarcerated nation in the total history of this planet, in raw numbers, and in percentage of the population, plus now most of “our” prisons are under the control of for profit private corporations, not the government.
We used to be a secular nation with a strong protection of religious freedoms. We now have become a “Christian” nation that actively and politically suppresses any other belief, exactly like in all other fundamentalist theocracies in history, including the Nationalist Party of the Nazis, and the current radical Islamists.
Our students used to rank #1 in all the areas of academics. We now rank at, or very near, the bottom of almost all other industrial nations in almost all areas, especially in science, mathematics, and reading.
We used to have a strong and involved middle class, and a strong and productive industrial base that supported that healthy middle class. But that has now all been destroyed by the manipulative greed of the corporations, their sycophants, their collaborators, and your allowing.
Depressing isn't it? But hey, don't fret. . . It was you who has allowed it all. Aren't you? In fact, you are still actively allowing it to continue, and you are still financially supporting the very corporations that are doing this to you, and to our nation. Aren't you? What a sad waste of potential. What a dangerous lack of courage. Have you never studied the history of what happens to collaborators, whether from sycophancy, or apathy, after an angry reactionary revolution by the citizens of all failed tyrannies...??? Maybe you should.
I think the coming 2008 national election may be our, and your, last chance.
posted by The Old Hippie @ 4:24 AM
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| - The Giant Federal Corporate Cookie Jar It's the other name for “our” Department of Homeland Security. - “Shafting US With A Smile” You will take it and like it, because you have no choice. - An Interview with Chalmers Johnson Requires Realplayer to listen to audio Length = Just over 53 minutes Originally broadcast at Black Ops Radio's website |  |
posted by The Old Hippie @ 3:43 AM
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- From Talk To Action: Separation of Church and State 101
- “Religion, Politics and the End of the World” - Harris & Hedges debate - Full video/audio
- THE EVENT -“Imagine if everything the Religious Right believes about the End Times is true, except the Rapture doesn't take them and the antichrist turns out to be their favorite politician . . .”
That's the story of The Event, a book by Mick LaSalle which will be serialized on the above
linked web site, one Episode per week, over the next few months.
posted by The Old Hippie @ 2:29 PM
1 comments
No Matter How You Think of Mr. Moore, "SiCKO" is “Truth Displayed”
Last Night my wife and I watched “SiCKO” at home. Other of Mr. Moore's past films have displayed America's “Truth,” but never less caustically, never has he allowed the “Truth” to be the main leading character so well, as he has in “SiCKO”. My wife and I decided that, even though we have now seen it, when it is “officially” released on June 29th, we will go buy tickets, (to add our little bit of financial support, because like thousands of others, we got it free online,) and then rather than watch it again - Maybe we'd go celebrate “Truth's Display” by taking ourselves out for a rare dinner date.
I am not a movie reviewer. - But - This film is extremely worthy. I strongly suggest you see it. And even to share it with as many of your fellow citizens, be they family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. . . as you can. I also ask - If, like me, you got this film free online... please, go buy a ticket for everyone in your house that sees it. It's the right thing to do.
posted by The Old Hippie @ 2:08 AM
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posted by The Old Hippie @ 4:51 AM
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Back in the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went on national radio and declared what the basic necessities were for the American people—a wage that can support a family, decent housing, the right to health care, a good education and future economic security.
Sound familiar today? It certainly would sound familiar to a majority of the American people. The struggle for livelihood, the struggles to escape poverty, calamitous health care bills, mounting debt, gouging rents and failing, crumbling schools continues year after year.
What’s that French saying? “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Things have changed for the rich and corporate, though. The rich have gotten richer. The talk now is about the super-rich and the hyper-rich. The richest 1 percent of people in this country has financial wealth equal to the combined financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent.
The big corporations are more avaricious than ever. The past decade’s corporate crime wave, dutifully reported in the major business media—newspapers and magazines—demonstrates how trillions of dollars were looted, or drained away, from tens of millions of small investors, pensioners and workers.
In FDR’s time, the CEOs of the top 300 corporations paid themselves about 12 times the average wage in their company. Now the “top greed” registers 400 to 500 times what the average workers eke out in a full year. Wal-Mart is an example of that sheer self-serving power at the top.
All this is occurring while the big companies deliver comparatively far less to the economic well-being of the American worker. The CEOs are otherwise preoccupied with figuring out how they can outsource more American jobs to China and India, how they can hollow out more communities and ship whole industries to those and other countries, many under authoritarian rule, that promise to keep the CEOs’ operations at costs close to serfdom.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the CEOs say it is necessary to flee our country—where they were nurtured to their size and profits—in order to keep up with global competition. But they never urge outsourcing their own CEO jobs to hardworking, bilingual executives in the Third World willing to work for less than one-tenth of the U.S. CEOs’ pay package.
Besides, who wrote the rules (North American Free Trade Agreement, World Trade Organization) that define the global competition? Big Business and its lawyer-lobbyists.
Uncle Sam has bent over to give Big Business what it has demanded in the past 25 years. Huge tax reductions, compared to the prosperous 1960s. Massive deregulation, or the abandonment of law and order against criminal, negligent or defrauding corporations. Your tax dollars were transferred in the form of subsidies, handouts, giveaways and bailouts to demanding, mismanaged or corrupt large businesses.
Still, it was not enough coddling to keep these giant companies from casting aside what allegiance they had to our country, its communities and people. The companies’ standard is to control them or quit them as these CEOs see fit.
When BusinessWeek magazine answered a resounding “yes” to its cover story in 2000, “Too Much Corporate Power?,” the editors were not kidding. They even wrote an editorial saying that “corporations should get out of politics.” I guess they meant that since corporations do not vote, and are not human beings, that they should not be honing in on what should be the exclusive domain of real people.
