By David Glenn Cox

“A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude.” – Robespierre

Congratulations, if you’re an hourly worker in the United States you’ve earned a .02 cent per hour raise last month! (April) Now of course, after earning almost a whole extra dollar per week, tax and investment advice should be sought out immediately. If you work in information services for a living, your hours worked increased this month, by one tenth of an hour. 2,691,000 Americans work in the “information” category and I guess they’re lucky to be working that extra fractional hour, even if there are 9,000 less of them, working this month over last.

For everyone else, all 155 million of us American workers, hours worked in every category either fell or stayed the same. The propaganda networks will trumpet 165,000 “new” jobs and that’s Winston Smith’s way of telling you, everything is so much better now. Come out; come out where ever you are! Ollie, Ollie Ocean free! But under the veneer is another story entirely, a story that you will not see on TV or Radio.

While 165,000 new jobs were created last month, 210,000 workers joined the labor force.

The number of Americans working Part-Time, for economic reasons rose sharply by 278,000 in April, to nearly 8,000,000 people. Eight million people in this country that want a Full-Time job, but can’t find one.

Part-Time due to slack work or business conditions rose to 5,250,000.
The number of Americans who could only find part-time work last month declined by 49,000.

Workers marginally attached to labor force were up by 21,000 and discouraged workers are also up by 32,000 workers.

Nearly 2,000,000 Americans now work two or more part-time jobs, an increase of over 20,000 since last April.

So just where are all these “new” jobs? Well, they’re not in mining or logging and not in construction or manufacturing. They’re not in durable goods or non-durable goods; they’re not in wholesale trade or utilities and even our friends in “Information services” lost workers. The new jobs are to be found in private-service providing, 137,000 of 165,000 jobs are in the service industry.

Trade, Transport – 9,000
Retail – 13,000
Financial services – 19,000
Professional and business services – 50,000
Leisure and hospitality services – 36,000
Education & Health Services – 24,000
Other services – 4,000

Realty Trac reported this month, “The number of homes overall in foreclosure or bank-owned rose by 9 percent to 1.5 million properties nationally in the first quarter of 2013 compared to a year ago.” Another 11 million homes remain under water, which brings us to Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Margaret Thatcher was a Neoliberalist politician, same as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Duh be you and Barack Obama. And Neoliberalist politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, believe just like Thatcher, that society, American society is only an artificial construct; they believe that it only exists because people say it does.

They believe we’re all just free individuals and we might be our brother’s keeper but definitely not yours. They believe the only rights which actually exist, are property rights; everything else, like society itself is an artificial construct. The Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta and the Constitution are all non-sense, to their way of thinking government owes nothing to the sick, the infirm or the dying.

From Wikipedia:

We Don’t Love Freedom Enough
By David Glenn Cox

It is as if someone has died, that realization which comes to you from out of the blue and says, “Oh wow, they really did that!” Armed men in military style fatigues took over an American city and ordered its residents off the streets. Roaming, this force in their armored personnel carriers, interrogated citizens who dared break from their “voluntary” request. They ejected people from their homes and searched them without warrant. It reminded me of a scene from the movie Fahrenheit 451 where they were chasing Montag with the helicopters, while his picture is splashed across the television as “breaking news.”

Authorities pick out official suspects, disallowing any other photographs but those deemed “official.” The authorities ask for the public’s help in identifying the suspects, and then the boy’s mother comes forward saying the FBI has been talking to her son for two years and has been to their home…

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/04/30/we-dont-love-freedom-enough/davidcox/

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
By David Glenn Cox

I want you to look at these two photos objectively, because to me there is something just not right about them. The two suspects don’t seem to fit into the picture. Download this photo so that you can view it in a preview mode and expand its size. The suspect’s colors appear to not blend with the rest of the people in the photo.

The suspect in the white hat looks strangely over-sized in the photo. He looks to have a small puny build, yet his chest is the same size or larger than the other two men beside him. Look at the size of that white hat compared with the black hat on suspect two, could anyone else in the photo wear this hat?

Several years ago, I had a free trial of Photo Shop, and when the free trail ended I didn’t think I’d done very well. Today I think differently, and it was a lot of fun to photo shop my ex’s relatives in derogatory pictures. The trick is in the angles and smooth edges; it’s hard to get the edges cropped just right, so that it looks “normal.” Now looking at the boy in the white hat again, follow the edges of his image in the photo. See the woman in sunglasses holding her hand up in a “C” position with her mouth open? Look how her hair fuzzes the edge of the suspect in the photo, where is the suspect’s shoulder?

