Saturday, November 25, 2017

Bill Clinton, Sexual Predator

 He had a history of abusing women stretching back to his Arkansas days. He grabbed Kathleen Willey by the breasts and crotch and forced her hand onto his genitals. He summoned Paula Jones to his hotel room, dropped his pants, and demanded that she kiss his penis. This is the man Gloria Steinem claimed was just making clumsy "passes" at women.

In 1995 he turned policy matters over to former Jesse Helms adviser Dick Morris, assigning him additional duty as the presidential pimp. After that, the horny and hypocritical duo passed many pleasant days indulging their lust at public expense while refining torture of the poor. "The Monster," Morris called Clinton while consorting with his prostitute. "The creep," she said of Morris, escaping for a sterilizing bath.

In the banana republic of 1990s Washington, bodyguards delivered women to Bill Clinton, who claimed the Oval Office as his "private" sanctuary at the same time as he auctioned off the Lincoln Bedroom as a six-figure overnight flophouse for fat cat donors. While speaking to teens of the importance of chastity and personal responsibility, he bullied his sexual victims into silence, employing semi-official detectives to dig up blackmail data to be used in extracting false testimony absolving him of responsibility for his predations. Kathleeen Willey found her car tires punctured and a stranger inquiring after her children by name. "Don't you get the message?" the man asked.

Cabinet members and other subordinates were pressed into service to deliver plausible deniability and exculpatory lies. Lawyers famous for devising loopholes for rich thugs made sure the chronic deceit was all "legally accurate."

When all else failed, Clinton eagerly slandered women who tried to get the truth out. He dismissed Gennifer Flowers as a lying gold digger. He insinuated that Paula Jones was a common slut who might secretly have enjoyed a sleazy encounter with him. He discarded Kathleeen Willey's accusation on the basis that, "It's ludicrous to think I would come on to a small-breasted woman." He portrayed Monica Lewinsky as a stalker, and would no doubt have smeared her far dirtier had she not retained the presidential seal on her most famous dress.

An Arkansas nursing-home supervisor (Juanita Broaddrick) claimed Clinton raped her in 1978. Her story checked out. The Great Dissembler, who "tried" marijuana without inhaling it, failed to offer the obvious excuse: She was asking for it, but I didn't ejaculate. 

Sources:

Christopher Hitchens, No One Left To Lie To, (Verso, 1999)

Bill Clinton: "A Reckoning," The Atlantic, November 13, 2017

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Study Guide," the Progressive, November, 1998

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Weapons of Mass Distraction Get More Destructive

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media." -Noam Chomsky  




The daily attacks on american consciousness – not an oxymoron if you continue hoping for the best while preparing for the worst – via the treacherous fairy tales and homicidal gossip sold as news, not only continue unabated but get worse. If that’s possible.

The American Un-Intelligence community, according to our consciousness controllers at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Marvel Comics, has proved that Putin and the evil Russians interfered with our cherished democracy in which the majority of eligible voters never vote. Their department of mental constipation has done this by indulging in estimates of how many people might have viewed possible ads run by suspected Russians. These may have made totally absurd claims about America, like unarmed black men being killed by the police. Who could believe such nonsense? And they back up their charges of Russian evil-doing in our sacred markets based on revelations from paid political-academic spin doctors, all not only instantly accepted but spread far and wide by our corporate media mind managers. Who could doubt the story? Well, maybe little children not yet brain dead as a result of lifetimes of social conditioning based on psychocratic theology about free markets and individual egos fed by mind numbing drugs and commercial therapy.

The only distraction from this fable is the almost daily parade of celebrity and political figures confessing to sexual abuses committed many years before but owing to market legal and moral forces kept secret until election dates, film openings and other entertainment spectacles were on the agenda. The righteous anti-commies of the past have been replaced by righteous anti-rationalists of the present and conservative know-nothing-ism is now balanced by liberal no-thinking-ism.