More and more conservatives believe that Big Business (Wall Street vs. Main Street) is out of control and stomping on conservative values. They don’t like corporate welfare, corporate eminent domain against the little guys, commercial invasion of privacies, WTO and NAFTA shredding our sovereignty, corporate crimes (Enron, Worldcom, etc.) or Big Government on behalf of Big Business empires around the world.
They are appalled by corporations directly selling bad things and violent programming to their children, whom these companies teach to nag parents.
It is time for the American people to get off the defense and take the offense against corporate power, the way it was done in the consumer, environmental and worker areas from 1965 to 1975 and beyond, and move to new frontiers of subordinating the big corporations to the rights and necessities of real people.
posted by The Old Hippie @ 4:59 AM
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“It, just as obviously, wasn't enough.” - Many of us saw the destruction of the “allowing.” We also saw the danger of the “allowing” being denied. Denying that it could be “allowed” to destroy our Constitutional Democracy. That it would be “allowed” to destroy the greatest Constitutional Democracy human history has experienced. But here we collectively are. . .
{-The Way Many Picture Me-} | We who banged our heads against the wall of denial took abuse as Chicken Littles, were laughed at as conspiracy nuts, called un-American for “questioning” the obvious dangers, ignored as if the danger was over-blown, derided as agitators, accused of being weak-minded or wrongheaded on the terrorist threat, or worse - mislead by liberal propaganda into being supporters of the terrorists, and against our troops. And now here we collectively are. . . The start of the summer of 2007. . . The ice is melting, faster. The oceans are rising, faster. The species, both plant and animal, are disappearing, faster. The whole of the planet's peoples are turning against us, faster. Corporate privatization of all nation's natural resources is happening, faster. America “allowed” America to become, and to this moment is still denying that America has become... |
An incorporated nation of corporate-supporters/collaborators, and “allowers,” to the point of planet wide destruction, faster. And due to the “denial of the allowing,” my America remains almost completely blind to our own self-destruction. There's always hope - Until reality is “allowed” to smack you in face, and says not anymore. . . Meanwhile the 1%'ers are still sneering at your denied “allowing” all the way to their banks in their protected enclaves. . . When the destruction reaches you, and you need a place to hide from it, do you think they will “allow” you in?
posted by The Old Hippie @ 3:26 AM
0 comments
Armed units from the private security firm Blackwater USA opened fire in Baghdad streets twice in two days last week. It triggered a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, a reminder that the war in Iraq may be remembered mostly in our history books for empowering and building America’s first modern mercenary army. There are an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors working in Iraq, although there are no official figures and some estimates run much higher. Security contractors are not counted as part of the coalition forces. When the number of private mercenary fighters is added to other civilian military “contractors” who carry out logistical support activities such as food preparation, the number rises to about 126,000.
“We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense,” said House defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D., Pa.). “How in the hell do you justify that?”
The privatization of war hands an incentive to American corporations, many with tremendous political clout, to keep us mired down in Iraq. But even more disturbing is the steady rise of this modern Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome was a paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse, and eventually plunged the Roman Republic into tyranny and despotism. Despotic movements need paramilitary forces that operate outside the law, forces that sow fear among potential opponents, and are capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors. And in the wrong hands, a Blackwater could well become that force.
American taxpayers have so far handed a staggering $4 billion to “armed security” companies in Iraq such as Blackwater, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.). Tens of billions more have been paid to companies that provide logistical support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) of the House Intelligence Committee estimates that 40 cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors. It is unlikely that any of these corporations will push for an early withdrawal. The profits are too lucrative.
Mercenary forces like Blackwater operate beyond civilian and military law. They are covered by a 2004 edict passed by American occupation authorities in Iraq that immunizes all civilian contractors in Iraq from prosecution.
Blackwater, barely a decade old, has migrated from Iraq to set up operations in the United States and nine other countries. It trains Afghan security forces and has established a base a few miles from the Iranian border. The huge contracts from the war - including $750 million from the State Department since 2004 - have allowed Blackwater to amass a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. Jeremy Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, points out that Blackwater has also constructed “the world’s largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina.” Blackwater also recently opened a facility in Illinois (”Blackwater North”) and, despite local opposition, is moving ahead with plans to build another huge training base near San Diego. The company recently announced it was creating a private intelligence branch called “Total Intelligence.”
Erik Prince, who founded and runs Blackwater, is a man who appears to have little time for the niceties of democracy. He has close ties with the radical Christian Right and the Bush White House. He champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is dishonest, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. But what he and his allies have built is a mercenary army, paid for with government money, which operates outside the law and without constitutional constraint.
Mercenary units are a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built rogue paramilitary forces. And the appearance of Blackwater fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, may be a grim taste of the future. In New Orleans Blackwater charged the government $240,000 a day.
” ‘It cannot happen here’ is always wrong,” the philosopher Karl Popper wrote. “A dictatorship can happen anywhere.”
The word contractor helps launder the fear and threat out of a more accurate term: “paramilitary force.” We’re not supposed to have such forces in the United States, but we now do. And if we have them, we have a potential threat to democracy. On U.S. soil, Blackwater so far has shown few signs of being an out-and-out rogue retainer army, though they looked the part in New Orleans. But were this country to become even a little less stable, outfits like Blackwater might see a heyday. If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown that triggers social unrest, or a series of environmental disasters, such paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could ruthlessly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to corporations, and to right-wing interests such as the Christian Right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets.
Chris Hedges (hedgesscoop@aol.com) is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He is author, mostly recently, of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”
posted by The Old Hippie @ 3:21 AM
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67, over-educated tree-hugging music-loving deadhead retired old-happy-hippie
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