the rich should fear their servants

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that said the greatest fear of the wealthy is political violence in the streets.

But it’s not the people outside the gates they should fear--it’s all the ”little” people they need to fear run their lives, the butlers, nannies, drivers, gardeners, accountants, ass-wipers, and probably even the private security.

Even if these servants are well-compensated, they have eyes and ears and could realize that their bosses are screwing their friends and family and even endangering their lives.

Those inside the walls might take action or even leak some useful information to the rest of us.

Jack London wrote about this happening in a revolution in the US in THE IRON HEEL. It was incredibly accurate about the methods of the wealthy today even though it was written over a hundred years ago.

You can see a real life example of this in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED when the wealthy of Venezuela are fretting on camera that their servants may be spying on them, then the camera turns for just a second to a Native maid dusting whose eyes flash up making you wonder if they were right.

So it will be here.

We have already seen this with low and mid-level people who execute the orders of the rich in the defense and foreign policy establishment, from functionaries who refuse to lie like the Iraq Survey Group and the pre-Iraq War intel analysts, to those in the military who leaked specifics of war plans against Iran and the suspicious movement of nuclear weapons in the US, to the wholesale leaking of Bradley Manning.

You can’t be an idiot and do those kind of government jobs, and when they see the real agenda, not of protecting our security or even enriching average Americans, but of killing people and crushing democracies to enrich a very few, they can’t do their job blindly forever. As Frederick Douglass said, when someone realizes they are doing an injustice, either they will be eaten by guilt until they end the injustice or they will figure out a way to justify it in their mind.

In the Internet Age, when it is so easy to find other opinions and facts about what’s going on, a literate person would have a hard time keeping up the walls of rationalization for long.

When enough of their servants say “ENOUGH,” their day will be over. Then we can get on with solving our pressing problems without worrying about whether the solutions offend or cut into the profit margins of  pampered, morally degenerate trust fund babies.

It's not just Republicans that need to repudiate Rush

I got this email from the DSCC about browbeating GOP senators to repudiate Rush Limbaugh, and on one level, it's gratifying to see Democrats finally learning one of the correct lessons from the GOP: hit your opponent's strength. Do to Rush what the right did to the word "liberal" in the 80's, so that Republicans will be embarrassed to say anything that sounds remotely like any of his talking points.

I've already noticed a version of this in my college classes. Whenever a student says something about global warming being a hoax or making batteries for electric cars makes more pollution than an internal combustion engine spits out in its lifetime, I ask them, ''Where'd you hear that--on Rush Limbaugh?"

The tone is not accusatory, but for some reason, they never say yes.

There is just one problem of this shaming of Republicans: I would like to know which of the GOP's ideas so-called ''moderate'' Democrats are going to repudiate as well.

Will they forsake:

• Only taxing the rich as much as they wish to be taxed and looking the other way when they hide money in off-shore accounts or use other book-keeping scams
  
  
• Trade deals like NAFTA that screw American workers
  
  
• H-1B visas that allow high tech companies to import engineers & IT workers and leave American college grads sitting on the bench
  
  
• Privatizing government functions, including education, even though the private versions are consistently more costly and of questionable effectiveness
  
  
• Letting corporations dictate the policies and regulations that effect them as Wall Street and banks still seem to be doing with the team of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, and Bernanke writing checks for trillions with no strings attached
  
  
• Sending a black kid who robbed a 7-11 of $50 to be raped in prison and sending a white trust fund baby who broke our economy a check for billions to party with his friends, and after seeing the party, sending another check.
  
  
• In the same vein, letting health insurance and drug companies have a seat at the table crafting health care reform when they should be roasted slowly on a spit to feed the people at the table
  
  
• Letting politicians leave office and go to work for corporations they did favors for while in office
  
  
• Using fear of terrorism and nuclear weapons as an excuse to intimidate and invade nations that don't do business on terms American oil companies and banks like as is the case with Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela (the Bushies went as far as to claim al Qaeda was in Venezuela)
  
  
• Almost blasphemously, claiming we are teaching other countries democracy when we invade them and kill their people, then questioning how ''mature'' their culture is when they dare to fight back
  
  
• Never dealing honestly with why we didn't punish the two countries that sponsored al Qaeda, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In the case of the latter, they sent an agent to pick up two of the 9/11 hijacker at the airport who set them up in an apartment and funneled checks to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife.
  