As always, you have to laugh to keep from crying, fearing native or foreign terrorist attack and wondering if we might have been better off when we were hunting meat and gathering veggies in nature instead of hunting  parking and gathering commodities at the mall. Sometimes the only solid thing we have is the plastic we use to pay for those commodities, even if the alleged dollars we spend don’t really exist and are only electronic blips with slightly more material foundation than the angels on a head of a pin or the pinheads we still accept as rulers because Russians have taken our fictional democracy away. Of course. Profitable films and fantasies to the contrary, the one thing we Americans need not fear is invasion by zombies. They feed on brains.



Monday, November 13, 2017

Bulletin From The Corporate Fake News Internet Toilet



Jesus, Belatedly, Charged With Sexual Assault


World famous feminist lawyer Gloria Allbucks revealed shocking details contained in previously unread biblical blogs from the Dead Ocean Scrolls which show that Mary Magdalene suffered outrageous sexual abuse from Jesus but was too frightened of his power to say anything at the time.
 
“Now that times have changed and brave people are coming forward, we can speak out for her and finally show the world what really went on in the days before TV, the internet, and lucrative litigation” said Allbucks, whose press conference was attended by hundreds of elected officials, dozens of Papparazzi, several former clergy, and six members of Girl Scouts of America who had come to the wrong press conference.

Calls for re-crucifixion came from Atheists, Agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Big Brothers of the Rich, while many devout Christians asked for restraint and listening to both sides before rushing to judgment. Informed that both sides had been dead for thousands of years, they urged prayer and that Catholics conduct a second collection for all the suffering children in America’s charter schools.

Allbucks said she was dropping her case against statue defilers for their vicious cruelty to animals in removing bird toilets from public places and would put the full force of her skill into this case to finally reveal the untold story of a sexist criminal who fooled the world for far too long.

“When this case is over, things will never be the same for men,  for women, and for all the other sexes”, she said.


Several of the elected officials were later accused of sexually molesting the Girl Scouts in attendance and another lawsuit is expected.
Ian56 tweeted
Why are all the fake liberals leaving out Bill Clinton in their lists of rapists & sexual abusers?
Why are they leaving out Hillary Clinton as a Rape Enabler?

Sweet Land of Liberty

"Mass shootings can happen anywhere, at any time. When you're out in public, before settling into your seat or spot, ask yourself, if there's an attack, what will I do? At theaters and concerts, consider choosing seats on the aisle and close to exits. At restaurants, sit with your back to the wall and face the entrance. Before you relax, identify your escape routes and exit points, including turnstiles, doors, scalable fences, and accessible windows. Get out of the kill zone. It's your best option."

---Security expert Ed Hinman in WashingtonPost.com

Friday, November 10, 2017

Support Our Vets: Promote Social Revolution

If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
                                  -----William Blum

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, which used to be called Armistice Day, and differs from Memorial Day who knows exactly how. All we are supposed to know is that military service makes one a national hero, not (as used to be the case) for having demonstrated courage on the battlefield, but merely for signing up. We are well into the era of grade inflation, and as public school officials like to say, "everyone is above average."

Whatever respect is owed the martial virtues, it is not clear how much longer the human race can survive the era of super-patriotism. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock is set at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest we have been to self-inflicted doom since the Reagan administration installed first-strike Pershing missiles in Germany (1982) while babbling about "winnable" nuclear war.

Though it is only by sheer blind luck that military brinksmanship has not terminated the human race, we are still encouraged to believe (especially on Veterans Day) that we should be grateful to the military for defending "our freedoms" around the world. The suggestion juxtaposes itself incongruously to the realities of the "war on terror" era: preventive detention, institutionalized torture, the "right" of the president to kill American citizens without due process of law, universal snooping and data mining by corporate behemoths and the national security state. True, this is no fault of U.S. soldiers, but it is hardly sensible to congratulate the military for defending our freedoms when they are constantly under attack by the very national security state that claims to be protecting them.

