How The Government’s Lies Become Truth

September 29, 2012 |Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

In my last column, “A Culture of Delusion,” I wrote that “Americans live in a matrix of lies. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision.” This column will use two top news stories, Iranian nukes and Julian Assange, to illustrate how lies become “truth.”

The western Presstitute media uses every lie to demonize the Iranian government. On September 28 in a fit of unmitigated ignorance, the UK rag, Mail Online, called the president of Iran a “dictator.” The Iranian presidency is an office filled by popular election, and the authority of the office is subordinate to the ayatollahs. Assange is demonized alternatively as a rapist and a spy.

The western media and the US Congress comprise the two largest whore houses in human history. One of their favorite lies is that the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to kill all the Jews. Watch this 6 minute, 42 second video of Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Jewish religious leaders. Don’t be put off by the title. Washington Blog is making a joke.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/horrifying-graphic-video-of-iranian-leader-savagely-abusing-jews/
 
Last week the news was dominated by the non-existent but virtually real Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, blatantly intervened in the US presidential election, demanding that Obama specify the “red line” for attacking Iran. 

Netanyahu believes his maximum leverage over Obama, the president of the “world’s only superpower,” just prior to the election. Israel cannot attack Iran on its own without the risk of Israel’s destruction. But Netanyahu reasons that if he attacks Iran the week before the US election, Obama will have to join in or lose the Jewish vote for not supporting Israel in states such as Florida, which has a large Jewish population and many electoral votes. If the election is close, Netanyahu, a person consumed by arrogance and hubris, might exercise his threat and attack Iran, despite the opposition of former chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military, the opposition party, and a majority of the Israeli people.

In other words, the outcome of the “superpower’s” presidential election might depend upon whether the sitting president of the “superpower” is sufficiently obedient to the crazed Israeli prime minister.

That the outcome of the US presidential election could depend upon the agenda of the prime minister of a tiny country that exists only because of US financial, military, and diplomatic support, especially the UN veto, should disturb those Americans who think that they are the “indispensable people.” How indispensable are you when you have to do what the Israeli prime minister wants?

The US media makes certain that this question never enters american minds. Americans have been told that if Iran doesn’t have nukes, it has a nuke weapons program. This is what the politicians of both parties, the media, and the Israel Lobby tell them. Americans are told this despite the facts that the CIA and the National Intelligence Estimate stick to the conclusion that Iran abandoned its flirtation with a nuclear weapon in 2003 and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran report no evidence of a nuclear weapons program and no evidence of any diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

Moreover, what could Iran do with a nuclear weapon, other than use it against an aggressor?

Any offensive use would result in Iran’s destruction.

Why do Americans believe Iran has nukes or is making nukes when the CIA says they are not? The answer is that Netanyahu says so, and the elected members of the US government in the House, Senate, and White House are afraid to contradict the Israeli prime minister, as are the American print and TV media. Some “superpower” we are! The “indispensable people” have to grovel in the dirt before Netanyahu. Americans are not even aware of their shame.

Iran, unlike Israel, signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Signatories to the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy requires a low level of enrichment, 5% or less. The minute Iran announced a nuclear energy program, the Israeli government and its prostitutes in Washington lied that Iran was building a bomb. For exercising its legal rights under the treaty, Iran has been painted as a rogue criminal state and demonized.

A nuclear weapon requires 95% enrichment. To get to 5% from scratch and then to 95% is a long drawn out process. I think I first started hearing Israeli government claims of an Iranian nuke back in he 1990s of last century.

When Iran announced that, in view of the sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions that affect medical supplies, Iran was going to enrich uranium to 20% in order to supply itself with medical isotopes, the Israeli allegations that this would lead to a bomb resulted in Iran saying that the Iranian government was content for France or some other country to supply their medical isotopes and would not pursue enrichment beyond energy requirements. The US and Russia were also mentioned as suppliers.

According to the NY Times on September 29, 2011, “the Iranian president told the Washington Post and later, in basically the same terms, the New York Times: ‘if you [the United States and Europe] give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/30iht-edvaez30.html?_r=0

On Israel’s orders Washington vetoed the Iranian concession. Solving the problem is not what the Israeli government wants. The problem has to be kept alive so that it can be used to foment an attack on Iran.