  
• Claiming other countries getting a handful of nukes is somehow a threat to us without adding that no country would be foolish enough to launch one at us or give them to terrorists to detonate here since everyone knows we have THOUSANDS and would not hesitate to burn their entire country off the map before one mushroom cloud cleared here. With the Soviets, there was MAD--mutually assured destruction. Today the would be OSHOSE--our side hurt, other side exterminated.
  
  
• Intentionally blurring military defense and empire and wars of aggression. China and Russia have a tenth the military spending we do, and no one is lining up to invade them. Similarly, if a medium-sized Iraq can give us, the world's sole superpower, a bad day trying to occupy them, it is unlikely anyone would get very far with trying to occupy us or even consider it. Most of our Defense apart from the troops themselves is welfare for defense contractors.

Moderate, blue dog, DLC, or whatever you want to call them have voted with the GOP on most or all of these issues.

I would look forward to Democrats clearly separating themselves from the GOP on these points, and not just being better graded on a curve.

From: info@dscc.org
Subject: What Rush doesn't know
Date: March 7, 2009 9:03:47 AM PST

Rush Limbaugh doesn't know what he's started. Tens of thousands of you have already signed onto the DSCC's urgent call for Republican Senate leaders to denounce his shameful rhetoric - and that's just the beginning.

The Republican response has been predictable: blame the media, blame the Democrats, and rally their base. They'll do anything except tell Rush Limbaugh he's wrong.

They're hoping this will all blow over and they can go back to pretending like Rush doesn't speak for them. It's not too late for you to add your voice so we can keep the pressure on. If you sign today, we'll send your comments right to the Republican Senate leadership.

Click here to demand that Senate Republicans reject Rush Limbaugh's hateful rhetoric - We'll send them your comments. When you're finished, please forward this message to your friends and family.

The response so far has been tremendous, but we all have to do our part to fight back against ultra-conservative extremism. Join us today.

- J.B.

MUST READ: economic democracy crushed by tanks & coups again and again but keeps coming back stronger and stronger

This is simply breath-taking in tying together what has happened to us her in the US since the Reagan Revolution, what neoliberalism and resource wars like Iraq have done to the rest of the world, and most importantly, how people fought back again and again and could only be deterred by economic or military force.

This is partly why Hugo Chavez is so terrifying to the corporate world: not that he is so far left but because their usual tools failed to remove him or bring him to heel. When they called their bought off generals for a coup enough of the Venezuelan people and even enough of the military saw Chavez was looking out for their interests and the economic elite were not.

Whether the Democrats will really put the people before their corporate donors remains to be seen, but this is the direction we MUST push them in if we in the middle and working class don't want to end up living in a cardboard box in a Third World slum in the middle of North America.

EXCERPTS:











Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, "The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

***
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this -- if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

***

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

FULL TEXT

A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How "economic hit men" set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

IRAN CANCELS OIL CONTRACTS 1981: why Bush will NEVER pull out of Iraq

Without the presence of American troops or a compliant puppet government, even the ayatollahs could see they were being screwed by oil companies.

While the current Iraqi government may wish to please Bush, given the rate of the troops we are "training" immediately crossing over to the insurgents, it's likely that government will collapse as soon as the majority of our troops are gone--or they will start to represent the Iraqi people to save their necks. In either case, the oil companies could end up with nothing, which would be a fitting outcome if it weren't for the bill in hatred, taxes, and death they have stuck us with.

This might be why the recent war funding bill included not only a requirement for Iraqis to pass the Hydrocarbon Law, but a pretty big loophole that allows troops to remain for "training" and chasing al Qaeda AFTER the pullout date. According to the Bush administration, that is all we are doing there right now.

Until the Democrats deal openly and honestly with this oil issue, they are unlikely to end this war and even more unlikely to prevent the next one.

FULL TEXT:

Iran Cancels 1954 Oil Pacts
AP. New York Times. Sep 9, 1981.

Iran has canceled all contracts signed with multinational oil companies before the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Iranian Oil Ministry announced today.

The announcement, carried by the official Iranian press agency, said the contracts had been signed with American, British, Dutch and French companies in 1954.

The statement said the companies had ''plundered the oil resources of Iran from 1954 to 1979, while Iran, which is in fact the justified owner of these resources, had only little to gain from the contracts.''

Industry analysts said they believed Iran's announcement was unlikely to have any practical effect on American oil companies that had operated in Iran because no Iranian oil is currently being bought.

Iran's current crude oil production is estimated at 900,000 barrels a day, down from an average of six million daily before the 1979 revolution.

