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:

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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/

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:

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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. Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Somewhere Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
By David Glenn Cox

The French aristocracy was not executed during the blood terror simply for the crime of being rich; they were executed for ignoring the plight of the poor. In their defense, yes their defense, let me offer up the observations of a poor man. When you have nothing or very little, you share that environment with all those around you who also have little or nothing. Since that number in this American society is huge and growing, that lifestyle and those opinions, appear to be the opinions to us, of the population as a whole.

Now, take your average golden lunchbox millionaire earning around $ 400,000 annually. He or she gets that paycheck every week and glances at their gross weekly earnings of $ 7,692.30; they look quickly at their deductions and are outraged. But what they don’t ever have to think about is “Oh, my god, how am I going to pay my bills!” With a monthly income of $33,000, what’s a $5,000 a month house payment or a $ 900 per month car payment, or even two of each?

Very quickly, in a matter of a few years, they’ve run out of things to spend money on. You own all the houses and cars you can handle, you’ve got a Rolex or three and you’ve gone everywhere and done everything; well… almost everything. But that damn money keeps piling up by the door, another $33,000 every 30 days, so there’s nothing left to do but to invest.

Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that our golden lunchbox millionaire likes the wild life and spends heavily. Even after deducting any potential tax liability, our millionaire still has around $320,000 to try and live on. So let’s suppose they spend $10,000 per month on a David Crosby size cocaine addiction, or a Bill Bennett sized gambling compulsion. Even after squandering 12 grand a year or even 50, they’re left with only $ 270,000 to live on, with the point being, their lives have nothing to do with ours.

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/03/08/somewhere-between-yesterday-and-tomorrow/davidcox/

Where Do They Go?
By David Glenn Cox

All along the watchtower princes kept the view of strange days and of self-same nights.

This month’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report expresses the symptoms of a lingering stagnation that smells. Actual new job hires were 17,000 in a labor population of nearly 157 million; two million more working compared to last year, with another two million more “no longer in the labor force.” Either way, split the difference as the number of officially unemployed grew for a third consecutive month to 12,332,000.

Wages rose at the ridiculously paltry rate of 0.5 percent, seasonally adjusted for three months and for the year; compensation rose only 1.9%. A desert sheik should run such a frugal household. At 1.9% wage growth, any plans for an economic recovery should be placed well off into the far distant future. It’s true you know, you can’t stand still. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. The numbers all meander around so, up one month and down the next, but never improving outside of a narrow range.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics report says: “Employer costs for health benefits increased 2.8 percent over the year. In December 2011 the increase was 3.5 percent.” Who paid that increase? So the averages for Americans of all stations are falling backwards. Take heart ye of the class struggle, wages for the higher-ups are doing only proportionally better. Retail workers’ wages increased an average of ten dollars a week, while their boss made twenty. But either way it’s only McDonald’s money.

Weekly hours worked are down in every employment category year after year, save for business services and healthcare. It’s not just a slowdown in this industry or in that, it is a widespread malaise. In its January report the BLS is careful to mention in the footnotes: “Note: Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of the January data.”

Median unemployment duration in weeks:

October – 19.6

November – 18.9

December – 18.00

January – 16.00

I never would have guessed that they adjusted the population controls, would you? Such adjustments make it difficult to assess changes over time through data comparisons and what they’re saying numerically doesn’t truly express the meaning existentially. It means if you were to lose your job today, on average, in a best case scenario, you won’t find a new job until June.

Now take a look at the average length of stay on unemployment.

http://www.leftistreview.com/2013/02/17/where-do-they-go/davidcox/

Hobo’s Lullaby
By David Glenn Cox

“Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can’t you hear the steel rails hummin’
That’s the hobo’s lullaby”

The red sled has been put away; the wrapping paper has gone into the trash along with the experts and their post -Thanksgiving forecasts of vibrant Christmas sales. Warm candle lit predictions of three to four percent in sales increases have been extinguished by the cold wind of a mere 0.7% sales increase. Now, factor in three percent annual inflation and you have the worst Christmas sales since, well, last year. Actually, it has been the worst Christmas sales season since 2008, when the New Great Depression first began.

