To most people, it’s a recession, or even a depression.

To those with money, it’s a “buying opportunity”.  

For those who are financing the ridiculous debt this country is burying itself into, it might be a good time to cash out.

And by cashing out, I mean cashing out, as in getting out of cash and going for the hard stuff:  gold, and land.  And where better to buy the land, than in the country whose dollar is about to be utterly devalued, the good old United States of America.  

What a buying opportunity!

Chinese official urges buying of gold, U.S. land: report

Li Lianzhong, who is head of economics at the party’s policy research office, said the U.S. dollar is poised for a fall, making gold and land better investments for China’s $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the report said.

Gotta love it that the corporate media is so unified in their outrage over the Iran situation.  

Where was their outrage when Israel massacred 1400 civilians in Gaza?  

This piece by Margaret Kimberley sums it up in a sad and devastating way:

In December 2008 Israel began what can only be described as a massacre in Gaza. More than 1,400 Gazans were killed so that Israel might inflict collective punishment on a civilian population, a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. They were not even allowed to flee and save their lives, instead even hospitals and ambulances were targets in Israel’s efforts to kill as many Gazans as possible.

“The corporate media are quite selective when they decide who deserves our sympathy.”

Just as they prevented civilians from fleeing, the Israeli government did not permit the world’s news organizations to enter Gaza. The American media conducted incomplete coverage of the crisis without even pointing out that the Israeli government prevented them from doing their jobs. They didn’t exhort their readers and viewers to remind Israel that “the world is watching” them. There was no campaign to use Twitter as a tool to protest the killings and defend the Gazans right to live.

The United States Congress did not pass resolutions condemning the Israeli government. Neither Democrats nor Republicans exhorted then president elect Obama to speak out on behalf of the Gazans. Editorial pages did not criticize his silence and tacit approval of a truly horrific human rights violation.

In contrast, congress rushed to condemn the Iranian government, allegedly on behalf of the Iranian people. Their hypocrisy is breath taking. During the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain composed his only little ditty, “Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” in a horrendous disregard for human life. Now he attacks Obama for not speaking out against the government of Iran.

“The U.S. Congress’s hypocrisy is breath taking.”

Throughout 2006 and 2007 both houses of Congress passed resolutions which condemned Iran as a terrorist state and were meant to begin the process of authorizing war. Many of these same house members now claim to care, by a 405 to 1 vote margin, about the people they previously had been willing to kill.

It’s no accident why.  It’s not random.  The U.S. government has been funding covert operations within Iran to help destabilize Iran’s government.  

Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership. This according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.

The operations were set out in a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which, by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Hersh, US Special Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq since last year. These have included seizing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of so-called “high-value targets” who may be captured or killed.

So this major media orgasm over the protests in Iran are the culmination of what the Covert Ops people hope is a successful overthrow of the Iranian government.  

That is why it’s getting so much coverage, and getting things like a 405 – 1 vote of approval by the United States Congress.

Anybody remember the way we tend to treat other protestors?

Anger Mounts After U.S. Troops Kill 13 Iraqi Protesters

Yeah, how dare they protest an illegal invasion of their country?  Fuckers.  

And do you think anyone in America read about this sort of thing?

“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy …

Where was all the grand twittering then?

And even though in Gaza entire villages were literally wiped off the map, our American “leaders” didn’t say a word.  Their support for the war criminals of Israel was unwavering, the reality of the crimes by the Mouthpiece Media kept hidden.

As Margaret Kimberley says:

The corporate media behave in a fashion that requires us to question everything they present to us as fact.

Ain’t that the truth.

Scientist Warns that Farmed Fish Could be a Source of Mad Cow Disease

In a paper that shows just how strange our modern world has become, Robert P. Friedland, neurologist from the University of Louisville, warns that farmed fish could be at risk of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, or mad cow disease.

Currently, farmed fish are fed cow byproducts-a food source they would never find natural environment (unless society started dumping cow carcasses in oceans or lakes).

Friedland and co-authors raise the issue in the Journal of Alzhemier’s Disease and call on food regulators to ban feeding cow bone or meat to farmed fish until it can be determined if the practice of feeding fish cow-parts is safe.

“We have not proven that it’s possible for fish to transmit the disease to humans. Still, we believe that out of reasonable caution for public health, the practice of feeding rendered cows to fish should be prohibited,” Friedland said. “Fish do very well in the seas without eating cows.”

Great, just another thing to avoid.  Pretty soon it seems we’ll all be starving out of a vain attempt to eat only good clean food.

This latest is from The Organic Consumers Association, and I heartly recommend everyone sign up for their e-mail service, where you can learn about these sorts of things, seeing as how they are completely unreported in the mainstream Corporate Mouthpiece Media.

I’ve been a fan of Chris Hedges ever since I first noticed him.  The guy is simply tuned in.

But this recent piece of his can leave you staring at the ceiling, wide awake, when you should be sleeping.  

The American Empire Is Bankrupt

Here’s a small sample:

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism … there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities-think Enron-for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Well, isn’t this just a great news day for this to come out.  Between the SCOTUS nomination and the Prop 8 brou-ha-ha, nobody is gonna hear about this:

A man who is actually one of the men who conducts the “interrogations” in question admits that it cost “hundreds, if not thousands” of American lives.

Dick Cheney and every Republican and Noise Machine Pundit out there is a LIAR (gee, what a surprise):

http://rawstory.com/08/news/20…

“Torture does not save lives,” Alexander said in his interview. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, recently published a report written by a retired American Army Colonel who says:

“Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

“The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.

The article from which I am getting this information, here, at Anti-War.com, written by Jeremy Scahill, says the following about JINSA:

The organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal “advisers,” among them Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. JINSA, along with the Project for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in shaping U.S. policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable force with Obama in the White House.