Furthermore, well prior to the launching of the "war on terror" it was impossible to believe that Washington's endless interventions and invasions had much to do with defending our precious Constitutional freedoms. Just how did the 1983 invasion of Grenada, for example, shore up our Bill of Rights? 

In the name of patriotism we have turned a small al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan into a world-wide terrorist menace, although death tolls from its murderous attacks in the "homeland" are frequently eclipsed by random sociopaths mowing down dozens of people in church, at concerts and movies, or on school grounds. But surely ISIS stands a good chance of winning our permanent attention with a carefully planned WMD attack in a U.S. city. After all, it has been more than a generation since journalist Robert Fisk discovered that two themes were dominating titles in the bookshops of Algiers: fanatic religious tracts and nuclear, chemical, and biological engineering books. (Doesn't anyone read for pleasure anymore?)

Veterans Day often tends to go with "We're Number One" nostalgia, though it won't do to mention that the U.S. is first in the world in per capita prison population, financial bailouts for corporate looters, homicide and death by guns, and massive imperial bloodshed. Such dismally routine features of American life cannot be said to embody love of country any more than the many schools that are falling apart, public hospitals that are closing down, and essential public services that are being cut so plutocrats can have yet another huge tax cut. Thus, we avert our gaze and praise our soldiers, whose job it is to protect U.S. corporate "interests," not the United States itself.

These perverted values obliterate our capacity for basic moral judgment. For example, when the USSR basketball team beat the USA team at the 1988 Olympics, political scientist Michael Parenti reminds us, the American media treated it as though it were an "end to civilization as we know it." In post-game commentaries NBC lamented how the Americans had been seriously handicapped by lack of practice time and the loss of a key player, and thus had been unable to overcome the "the Soviet onslaught." The evil Communists "never let up their attack" and were a "relentless juggernaut." "The impression left," comments Parenti drily, "was that the Americans were facing the Red Army rather than another basketball team." 

By 1992, the U.S. had arranged for professionals to play in the Olympics, so Americans were able to delight in NBA all-stars slaughtering a ragged team from Zaire, composed of kids who had to work for a living and barely raised enough money to get to the games, and who had only begun to practice together a few months before the Olympics began. In short, a heavily tilted playing field allowed an orgy of jingoism to masquerade as normal pride in legitimate national achievements. It wasn't the only time.

There are many fine men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces, motivated by a genuine desire to give their lives if necessary to defend their country. Unfortunately, the mission of the U.S. armed forces is not to defend the country, but to protect and expand the far-flung empire. The U.S. presides over an armed planetary force vastly beyond the capacities of any other empire in history. This includes over half a million troops stationed at over 700 military bases around the world, and many more within the 50 states, including enormous recent constructions in Central Asia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Colombia. It boasts an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads, a small fraction of which could eliminate human civilization, plus a naval strike force possessed of more tonnage and firepower than the rest of the world's navies combined, patrolling every ocean and stopping on every continent. It also has, or will soon develop, space vehicles with capacity to strike both terrestrial and outer space targets, and send reconnaissance and attack drones back into the atmosphere. This is in defense of an international network of client states (satellites is the more blunt term) that generates huge profits for a plutocratic minority at direct social cost to the world majority.

Meanwhile, the U.S. troops that are constantly praised as "heroes" are treated rather poorly. Since 2001, over six thousand of them have died in Afghanistan and Iraq for no legitimate purpose, with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled in fulfillment of an apparently endless mission that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis as well. Suicide rates among U.S. veterans of these two wars dramatically exceed the corresponding rate for the rest of the U.S. population, with mental issues exceeding physical injuries as the cause of veteran hospital admissions. And on any given night in the USA tens of thousands of homeless veterans are found living on the streets.