The Iranian nuke is one of those grand hoaxes, a lie designed to hide the real agenda.

What is the real agenda?

The real agenda hiding behind the hysterical concern about an Iranian nuke, is the rightwing Israeli government’s design on the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Twice the Israeli government sent the Israeli army into southern Lebanon to occupy and eventually annex the territory. And twice Hizbollah defeated and drove out the vaunted Israeli army.

The few thousand Hizbollah fighters were able to defeat the Israeli army, which is equipped and supplied by US taxpayers’ dollars while Americans are foreclosed out of their homes and left unemployed as Washington applauds the offshoring of their jobs, because Syria and Iran provide Hizbollah with financial support and weapons that destroy Israeli tanks.

Syria, of course, is currently resisting its destruction by Israel and its american puppet state. The overthrow of Syria hasn’t gone well, because the Russians and Chinese didn’t go along with it, like they stupidly did in Libya. But the far rightwing Israeli government has concluded that with american prestige involved in the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, the deed will be done.

That leaves Iran. The Israeli government knows that it cannot be forthright and say that it wants Americans to go to war with Iran so that Israel can steal southern Lebanon. But if fear over nonexistent nukes can muster the Western populations to support an attack on Iran, Iran can be eliminated as Hizbollah’s supplier, and Israel can steal the water from Lebanon.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the real agenda anywhere in the US print and TV media. I doubt there is any discussion anywhere in Europe, which is a collection of american puppet states.

Will we get World War III for Christmas? Possibly, if the US election is close as it approaches. If the election is too close to call, Netanyahu might throw the dice and rely on Obama following his lead. Iran will be attacked, and the consequences are unknowable.

Let’s turn to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Like Iran, Assange has been demonized, not on the basis of facts but on the basis of lies.

Washington, which poses as a purveyor of human rights, has been mistreating if not torturing Bradley Manning since May 2010 without bringing him to trial in an effort to make Manning say that he and Assange constitute a spy team working against the US.

Assange is a celebrity, because Wikileaks publishes the news leaked to the organization that the Presstitute media suppresses. While in Sweden, Assange was picked up by two celebrity-hungry women who took him home to their beds. The women later bragged of their conquests on social media, but apparently when they found out that they were rivals, they turned on the “two-timer” Assange and made charges. One claimed that he had not used a condom as per her request, and the other claimed that she had offered one helping but he had taken two.

Whatever the accusations, the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dismissed the case.

Despite this known fact, the Western Presstitute media reports that Assange is a fugitive evading rape charges by hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Even RT, an alternative media voice, has fallen for this disinformation.

After Assange was cleared in Sweden, a female prosecutor has tried to reopen the case. There is no evidence for her to bring charges, so she demanded that England arrest Assange and extradite him to Sweden to be questioned.

Normally, people are not subject to extradition for questioning. Only people who have been formally charged are extradited. But this detail wasn’t of interest to the Presstitute media or to the British courts which ruled as Washington desired.

Opinions vary as to whether the female prosecutor who wants Assange for questioning is an ideological feminist who believes no heterosexual sex is legitimate or whether she is in the pay of Washington. But experts agree that once Assange is in Sweden he is certain to be turned over to Washington, which will demand his extradition on trumped up charges. Extradition on trumped up charges is difficult in England but easy in Sweden.

Assange offered to be questioned in London, but the female prosecutor refused. Now the Ecuadoran Embassy is offering to send Assange to the Ecuadoran Embassy in Sweden to be questioned, but Washington, London, and the Swedish prosecutor have refused. They want Assange without the protection of the asylum that Ecuador has granted him.

Washington has how made this obvious. John Glaser writing in Antiwar.com, September 26, 2012, reports: “Newly declassified documents have revealed that the US military designated WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an enemy of the state, who can be killed or detained without trial.”

 http://news.antiwar.com/2012/09/26/declassified-documents-reveal-us-military-designated-assange-enemy-of-state/
See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/wikileaks-investigation-enemy 

Assange is Washington’s enemy, because he let the truth get out. WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise, not a spy enterprise. It publishes information, some of which is leaked to it by whistleblowers, just as the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times. The information leaked to WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington, because it shows Washington to be two-faced, a manipulator of other countries’ governments and medias, and overflowing with mendacity.