Now expand the photo to see his shoulder ends at the column and her hair has been distorted to cover it up. Now look to the right, to the other edge of her hair, as again it is fuzzy. It covers up suspect number one’s jacket, but there is a small gap, from the suspects shoulder to the line of his jacket is as straight as a razor blade. But looking into the gap is it curved or right angles?

Looking back at the suspect in the white hat, look at his left shoulder, obscured again by a woman with Auburn hair. One of the hardest parts of manipulating Photo-Shop is in the small spaces, like an Etch-A-Sketch, it doesn’t do curves very well. It is always best to stay with right angles and straight lines, look again at his left shoulder. The man in the orange jacket is on the boundary, expand the photo and look how his back line borders the suspect. Then look how the image blurs slightly when it reaches the suspects jacket. Look at how the shoulder of the hoodie blends with the man in red behind him.

Look at the woman holding her hand up making a “C” they’re hard right angles blurred, it was a space which needed to be filled in.

Look at photo number 2 of Suspect number two; look at the size of his head compared to others around him. Look above his white hat to the ghosted outline of his hat on the concrete behind him. What’s that dark patch on his cheek? Look at his chin, his head appears to be looking up, but his chin appears to be looking straight ahead. Look how the edge of the brim of his white hat touches the image of the woman in front of him. He’s just a head in the photo and there’s something up with his hat, and his cheek and his chin. I could not identify the man in this photo as being the same man shown in the first photo.

―

“Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself! It cannot be called our mother, but our grave.” ~ William Shakespeare

The Pill
By David Glenn Cox

Let us suppose that some giant pharmaceutical company out there has spent long years of research into developing a pill that would make you feel better. With a single dose you would begin to feel yourself growing calmer. Like magic, all the unimportant little worries and insecurities in your life would simply fade away.

You can feel yourself thinking clearer, you sleep better at night and find you’re thinking more about important things. The human mind is the most amazing device in the universe; it is a super computer inside your head. It will hold enough information to fill 10,000 hard drives, but it is far from perfect. Primarily because, while a mechanical computer can perform dozens of functions all at once, your conscious computer brain can only do one or two low-grade functions at a time.

Like a guitar amplifier, you can only plug in one or two guitars; after that, no matter how good the musicians play, what comes out becomes a jumble of noise. We have only our eyes and our ears to help us navigate through the world and when they become overloaded such as in an auto accident, we only remember tiny bits and fragments of information and not the event as a whole.

Then there is that other person who’s living with you, inside your head. Your subconscious is a whole different mind living in the back room of your brain and it operates independently, working the night shift, once you’ve gone to sleep. It creates your dreams and it re-fights your battles, back from when you were six or twelve or twenty. Your old girlfriends or boyfriends live in there along with your mom and your dad, your Aunt Martha and the crossing guard from your elementary school.

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/04/10/the-pill/davidcox/

By David Glenn Cox

We have reached a point in our lives, where from the summit of a high hill we can look back at the road which has delivered us here. Tis a tale of woe in a fairyland dream, sugar-coated pabulum, televised non-sense and unrealized dreams. It is hard to look back, almost painful, as yesterday weighs heavy in your pockets, so you try not to bring it along.

I have come full circle in this new reality, this new duality. This new America, where if we say we can’t see you, then you’re not there. Behind the façade you can see the shadows of agenda, a war on the post office, a war on public employees and educators. It is a complete and total deconstruction of society and of the world, which we once knew. As a young man, I’d wondered what it must have been like to have lived in the third Reich. Trapped as just some plain Joe, watching madness coming into season, what would your consciousness say when there was real money on the line?

Five years ago, I was of the middle class; today I’m of the missing class. There are fewer Americans working today than there were in December. During the same time period, the civilian labor force has fallen by over half a million workers. The official numbers of those unemployed also fell. But strangely, the numbers of persons in the Civilian Non-institutional Population rose by almost 600,000 since December. Do you see it; do you understand what it really means?

Not in Labor Force

Mar. 2012 – 88,288,000
Feb. 2013 – 90,100,000
Mar. 2013 – 90,483,000

The number of men 20 years and over, not in the labor force has grown by almost one million. One million American men, not just unemployed or discouraged workers, but men no longer counted as in the labor force in a single year. Rather than fix the economy, they just said they fixed the economy and the media aped along.

The average number of hours worked from March 2012 to March 2013 is virtually unchanged; there is no improvement anywhere to be seen. Retail trade employment lost 24,000 jobs in 31 days of March; clothing accessories stores lost 500 employees per day in March. Building materials and garden supply stores lost 10,000 people or 322 workers per day, for everyday of the month. It would seem reasonable to assume that if there were any and I do emphasize, any growth, to be seen in this economy, it would be reflected in garden supply store sales in the spring.