In short, our nation is bled to feed the imperial vanity of our rulers. "Support our troops" is a cynical veneer designed to disguise a shameless policy of "cut their benefits."



Sources:
Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism, (City Lights, 2004)
Michael Parenti, The Face of Imperialism, (Paradign Publishers, 2011)


Tuesday, November 7, 2017

1882: New York City

You Too Can Succeed In Life

"The happiness road no longer leads only to the prairies of the West. Now, it is also the day of the big cities. The whistle of the train, magic flute, awakens youth from its rustic drowsiness and invites it to join the new paradises of cement and steel. Any ragged orphan, promise the siren voices, can become a prosperous businessman if he works hard and lives virtuously in the offices and factories of the giant buildings.

"A writer, Horatio Alger, sells these illusions by the millions of copies. Alger is more famous than Shakespeare and his novels have a bigger circulation than the Bible. His readers and his characters, tame wage earners, have not stopped running since they got off the trains or transatlantic ships. In reality, the track is reserved for a handful of business athletes, but North American society massively consumes the fantasy of free competition, and even cripples dream of winning races."

-----Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 2, Faces and Masks, p. 221

Friday, November 3, 2017

Immigrants, Immigration, Personal Identities and Social Unconsciousness




The latest tragedy of innocent deaths caused by – depending on level of consciousness control – a maniac, a terrorist, an immigrant terrorist maniac or a maniacal terrorist immigrant, invites more word game therapy by avoiding the substance of a political economic problem. The fact that Trump has supported ending a policy which allows immigrants to enter the country through a lottery doesn’t turn criticism of that capital enriching social policy into a bigoted or anti-human rights position. The romanticized legends and myths about immigrants stand in terrible contrast to the actual history of immigration in America; the historic reality of people dumped on foreign shores for their economic use as cheap labor transformed into heroic tales of them rising from street peddlers to bank owners. In fact, had the latest maniac-terrorist not been allowed to enter this country under this lottery program, those he murdered might still be alive. Unless they turned out to be among the more than 100 slain everyday on our streets and roadways in the American market for private transit profits at public loss of life. Of course, most of those 100 die in accidents while the eight in New York were murdered. But as in every case of maniacal immigrant terrorism or terroristic native born maniacalism, the political economics and foreign policy that are the underlying cause are reduced to charges and counter charges of bigotry, hate crimes, anti-diversity and more psychobabble avoiding confrontation with that primary cause.

Why do some folks hate us so much they would crash planes into buildings, blow up or gun down people on holiday, and crash vehicles into innocent citizens just taking a stroll? Could it have something to do with our foreign policy which has been destroying nations and slaughtering people in the Middle East for nearly 17 years  - most recently - because they are terrorists acting in revenge for the policy which has been slaughtering and destroying them since long before? In fact, the one thing most Middle East people can agree on whether religious, agnostic, sectarian, diplomatic or every day folk, is that Palestinians have been abused and mistreated by the west since long before 1948, though things got much worse since then and are at the root of all the present problems presented as somehow arising out of a vacuum labeled “islamic terrorism”.

Rather than focus on that, we are manipulated into accepting “refugees” from places we have destroyed or are still in process of destroying, and calling one another names for being in favor or opposed to such sanctuaries provided, instead of ending our vicious, thoughtless, anti-human policies of treating an entire portion of humanity as lower life forms until our master race of self chosen people rulers convince us to take pity on some of their pain, inflicted by us.

This is not a problem to be solved by taking meds or seeing a therapist, but by radical transformation of a political economic system that is the root cause of the problem. Which is why we are made to focus on individual identity groups and minorities other than the one most important, which is global capitalist billionaires and their professional lackeys who are not just a “deep state” in america but operate as such for the entire world.