The wizards and chambermaids of prognostication have already stripped the bedding and the bed clothes to autopsy the fetid corpse of Christmas past on. Well, the reason is obvious, isn’t it? Come on; think about it, what could be the cause of such sluggish sales? Why, what else, the prognosticators tell us it was Hurricane Sandy and the budget negotiations in Washington. Shoppers in Alabama, Michigan and Montana must have said to themselves, “Well, little Jimmy wants an official NFL football and little Cindy Lou wants a new bike. But you know what? I ain’t a gonna do it, no sir, not until them lazy good for nothing politicians do something in them budget negotiations.”

Or maybe, collectively, the American public has decided that out of respect for a global climate change inspired hurricanes, they should forgo annual gift giving ritual. Of course, I’m being absurd but if; if only, I could become even more absurd, if I could perfect the craft of cultural absurdity, then maybe, I could possibly write for the main stream media. The actual reason for the slow seasonal sales is a clear as spinach between the front teeth of a runway model. It isn’t just that they lie about Christmas sales to affect a bandwagon approach, hoping the mobs of the great unwashed will go out and shop unreservedly, before all the good stuff is gone which they do. It is that, after lie is piled upon lie for so long, the absurdities either make sense or they’re simply not plausible and you sometimes get the feeling they aren’t even trying that hard anymore.

Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that jobs and wage losses from Hurricane Sandy were negligible and therefore would not be included in job or wage loss statistics. See, if the building you worked in was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, your job loss doesn’t count. It can, however, be included as a legitimate reason for slow Christmas sales. So as the hurricane victims sat in the darkened wreckage of their homes they thought to themselves, “I’d go Christmas shopping but for those bastards in Washington.”

The truth just ain’t in them, Harry Truman once said about Richard Nixon; “Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.”

Absolutely and in totality, we are buried in the massive corporate defecation’s, recommendations, free associations, declarations, coupons, group ons, code words, buzz word bullshit. So what could be the real reason for lackluster (war on Xmas) holiday sales, could it be the demise of the traditional family? Or maybe we just don’t love our families that much, the way we once did. But you already know the truth, don’t you? You’re probably saying to yourself right now, get to it man! We all know the economy sucks!”

If today’s unemployment statistics were complied by the same formula which was used in the last Great Depression, our current unemployment rate would be at 22% the same unemployment rate as in the worst year of the last Great Depression.

NBC News.com – New Home sales jump to two-year high

“New single-family home sales surged in September to the highest level in nearly 2-1/2 years, further evidence the housing market recovery is gaining steam.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday that new home sales increased 5.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted 389,000-unit annual rate — the fastest pace since April 2010, when sales were boosted by a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.”

The story is factually the truth, but actually a lie. A new home sale number of 389,000 is one of the worst in fifty years, but remember; the last time they sold those low numbers was in 1967 when there were only two hundred million Americans. This story is repeated ad nausea all over the media as are all stories of positive economic numbers.

Auto Sales Are Highest in 4 Years

New York Times, DETROIT — “Unemployment is still high and the so-called fiscal cliff is looming, but those worries didn’t slow down the nation’s car and truck buyers in September.

Autos flew off the lot at the highest sales rate in four years, adjusted for seasonal variations, according to the research firm Autodata.”

Highest sales rate in four years, otherwise known as the year the New Great Depression began. Rosy forecasts of 14.9 million new cars, Hazzah! Except, that annually, the US crushes 14 million cars, factor in the past three years with sales of 10 million new cars or 12 million new cars sold and you see a society less mobile. The shortage in the sales of new cars also drives up the price of used cars.

But because they lie about everything they sometimes find themselves tied up in their own ribbons. Why was General Patraeus fired again? It was because he had an affair, right? For myself, I doubted that. It’s almost traditional for generals to have a mistress, hell, Eisenhower had one and he didn’t get fired. I thought to myself, it sure was mighty lucky for President Obama that a story like that didn’t break before the election, convenient huh? Then I read the Bob Woodward story about Rupert Murdoch sending Roger Ailes to Afghanistan trying to encourage the good General to run for the Presidency in a Fox News funded and stage managed campaign. The reasons for the Patraeus firing become obvious, with only the details still shrouded in mystery.

The truth is cold dead, stone dead, it is a condition which cannot be altered, but still they try. Poor people don’t buy much for Christmas, some cannot even afford the day off from their pay. This is the ugly baby in the manger which none come to see, what millions of American families got for Christmas this year was poverty, same as last year.