The contracts signed in 1954 were to have lasted 25 years, with three five-year renewal periods. The ministry has formed a board to investigate any claims resulting from the measure and ''follow up the matter, possibly through international circles, until their final settlement and recovery of the legitimate rights of the Iranian people,'' the announcement said.

OIL MOTIVE for Iraq War resources
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/09/iraq-oil-war-resources.html




iran oil contracts oil concessions iranian revolution islamofascism iraq war privatization jim mcdermott oil psa production sharing agreement president george w bush oil companies shell bpExxonMobil ChevronTexaco ConocoPhillips republican antonia juhasz greg palast GOP conservative corruption occupation colonialism hydrocarbon law grover norquist jay garner professor smartass iraq peak oil propaganda corporation democracy war on terror public relations worst president ever failure war criminal smartass comments resistance censored news

Senators go to Iraq to press passage of OIL THEFT law

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (a state with lot of oil money sloshing around) went to Iraq to say a timetable for pulling out is a bad idea, the surge will work, and to remind the Iraqis of their duty to pass the Bush administration coerced and oil company written hydrocarbon law:

Murkowski said the senators specifically asked Iraqi lawmakers about the draft hydrocarbon law approved in early March and yet to be passed by the Iraqi Council of Representatives. The law would draft a strategy for developing and managing the oil wealth of the country. The senator said she was confident Iraqi lawmakers were making the legislation a priority.

http://newsminer.com/2007/03/18/5991

If this law were in the interests of the Iraqis, why would Bush and Republican senators have to remind the Iraqis to do this? Do people have to remind you to eat or sleep? Usually, when a salesman is putting on the pressure, it's because they are afraid you'll slow down, look at the fine print, and realize you are being screwed.

In this case, the Bushies are probably worried that once the troops are gone the Iraqis will do the right thing and use the hydrocarbon law to wipe their asses.

Antonia Juhasz, Greg Palast, Greg Muttitt, and Joshua Holland have all provided ample evidence of why the Iraqis should be wary.

The Sopranos provides the simplest explanation of how the deal the Bushies are forcing on the Iraqis works. In most oil rich countries like Saudi, Iran, or Kuwait, the oil companies are like the garbage companies in the Sopranos. Tony may run it and make a tidy profit, but it has no real effect on your home or business who hauls away your garbage. What the Bushies want is to treat Iraq the way Tony treated a gambling addict who got in over his head. He paid for his debts by giving Tony a share of his business. By the time it was all over, Tony had the business and the gambler had nothing.

A real world example might be the Bush administration's other favorite bad guy, Hugo Chavez. They hate him because he only wanted the oil companies to get 70% of Venezuelas oil income instead of 84%.

Ironically, AMERICA gives 84% to oil companies, but we have far more important things to vote about like prayer in school or whether yard gnomes are idols to false gods.

OIL MOTIVE for Iraq War resources
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/09/iraq-oil-war-resources.html




iraq war privatization jim mcdermott oil psa production sharing agreement president george w bush oil companies shell bpExxonMobil ChevronTexaco ConocoPhillips republican antonia juhasz greg palast GOP conservative corruption occupation colonialism hydrocarbon law grover norquist jay garner professor smartass iraq peak oil propaganda corporation democracy war on terror public relations worst president ever failure war criminal smartass comments resistance censored news hugo chavez venezuela

3 Questions before any war (or buying that another country is a threat)

Based on our experience in Iraq, an only slightly more than superficial reading of the history of our other wars and military actions, and a modest dose of common sense, we should always ask these questions before any war.

1. How many times over could we nuke that country off the map if they attacked us?

If it was Russia or China, maybe only 5-7 times. If it was a smaller country, the pilots would get bored after the first 30-40 runs.

2. What would this country gain by attacking us?

However cruel or unpleasant leaders of other countries may be, they didn't get to that position by being stupid. No leader of a country would take an action that had ZERO chance of success. Even Hitler's stupidest move, invading Russia, had some chance of success. What is the possible gain of any of our current or future boogey men in attacking us?

3. What business interests would profit from us attacking that country, and what has that interest done for us to deserve that sacrifice of tax dollars and lives?

Those first three address the kind of truly embarrassing childish lies and ommissions have been allowed to sell the American people.

But their is a second level of lies that has some credibility in academic and even military circles related to 3 about "strategic access" to resources. Therefore, some corrallaries are necessary:

3A. If someone says we need "strategic access" to a natural resource that country has, what would that country gain economically by denying us access besides ideological bragging rights? Would withholding the product do far more economic damage to them than us?