In other words, Washington is not the light upon the hill, but the gates of Hell or Mordor.

Assange had best be careful. If he again speaks to supportive crowds from a balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, he is likely to be shot down by a CIA sniper.

Approved by Obama, of course. Or his successor.

On RNC Opening Night, Republicans Dare to Build a Lie

By Charles P. Pierce - Esquire Magazine

TAMPA, Fla. — It was about halfway through the speech given by Mary Fallin, by the grace of a pitiless god the governor of Oklahoma, where I finally came close to losing it. She rolled herself into this remarkable passage:

The history of my great state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers movibe west to seek better lives. During the Great Land Run of 1889, thousands of families rushed to put a stake down on empty plots of land. They built tent cities overnight. They farmed the land and they worked hard. And, in 1897, eight years after the land run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money — not the federal government's money — to drill Oklahoma's first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone. By doing so, these early-day pioneers changed the future and Oklahoma forever and today Oklahoma is one of the nation's key energy producers and job creators. President Obama wants us to believe that Oklahomans owe that success to the federal government — to the Department Of Energy,to the EPA, to the IRS, or maybe even to him. Mr. President, we know better. As we say in Oklahoma, that dog won't hunt.

Handed in as a seventh-grade history essay, this would get no better than a D. Delivered to the convention of one of our only two political parties, it was perhaps the most singularly dishonest speech I have ever seen a politician give, and I grew up in Massachusetts, and Willard Romney was once my governor. My god, Oklahomans wouldn't even have Oklahoma without the federal government, without the Homestead Act of 1889 or the Railroad Act — both, by the way, achievements of a Republican presidents named Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Harrison.

And the land wasn't exactly "empty," Governor. It got emptied by a big-government program called the United States Army. You know what your state would be without the federal government, Governor, without the votes for the legislation from congressmen from the east and north, without the soldiers from New England and the Great Lakes? You know what Oklahoma would be?

Sand, with a whole lot of pissed-off Native Americans.

I'm not sure if it will be played this way. Ann Romney was sweet and lovely — and very defensive about people "attacking" hubby's success, but only as a "mom," of course — and Chris Christie brought down the house. But the Republican Party did something remarkable at its convention on Tuesday. It set out on an experiment to see exactly how much unmitigated hogwash the American political system can contain on a single evening. The Republican Party has set out at its 2012 convention in search of the Event Horizon of utter bullshit. It has sought to see precisely how many lies, evasions, elisions, and undigestible chunks of utter gobbledegook the political media can swallow before it finally gags twice and falls over dead, leaving the rest of America suckers all the same. What you didn't see in primetime, from Arthur Davis to Ted Cruz, and from one 2016 contender to another, was the GOP embarking upon the task of seeing exactly how much nonsense it could produce at top volume before democracy screams and gives up, like Noriega in Panama when they played the metal music at him.

It was something to see, I'll tell you. An entire evening based on a demonstrable lie.
The theme was We Did Build It — which, as every sentient being knows, is a mendacious barbering of something the president said a while back. (On the video screens in the hall, television commercials based on a severely edited version of the president's remarks were interspersed between the speeches, just in case somebody sought relief from the lies for a couple of seconds.) And there also was a lot of talk about how the various speakers Did Build It.

There was Jack Gilchrist from New Hampshire, the metal-shop owner, who was briefly an important Romney surrogate until it was revealed that his company took a few cool millions in small-business loans. There was Sher Valenzuela, running for lieutenant governor of Delaware, who talked about how she and her husband Did Build their business. She also talked about her husband, who was a soldier, and her father, the former drill sergeant and "a blue-collar union guy." She did not talk about her sideline, which is giving PowerPoint presentations to people — probably, I am sure, not in convention centers built with tax dollars — on how to suck up government contracts. There was a similar thing going on with Bob McDonnell, the slippery, up-and-coming transvaginalist of Virginia, who proved that his family Did Build It, by having his father join the army, his children doing the same, and himself, finding the "same job" in government once held by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. After listening to this laughable bafflegab for a spell, you begin to wonder whether or not the U.S. military is a rather large venture-capital concern with anti-tank weapons.