You cannot “good news” the poor into thinking they aren’t poor. No amount of talk radio can ever argue with the daily fear and precariousness with which they daily live their lives. The sad truth is the government / media are one and the same, they can no longer hide the truth and so they must bury it. Burying ain’t a craft skill, it is a volume business and so, they’re working overtime with extra flights of misdirection.

“Now don’t you worry ’bout tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go
Tonight you’re in a nice warm boxcar
Safe from all that wind and snow

I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to Heaven
You’ll find no policemen there

So go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Listen to the steel rails hummin’
That’s a hobo’s lullaby”
~ Goebel Reeves

Rockets Red Glare
By David Glenn Cox

It would seem we are a nation stumbling from tragedy to bloody tragedy; we are a nation of hurts. How can these things keep happening like this? Some of us shout about gun control, while others argue for more mental health treatment. Strangely, few point the finger at a third actor upon the stage.

There was a time when drunken nit wits would barge out on the field during a baseball game, to show their penis or their ass. Broadcasters decided not to show the nit wit dancing out on to the field and you know what, it stopped happening.

No telling, if even now, some mental case, some ersatz Travis Bickle isn’t trying on body armor in some cheap room. His heart filled with a lifetime of sorrow and hurt, his head formulating a plot to go out in a blaze of bloody glory. Each gunman dreaming of prime time gore and instant fame, as each, plots an even deeper outrage.

This is after all America; we love our violence, and can’t ever seem to get enough gore. Murder, death and violence becomes us, with the invasion of Iraq the cable news network ratings soared. It’s fun to watch people die on a high resolution big screen TV. It’s so interesting watching ghoulish reporters shoving a microphone into the face of a grieving relative asking, “How does it feel?”

CBS, Sunday “Revenge” a woman seeks revenge against the people who framed her father for a crime he didn’t commit. Fox Monday, “Bones” soon to air for its eight season centers around Temperance “Bones” Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who attempts to solve gory crimes through forensic anthropology. Monday ABC’s “Castle” pairs a best – selling mystery novelist, and NYPD detective Kate Beckett centering on the unsolved homicide of Beckett’s mother. CBS Monday, “Hawaii Five O” an elite police crime unit, fights evil doers in beautiful Hawaii.

Then there is this charmer from NBC, “Revolution.” A post- apocalyptic dystopian action- adventure series, “We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out. Everything stopped working. We weren’t prepared. Fear and confusion led to panic. The lucky ones made it out of the cities. The government collapsed. Militias took over, controlling the food supply and stockpiling weapons.” Lovely, simply lovely, Americans just have to have their violence quotient; it makes me proud not to own a television.

NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles, Body of Proof, Person of Interest, Criminal Minds, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Law & Order – Special Victims Unit, Chicago Fire, CSI: New York and “Grimm” because fantasy violence is fun and desensitizing. For the weekend, there is what is called by the industry insiders, “Crime Time Saturday” ninety minutes of America’s favorites, CSI and Criminal Minds in reruns.

Then there are the programs like Cops, Dateline NBC, 60 Minutes which disguised as investigative journalism, promote a point of view based on slanted and biased interviews designed to tug at our emotional heart strings. This programming along with all the others focus on crime, murder and mayhem and it doesn’t cause our problems or these bloody events but it is, our reflection, it is our alter ego as Americans. This is what we enjoy; this is what many Americans consider entertainment.

The Lancet is one of the oldest peer- reviewed medical journals in the world. In 2004, The Lancet released its first study concerning the estimated number of excess deaths in Iraq. The first study estimated 98,000 excess Iraqi deaths with a 95% level of certainty. A second study, released in 2006, raised that number to 654,965 or 2.5% of the population. From the Lancet report, “Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.”

This is us, we in the United States of America allowed this massacre to happen. These fatalities didn’t bother us in the slightest and for many Americans it doesn’t bother us still. They asked for it, good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction – no, he didn’t, but what he did have was lots and lots of oil, which hungry and unscrupulous men wanted. They turned on a propaganda machine as the opening act of the war machine.