Appliance stores lost 6,000 employees last month, I guess we’re all buying our washers, driers and refrigerators on the Internet these days, but more likely, it’s Craigslist. But employment also fell in mining, manufacturing, wholesale trade, transportation, warehousing, information and financial services. Employment fell from the mine to the check-out line, in this all mighty consumer economy of ours. At a time when legitimate government would be trying to bolster the economy, this government terminated 3,000 Postal employees per week in March.

The unemployed are pushed through the sausage factory, where you don’t ask where it came from unless you want to go there yourself. Through the steam pipes, through the valves and dials, finally poured down the drain pipe of untreated effluent, the waste product of a collapsing economy, deposited into the invisible sea of the missing class.

Through years of electric propaganda Americans have reached a point where it is now patriotic to hate Americans. This is not to say we haven’t hated each other before, but in the past they were at least selective about it. In times past, we hated groups by race or creed, based on grandpa’s hatreds. Clownish playschool Neo-Nazis or robed Klansman, scary only in the way an unchained pit bull is scary. Today our enemies are school teachers, municipal workers, postal workers, Union workers or the poor. All to be disparaged in the press round the clock by the Corporate News Networks.

The city of Detroit is now in the hands of an unelected Overseer, appointed by the governor to institute policies the electorate find unpalatable. Who is to blame for this American city’s descent into ruins? Who is to blame for this catastrophe? According to the blogosphere, it was caused by unions, blacks and decades of democratic politicians. Collective amnesia, plug and play racism, as the paid horde shouts for Barabbas.

It is a strange psychosis where a people profess a love for their country and its Democratic processes, while despising its citizens. Call it cardboard cut-out patriotism or flag waving from behind the bars.

Consumer Price Index

Food at Home – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 1.2 % (Not seasonally adjusted)
Motor Fuels – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 3.3%
Electricity – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up .8%
Apparel – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 2.4%
Shelter – Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 2.3%
Medical Care– Feb 2012 to February 2013, up 3.9%

Official Consumer Price Index rate of inflation – 2.07%

Average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees on non-farm payrolls

March 2012- $ 19.68
March 2013- $ 20.03

The average wage increase was .35 cents an hour, that’s average, now for retail workers it was .14 cents an hour and with an average work week of 33 hours their wages grew just $ 4.62 before taxes and maybe $2.50 after. There is no wage growth in this economy for anyone, regardless of what you do or who you are.

If you take the numbers listed by the bureau of Labor Statistics for duration of unemployment and add the numbers up, currently they stand at 15.68 million. If you do the same with last years numbers they total 15.9 million:

The Lights of Perverted Science
By David Glenn Cox

During the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill said something which was quite radical for the time and largely went unnoticed, but in our modern 21st Century existence, perhaps it needs to be reconsidered.

“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

By “perverted science”, Churchill meant radar and proximity fuses. This was before the buzz bombs or the V-2. It is such an explicit and exquisite term, perverted science, encapsulating and distilling knowledge without benefit, counterproductive, Mary-Shelly-Frankenstein knowledge. Nightmare technologies like nuclear weapons which once begun can never be ended. Our country is awash in genetically modified foods, fracking, drones, armed guards and RFI chips, yet, when we look at these things in a rear view mirror to see a reversed image, we see something far more frightening, as the seeds perverted science can only prosper in the soils of perverted government. Other governments around the world have dismissed out of hand proposals for GMO crops, GMO foods, fracking and drone surveillance.

This is made possible by corporate control of the American media creating a false sense of reality and of normality. The media in the United States of America is nearly as censored and editorially controlled as was the German press under Joseph Goebbels during the Nazi era. It was way back in February, almost an eon ago to modern media outlets when Chris Dorner, a fired Los Angeles Policeman killed two fellow officers and wounded three others. Dorner left behind a manifesto on his Facebook page claiming to have been victimized by the authorities because he had reported a fellow officer for abusing a mentally ill suspect.

That’s why they call it a Police State
By David Glenn Cox

Understand this… the politics you knew as a child or even the politics you knew before the 2000 election, no longer exist. There is only one political party in this country, the money Party. All politicians must appease the money Party. Your Congressman or Senator might come across back home as an arch Conservative or a Liberal environmentalist, but in the halls of power there isn’t a dimes worth of difference between them.

As a population we live with an overload of inputs, 9-11, the wars, the shootings and the endless carnage brought about by the political philosophies of those in our government, who are neither Republicans nor Democrats.

Politically I am a Socialist, I used to be a Democrat and I never left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me (Us). This New Great Depression has afflicted our economy for four years now. It has put tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans into economic distress and Barack Obama’s answer to all of this has been the same answer as that derived by Herbert Hoover.

