Tag: Orwell

Dec 12 2010

Obama’s Totalitarian Vision of a Censored Society

You may recall that Richard Nixon’s declared “enemy” was Daniel Ellseberg, who released “The Pentagon Papers” that finally brought to public light the lies, corruption, and futility behind the Vietnam War. Nixon was so pissed about this, that he formed his own private CIA-hit team, called “The Plumbers”, made up of CIA “Bay Of Pigs” assassins (and Kennedy assassination participants), E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, etc. to go around and ensure that any leaks were plugged up. Of course, the Daniel Ellsberg burglary, and the Watergate break in then followed, which led to Nixon’s own downfall — something today’s Congress would let pass by without a thought, in the today’s unspeakable age where: Human torture and preemptive War are good things in eyes of The United States Government (as long as we’re the ones doing it, or Israel, or the British Oligarchy, or Saudi Arabia).

Well the Pentagon Papers of today, are WikiLeaks, and guess who’s side President Obama is on?  That’s right, the same side as Richard Nixon.

Obama made a public statement to  Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan where he was quoted as:   “Expressing his regrets for the deplorable action by WikiLeaks“.

Link: Obama Lashes Out Amid Calls to Free Assange

Yeah….in Obama’s World, truth-telling is really “deplorable”, and not our criminal and corrupt Foreign Policy, our Worldwide mass-violence, and his utter waste of Trillions of dollars of American citizens money — who must instead, according to Obama, be robbed of their own Social Security lifeline in order to “keep the debt under control” — while he also hands out over $700 Billion dollars to multi-millionaires, and tells the Democratic Party: “take it or leave it”   (who’s the real treasonist here?).

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This is a tragic statement about our Country, but hardly surprising since President Obama has also happily agreed with Dick Cheney and George Bush (his Foreign Policy role models) supporting the elimination of Haebeus Corpus, elimination of our Miranda Rights, elimination of the Posse Comitatus Act, support for secret brutal CIA Renditions (i.e. the outsourcing of Human Torture), broad based Government Wiretapping and data gathering on U.S. Citizens that would make Richard Nixon blush, and the right of the executive to now kill and assassinate any U.S. Citizen without any charges or crimes ever being demonstrated … on mere suspicion alone.
This is President’s Obama worldview.

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The President also called Mexican President Felipe Calderon as well to make the same statement as well, as part of an effort to put pressure on Foreign Governments to continue to scapegoat, abuse, jail, harass, torture, or possibly assasinate the truth-teller.

Obama has also turned Attorney General Eric Holder loose to prosecute — not the War Crimes committed by criminal government officals whom we all pay the salaries of — but instead to prosecute truth-teller Julian Assange, and by using “all the tools” at his disposal (e.g.: assassination efforts underway).
This is President’s Obama worldview.

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Support of WikiLeaks may be the most constructive thing that all of us ordinary people can do now, to bring about pressure upon the ruling Elite class, and expose their genocidal and monetary crimes.

Nov 15 2009

Is the white, male, Christian ruling class doomed to extinction?

As stated in other recent diaries, perhaps this nation’s demographics are such that the white, male Christian ruling class is destined to suffer the ravages of diminishing power and influence.  Although this writer shares that fervent hope and allows that present conditions may portend such a monumental, seismic shift, this process will likely take far longer than we might want to imagine.

Despite the best efforts of the Reich Wingnut talking heads to encourage their minions to “get busy” and create hoards of newborn teabaggers, their relative numbers are likely to continue shrinking.

No doubt the so-called elite (aka GWB’s base) are assiduously studying the tactics applied by the Spanish conquistadors who, during their invasion and swift, easy conquest of the native populations in the Americas, demonstrated that it is possible for the few to control the many.

More recent examples of minority dominion would be exemplified by the lengthy rule of the whites in South Africa, who, at their peak in 1911, accounted for only 19-21% of the population (13.6% when apartheid was abolished in 1994) and by the extended reign of the Sunnis in Iraq, who comprised only 15 to 20 percent of the country’s entire population, yet dominated that country’s government and economy throughout the 20th century.  