On May 15th of 2003, President Bush made his famous “Bring them on” remark, with the message being that war is so good, we can’t get enough murder and mayhem and want more. On October 11, 2011 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was informed of Muammar Gaddafi’s death in Libya, Clinton smiled and rubbed her hands together in satisfaction and remarked, “We came, we saw and he died.” Ain’t it great? Ain’t we special?

Operation Neptune Spear was carried out last May in what was described as a Central Intelligence led operation including Navy seals and the Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment and CIA operatives. Excuse me, but when did the CIA become a branch of the US military?

Daily Mail, May 2, 2012 – “President Obama has revealed that he felt a ‘deep-seated satisfaction’ when he saw a photo of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for the first time.

The President said that the sight of the bullet ridden corpse made him think of the families of those who died on 9/11 – but denied that he did a high five in his mind.”

Strange the President should think such a thing, especially since Osama Bin Laden was never charged in connection with the events of 9/11. Bin Laden was charged in connection with a series of US embassy attacks in 1998 in North Africa. We the American public were never allowed to see those photos or the DNA evidence proving that it was, in fact, Osama Bin Laden.

An unnamed U.S. senior defense official stated that only one of the five people killed in the attack were armed. The interior of the house was pitch dark, because CIA operatives had cut the power to the neighborhood. Matt Bissonnette, who participated in the raid, described it this way, “when bin Laden peered out at the Americans advancing on his third-floor room, the SEAL who fired upon him hit him on the right side of the head. Bin Laden stumbled into his bedroom, where the SEALs found him crumpled and twitching on the floor in a pool of body matter, with two women crying over his body. The other SEALs allegedly grabbed the women, moved them away and shot bin Laden repeatedly in the chest until he was dead.”

“So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: justice has been done.” ~ Barack Obama

Indeed, “We will be true to the values that make us who we are.” We will kill the wounded and the unarmed, we will violate accepted codes of international behavior and then when asked to provide proof of what they’ve done will answer, that’s none of your business. On April 26, 2012 in response to Freedom of Information requests from the news media, Judge James E. Boasberg ruled that the defense department was not required to release any of the evidence to the public.

This is who we are; this country of ours coolly operates concentration camps beyond our shores. We hold people indefinitely, without any charges of wrong doing. These prisoners have been as young as age 15 years of age and have been tortured, beaten and abused for years on end, before receiving long sentences at the hands of military tribunals.

Since 2004, the US military has been launching unmanned aerial drone missile attacks against the people of Pakistan. In 2008, Pakistan’s interior minister said, “A few militants are killed, but the majority of the victims are innocent citizens” A 2009, article by David Byman of the Brookings Institution reported, “drone strikes may have killed “10 or so civilians” for every “mid- and high-ranking [al Qaeda and Taliban] leader.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that between 391 to 780 civilians had been killed in these attacks and of that number 160 of the victims were children. It was also reported that since President Obama took office, at least 50 civilians were killed in follow up attacks when neighbors had gone to the aid of the victims. On June 12th of this year, Navi Pillay the UN high commissioner for human rights called for an investigation of the drone missile attacks repeatedly referring to the attacks as “indiscriminate.” Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, called on the Obama administration to justify its use of targeted assassinations rather than attempting to capture al Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

But wait – we are not at war with the people of Pakistan, we don’t have the right to launch even one missile, not one. Those murdered are not members of any government. At worst, they are aledged to be members of a criminal organization. At worst they are criminals, while at best, we ourselves are the criminals.

We live in a nation with a perverse and pervasive preoccupation with violence, then we act so surprised when we must face violence ourselves. Especially violence against the innocents, which can neither be justified nor put away in any case. We are a monster factory, and while taking away guns might seem like the obvious solution, especially since that program has worked so wonderfully with drugs and alcohol. The problem is much deeper than that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

It is a slippery slope and we have already lost our footing,

Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 3, 2012 – 13 Cleveland police officers who fired 137 rounds into car, killing 2, expected to be interviewed by investigators today.

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) Updated, November 27, 2012 – Andrew Lopez was lying on his back, wounded and unarmed when an Albuquerque police officer delivered the shot that killed him early one February morning in 2009. Alan Gomez was carrying a plastic spoon and reportedly walking away from officers when he was killed by police earlier this month. And an unarmed Christopher Torres was shot in the back three times at point blank range in April after police say he tried to grab his gun.