 The empty words, platitudes and sincere if useless pronouncements from gas-bags after each of these horrors is to be expected, but serious actions are what is needed to end the horror inflicted on innocent americans by a relatively tiny population –the terrorists - in response to the awesome murders and destruction visited upon a great mass of humanity by a relatively small population from here – the military - under the control of the smallest population of all – our ruling class rich. Blaming the ongoing slaughters in the Middle East on the military is as dumb as blaming billions of Muslims for the retaliatory blood letting of a minority force of relative amateurs at mass murder. Still, we call them “terrorists”, while our destruction of nations, their leaders and hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis and Palestinians are rationalized to be supporting democracy, peace, fried chicken, abortion on demand, free circumcision, or whatever other lie that can be safely forced into the minds of innocent people who believe too much of what authority tells them.

When that belief changes to anger at having been lied to for so long, and people are presented with no more alternative than voting for the sub-moron brand instead of the brain dead brand – the lesser evil marketing some still call our democracy – we wind up with a presidential race with the major difference between the candidates of the rich is that one is in their employ while the other is one of her employers. The fact that Trump helped finance campaigns for his alleged arch-fiend enemy and she gladly accepted funds from her arch-fiend enemy, should be enough to cause serious citizens to stop consuming for a moment and think. But legions of decent, sincere and desperately manipulated people voted for one or the other while the policies both support helped induce the new york murderer, as it did all the previous terrorist-maniac- immigrant fiends created by the main terrorist fiends here at Hypocrisy Central.

We need to ask what kind of immigration system makes it possible for a foreigner to get into the country via a lottery that offers as much personal background information as is available about someone who buys a lottery ticket, while other foreigners with education, job and language skills are walled out and sometimes put through a bureaucratic green card hell that lasts for years? Our kind. That system also allowed someone deported five times to re-enter the country five times, and eventually, whether accidentally or not, take an innocent life. These things have almost nothing to do with immigrants, the overwhelming majority being decent, benign, honest, sincere, hard working and only in rare cases criminally inclined, but a corrupt debased system profiting from cheap immigrant labor which is even cheaper when it is illegal.

Past hordes of immigrants from Europe and Asia had greater distances to travel and couldn’t use illegal routes as easily as current generation immigrants from south of our borders who need merely cross a line that is on maps but non-existent in the material world. The idea of a border wall is neither brilliant nor totally idiotic though it will certainly make illegal entry more difficult. But as long as the economy profits from such immigrant labor there will be doors, windows and underground entrances found in such a wall, many of them attended by capital’s government agents who will provide safeguards greater than those that currently exist.

How is it possible for people to enter the country illegally and then get a legal driver’s license? That is so they can drive to work and shop like other americans, even if they do not speak the language or earn anything near what some call a living wage, which is becoming more scarce for English language speakers while foreigners, frequently without similar education or skills, gain employment instead of americans who, it is said, want too much money. How much is too much? Maybe a decent legal minimum wage? But an illegally employed person earns less, which means more private profits, more public loss, happy capitalists and unhappy citizens easily driven to actions a more affluent privileged class can, in usually gross over-simplification, identify as bigotry.


If we truly wish to stop the abuse of human beings and not merely members of one or another special group of human beings, we need to stop the oppressive practices inherent in dependence on something called market forces to govern the creation and use of all that it takes for said humans to survive. As long as some of us are allowed to be reduced to less than human, a few of us will amount to more than human and that is the core of a problem faced by humanity through all manner of civilized (?) societies, from slave to feudal to capitalist. But the problem has become much worse under the last form of social organization which evidence shows is destroying more of our race and the very nature in which we have been created and sustained for much longer than the latest purchase at the mall or the pentagon, or program to sustain capitalism via free market fundamentalism or its lesser evil partner, social democracy. The fact that eight people have combined wealth equal to or greater than that of half the world’s population – 3.6 billion members of our race – should be enough factual, material information to give us all pause to think, then act to end a system that would allow, tolerate, sustain and even laud such a dreadful reality. At that point we will see the beginning of the end of terrorism, profitable poverty and war itself. But not before.