And, closer to home, given their considerable power, one might reasonably conclude that large numbers are represented by the National Rifle Association, even though they comprise only about 1.3% of the U. S. population.  

As Aldous Huxley so presciently observed in his 1931 novel, Brave New World, in order to maintain control over the oppressed, one need only convince those at each rung of the socioeconomic ladder that theirs is by far the best lot of all.  

Jun 17 2009

More of the same from ObamaNation (abomination)

More of the same old same old from the Obama Administration.  

Obama Blocks List of Visitors to White House

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

Updated: CREW says it filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Here’s a copy of CREW’s complaint.

“We are deeply disappointed,” said CREW attorney Anne L. Weismann, “that the Obama administration is following the same anti-transparency policy as the Bush administration when it comes to White House visitor records. Refusing to let the public know who visits the White House is not the action of a pro-transparency, pro-accountability administration.”

Enjoy your new overlords.  Same as the old overlords.

Oh, but I know, Obama is really trying!   He’s just up against such pressure and such opposition like a 67% approval rating and both houses of Congress.

Yup.

Jan 13 2009

George Orwell and fin de siecle America

I returned to New York from the four corners area in early 1998 and saw an economy that had completely decoupled from reality.  I was born in Westshecter County in 1965 and lived there until 1994.  When I returned in 1998, there was money pouring into NYC from all over the world and the Russian debt crisis and “Asian Contagion” did very little to slow it down.

By the time the tech crash and 9/11 attacks had tamped down somewhat on the economy, I had moved to Maine to teach high school there.  While in Maine, I picked up a copy of George Orwell’s essays and read it through.  I love his up front style.  In particluar, there were two sections of Such, Such Were the Joys dealing with Edwardian England that struck me as particularly relevant to America in those years.

There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914…

The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever…

The goodness of money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title, or a horde of servants was mixed up in people’s minds with the idea of actual moral virtue…

By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be any good.  But all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same people.  It was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called “guts” or “character,” which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others…

That was the pattern of school life – a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak.  Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous that other people – in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way.  Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.  There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.

This British idyll was, of course, ruptured by The Great War of 1914.  Personally, what I was seeing in those six months I spent in NY between January and August of 1998 was a mad scramble for a declining piece of what was once middle class America, but which had become harder and harder to come by since the 1970’s.  Remember that this was the beginning of the school shootings and the height of Rudolph Guiliani’s  reign as mayor.  The Abner Louima incident had occured the previous summer and 1998 would see Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond killed by NYPD as well an eruption of no-knock warrants and repeated stop and searches in minority neighborhoods.  I remember one statistic as being that 45,000 people in Brooklyn were stopped on the street and questioned by NYPD and 10,000 were cited for some offense, which means that 35,000 people were harassed by NYPD for no apparent reason.

Well, the page will turn in 8 days, and hopefully we can say good-bye to the Bush era and move on to a real effort to realize the potential of this country and its people.  This nation can no longer survive with its citizens focused on “me and mine.”  Rather, we must look out for all of US.  Peace.

Nov 23 2008

The “euphemizing” of America

Why do we so easily accept words and phrases that inaccurately, but perhaps more pleasantly, describe less-than-pleasant things or concepts or actions? While some euphemisms are relatively innocuous (water closet instead of toilet; passed away instead of died), many are far more insidious. Why has it been so easy for organizations such as the Pentagon and corporations to make up jargon to explain, or to explain away, their unethical, dishonest, greedy actions? I am sick to death of it, and the connection between Republican talking points and corporate talking points is like white on rice. Must be because the connection between Republican power and corporate power is equally inseparable.

When did this crap start? When did we begin to allow such dishonesty in our public discourse, and in our corporate-speak? Immanuel Kant said, “Honesty is better than any policy,” but we surely don’t seem to believe that, in either the political arena or the military-industrial complex.

Mar 08 2008

Anti-public- corruption-compliance

Anti-public-corruption compliance is the latest global buzzword and it may be take in the literal sense.  Compliance with corruption that is not in the public interest.

The US had Enron which begat Sarbanes-Oxley.  Hegelian dialectic at it’s best, problem, reaction, “solution”.