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie. And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it.

The Republicans simply don't care.

They don't care that they lie. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie. ("They believe in teacher's unions. We believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them.) They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us.

Did Ted Cruz really quote Martin King in this hall? Did Artur Davis, the newly minted Republican turncoat from Alabama, just cite Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Lyndon Fking Johnson as examples of "leaders" who "reached across the aisle"? Lyndon reached across the aisle? Yeah, he did, and he grabbed their peckers and put them in his pocket, and he didn't give them back until the skinflint bastards coughed up Medicare. Jesus, this was pathetic. They don't care that they lie so obviously that they always get caught, like they did with the evening's entire theme, like they have in and around the Tampa Bay Times Forum, or with the story of poor Jack Gilchrist. The Republicans will just tell the lie again. And again. And once more, until people get tired of telling the truth in response.

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie because it was an entire evening based on rejecting — publicly and dishonestly, and without caring that the facts of your own biographies give the lie to the words you're saying — the idea of a general political commonwealth as expressed through the national government, which has been the great engine behind the expansion of the country's size, the country's wealth, and, yes, the country's freedom. It was a purchase in that political commonwealth, and not in a loose confederation of states, that King sought, and that Lyndon sought to give the country's poorest citizens, including the vote, which the government of John Kasich in Ohio is presently working assiduously to roll back.

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie, and it was topped off by a demonstrable liar named Chris Christie, who talked about how the president can't lead, and that nobody wants to tell the Americans the truth of the sacrifices we have to share, and talked about "politicians who pander" at a convention that is preparing to nominate Willard Romney, which was the final hilarious lie of the night, since Romney hasn't stopped pandering since he walked down the steps of the Massachusetts State House in 2006.

Earlier, though, Christie rang the theme of the evening's overriding demonstrable lie, too. He talked about how his family Built It, his Irish father and his Sicilian mother.

They both lived hard lives. Dad grew up in poverty. After returning from Army service, he worked at the Breyer's ice-cream plant in the 1950's. With that job, and the GI Bill, he put himself through Rutgers University at night to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.

Chris, old man, you didn't even build yourself yourself. The tax dollars — the federal tax dollars — of, among other people, my parents paid your father's Army salary, and they paid for the G.I. Bill. The tax dollars of thousands of other people paid for his education at Rutgers, which is, as it proclaims, The State University Of New Jersey. All of them were proud to do it, because they knew that they were part of a political commonwealth that has as its proudest expression a national government in which all citizens have purchase.

And, Chris, and Bob, and Sher, and Jack, and all of you, you're welcome.
Liars.

Last Friday’s Jobs Report: More Lies From “our” Big Brother

by Paul Craig Roberts
August 4, 2012

In his report on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs and unemployment report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes:  

“The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading. . . . Suspecting at one time that the jobs numbers were being rigged against him by his own Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Richard M. Nixon proposed a new approach to reporting the numbers.  Although the proposed changes never were implemented, several decades later the BLS adopted reporting methods that were somewhat parallel to the late president’s thinking.”

I will spare the readers an explanation of Williams’ account of the manipulation that is occurring as it is too arcane for the general reader.

Instead, Let’s just apply common sense. According to the BLS, there were 163,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs created in July. This figure is about 13,000 more jobs than is needed to keep pace with population growth. Therefore, the unemployment rate should have declined fractionally. Instead, the unemployment rate (U3) rose from 8.2% to 8.3%.

In case you missed the point: new jobs--a net figure--rose and so did the unemployment rate!
Moreover, the alternative, but much less reported, jobs report from the Household Survey found that the economy lost 195,000 jobs in July. 