“Economic depression can not be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement” ~ Herbert Hoover

Partisan rhetoric about the effects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aside, in 8 years the American workers had recovered their prosperity. These workers had the right to join a labor union and they had a Social Security income to depend upon, to build a decent retirement.

Obama has followed the Hoover method; he’s cut taxes for business again and again. Obama’s has even proposed a plan for government to subsidize labor costs for corporations. That isn’t liberal or conservative politics, its Fascism. It represents the co-mingling of industry and government. To live in a country where industry sets the safety standards, a country where the government sides with GM against the UAW and then profits directly from the workers loss.

A country where a Democratic President loves gun control and there’s only one problem with gun control, besides being a fanciful and unworkable penalty against the law abiding, and that problem is the cops.

The other day in Rancho Cordoba California, three policemen shot and killed a suspect. The police had been called to a domestic dispute and when the officers tried to remove the man from the bedroom he resisted arrest. Police say, he nearly overpowered the three officers, so the three officers shot and killed him. Doesn’t that seem a bit of a harsh sentence for resisting arrest? Couldn’t they have called the station house for help, he was after all unarmed. Either, this was a baddest man ever to step out of the mountains or the Rancho Cordoba police force needs tougher physical standards. Three on one, armed with night sticks, pepper spray and tasers and the cop’s first answer was to shoot him?

They used to call these things isolated incidents, but not anymore. In Cleveland, a police officer heard a loud noise, which he presumed came from a car leaving the court-house parking lot. The officer put on his thinking cap and deduced he was under fire from terrorists in a car leaving the parking lot at a normal speed. So cleaver were the two suspected terrorists, both middle-aged, that no one else in the area even suspected that there had been a shooting, isn’t that amazing?

The officer returned fire on the car and then, somehow in the police thought processes, couldn’t understand why the car wouldn’t want to stop. Gee, you’re driving along when suddenly bullets are whizzing around your head for no apparent reason. Would you stop and try to explain the mistake to the nice officers? Eventually, after a high-speed chase, police officers fired 137 rounds and killed two unarmed citizens, guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In Marin County Florida, an officer shot a fleeing suspect in the back and a Grand Jury failed to indict the officer. A You Tube video from the dash cam clearly shows the altercation between the suspect and the two officers. When the suspect takes off and begins running away, without reflection, the officer fires automatically and kills the suspect. Here’s what’s important, activists protest and picket over President Obama’s claim to executive authority over targeted killings, but a Grand Jury refused to indict a cop who clearly executed a fleeing suspect.

Do police now hold the power of life and death over us all?

On July 10, 2011 Kelly Thomas was beaten and suffocated by five Fullerton Police Officers. Kelly Thomas was a homeless man and a diagnosed schizophrenic. Police had stopped Thomas for a suspected auto burglary, but Thomas had nothing on him indicating he was involved. Over the next 15 minutes the officers taunt Thomas, threatening to arrest him for imaginary crimes, until finally, Officer Ramos says, “Now, you see my fists, they’re about to fuck you up.”

Thomas was tasered six times, until the taser guns ran dry and then, he was beaten and finally, suffocated by five officers piling on top of his lifeless body. Thomas’s body then lay on the sidewalk, in a puddle of his own leaking body fluids, while paramedics attended to the cop’s bloody knuckles.

Kelly Thomas was beaten to death by police on the streets of Fullerton California, but what was Kelly Thomas charged with? The officers knew Kelly Thomas, he was a fixture, and they’d talked to him before. They knew he was homeless, but rather than say homeless, let’s say instead, that they knew he was powerless to stop the officer’s.

Kelly Thomas had no cell phone or high-powered attorney. His economic status made him an easy victim. So let’s beat up that homeless guy, just for fun. Oop’s we’ve killed him.

You are closer to Kelly Thomas than you could ever imagine.

In February of last year, Officer Daniel Harmon-Wright killed 54-year-old Patricia Cook in the parking lot of Epiphany Catholic School in Culpeper, Virginia, for the crime of driving away when he was trying to question her.

The jury recommended a three-year sentence, after the officer had fired his pistol five times into the body of an unarmed Sunday school teacher. He faced a possible 25 year prison sentence, but soon, will be back out on the streets with us again.

When your greatest fear of gun violence comes from the police force themselves, gun control is a bad idea. Because once the police know the average citizen is powerless against them, we’re all Kelly Thomas. And when you consider the volume and the rise of “shoot first, make excuses later,” police work. Given American police forces penchant for gun violence, they would quickly make the Gestapo look like grade school crossing guards.

An all-powerful imperial police force, with the power of life or death over the average citizen in a free country is an absurdity. That’s why they call it a police state.