If a country has only one product, like OIL, cutting off the customer that uses 25% of the product would create a glut for other consumers, lower prices, dry their treasury and elites bank accounts of income, and possibly cause a recession or depression for their own people even more than it hurt us.

3B. If someone says that country may jack up prices if we don't invade, would the current price of that commodity plus the cost of military action in tax dollars,lives, and international resentment be less than their hypothetical exorbitant price?

These questions or some variation of them should be asked by every reporter, congressman, senator and American whenever military action is proposed.

Even Democrats have sold some variation of these lies about Iran saying Iraq was a distraction from the "real" threat of Iran. Their threat in reality is the same as Iraq's or Venezuela's: that the country might keep a decent share of their oil income and American companies won't get all they want (or any at all). And if a country like Iran gets nuclear weapons, the political cost of going in to take that oil will be too high.

The Democrats have made some steps in the right direction in their brief time back at the wheel. Declaring something like this would plant them firmly in the center of the reality-based community instead of being nearer neighbors to it than the GOP.




war profiteering iran iraq war wmd terrorism oil nuclear weapons president george w bush warheads real reasons questionsstrategic access dlc democratic leadership council republican GOP conservative corruption occupation halliburton imperialism colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq propaganda corporation fascism chamber of commerce george w bush war on terror false flag northwoods smartass comments resistance censored news rebel veneuzuela

Joint Chiefs say Bush wrong on Iraq troop surge

Remember Gen. Ripper in DR STRANGELOVE, the crazy general who wanted to start a nuclear war? There has been a persistent theme in our popular culture about the trigger happy general, and there certainly have been cases of generals giving epically bad advice particularly in dealing with Cuba that could have started World War III. Most of the time though, the military itself has been apolitical and does the bidding of the guys in suits in Washington whose cronies are itching to fill their pockets with assets stolen on the public's dime, as Marine Corps general and double Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler famously pointed out.

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/anti-govt/war-is-a-racket.htm

Today we are seeing the exact opposite of the STRANGELOVIAN stereotype--the itchy trigger fingers are in the White House, and the military is the voice of reason and is actually closer to the public consensus than our supposed representative in the White House and even closer to the public than Democratic leader Harry Reid who supports the idea of sending MORE troops to Iraq. Something similar happened in South America. For decades if not longer, their military supported the interests of the business community no matter what. If an election produced a government that discomfited business, the military would simply end democracy until the people were "mature" enough to handle it. Now most prominently in Venezuela, their militaries have gotten sick of being the Pinochet-like thugs who kill their own people to benefit a very few, and when the local and international financial elite wanted to remove Hugo Chavez, who got overwhelming majorities in a couple of internationally-monitored elections, the majority of the military stayed loyal to Chavez and the democratic will of the people and reversed the coup as it was happening.

It is a measure of the corruption and weakness of our democracy that our unelected military is more in tune with voters and reality than their elected civilian bosses. We need serious, fundamental change to our system and if the Democrats don't take aggressive, concrete steps toward that in the next two years instead of simply being the business party without religious nuts, the American people will do to Washington what Washington has been doing to us so openly the last six years.


KEY EXCERPTS:

washingtonpost.com

White House, Joint Chiefs At Odds on Adding Troops

By Robin Wright and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 19, 2006; A01

The Bush administration is split over the idea of a surge in troops to Iraq, with White House officials aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intense debate.

***

At regular interagency meetings and in briefing President Bush last week, the Pentagon has warned that any short-term mission may only set up the United States for bigger problems when it ends. The service chiefs have warned that a short-term mission could give an enormous edge to virtually all the armed factions in Iraq -- including al-Qaeda's foreign fighters, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias -- without giving an enduring boost to the U.S military mission or to the Iraqi army, the officials said.

The Pentagon has cautioned that a modest surge could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda, provide more targets for Sunni insurgents and fuel the jihadist appeal for more foreign fighters to flock to Iraq to attack U.S. troops, the officials said.

The informal but well-armed Shiite militias, the Joint Chiefs have also warned, may simply melt back into society during a U.S. surge and wait until the troops are withdrawn -- then reemerge and retake the streets of Baghdad and other cities.

Even the announcement of a time frame and mission -- such as for six months to try to secure volatile Baghdad -- could play to armed factions by allowing them to game out the new U.S. strategy, the chiefs have warned the White House.

FULL TEXT:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/18/AR2006121801477.html



troop surge
president george w bush pentagon generals iraq war smedley butler dr strangelove oil hugo chavezcoup venezuela occupation chamber of commerce neoliberalism northwoods worst president ever