The government that lies to you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about Iraq’s al Qaeda connections, about the Taliban in Afghanistan, about Osama bin Laden, about Libya and Gadhafi, about Iranian nukes, about Syria, about Pakistan, about Yemen and Somalia, about Bradley Manning, about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, indeed about everything under the sun, also lies to you about jobs, unemployment, economic recovery, GDP growth, 9/11, the “terrorist threat,” everything.

Try to find anything that the government has said over the past 6 presidential terms that is not a lie.

Other than some minor insignificant detail, “your” government has been consistently lying to you about everything of importance.

“Your” government lies to you, because “your” government has an agenda that it most certainly will not tell you about, because if you knew what it is, you would revolt.

Putting down the revolt would divert the government from its agenda. It would also alert the rest of the world to the fact that the US government has an undeclared agenda of world domination, despite the costs to the American people and every other people. World War III looms. 

Nuclear annihilation is the necessary outcome of the neoconservatives’ drive for US world hegemony. Syria can fall, and Iran can fall, but Russia and China are unlikely to accept their reduction to puppet state status. As both are nuclear armed and as the crazed criminals in charge of the US government are wallowing in hubris, nuclear war seems inevitable.

The world’s most mortal enemy is Washington. If Washington prevails, the world will be dead or in slavery to Washington, including all american subjects, whether Democrats or Republicans.

Don’t let it ever be said that your enemy, whatever your country, has not been identified.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Reagan, and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate.

Disinformation On Every Front

Disinformation On Every Front

By: Paul Craig Roberts| May 4, 2012 |

Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to Americans.

If I may give some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity to relive the Nixon horror.

What precisely was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the Watergate burglary.

When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.

By going along with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary. White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up and had to go, but what was the real reason?

What was the Watergate burglary? We don’t really know. A group of men including former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate complex. We don’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere. Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls, that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly one of the call girls.

Looking back from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality, Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable. Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.

What was Watergate really about?

I doubt we will ever know. But I can offer one possible explanation. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy before him, alarmed the military/security complex with his plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam (Vietnamization) and his determination to open communication with communist China and improve relations.

As President Eisenhower warned in his last address to the American people, conflict brings power and profit to interest groups that benefit from conflict. Nixon, like Kennedy before him, was perceived as a threat by these powerful interests, because he was working to reduce conflict.

James W. Douglass in his documented book, JFK and the Unspeakable, attributes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service. Douglas reports that these powerful government institutions were concerned by Kennedy’s refusal to approve Operation Northwoods, to back the CIA’s invasion of Cuba, and to confront the Soviets militarily over the Cuban missile crisis and by Kennedy’s plans to end US military intervention in Vietnam. JFK also told his brother Robert that after his re-election he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.

The right-wing view that Kennedy was too soft to stand up to communism was intensified when it was learned that Kennedy was working with Nikita Khrushchev through back channels to defuse the Cold War. In his “A Strategy of Peace” speech (June 1963), Kennedy announced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing.

“What kind of a peace do we seek?,” Kennedy asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” With his words and deeds, President Kennedy made himself into a threat against the interests of the military/security complex.

There was enough suspicion of JFK’s assassination that yet another president assassinated by another “unhinged lone gunman” might raise more eyebrows. Nixon was disliked by the media, which made him a good candidate for political assassination. The Watergate burglary provided the opportunity. The Washington Post did the job with reports of “Deep Throat” meeting with reporters in spooky underground parking lots after midnight. Little, if any, information of consequence was contained in these reports. Instead, the newspaper’s reporting transferred the spooky danger of the deserted parking garages to Nixon and an aura of evil was attached to Nixon that eroded his support.

It is interesting that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict who become targets for assassination. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was strong enough to fool the left-wing, but the military-security complex knew of Reagan’s intention to end the Cold War. The CIA, formerly headed by Reagan’s vice president, opposed Reagan’s plan to put the pressure of an arms race on the creaking Soviet economy. The CIA argued that the centrally planned Soviet economy allowed the Kremlin to control investment and that the Communist Party could allocate whatever percentage of Soviet GDP to the military as was needed to win the arms race. In other words, the CIA argued that the US would lose the arms race if Reagan raised the stakes as a means of bringing the Soviets to negotiate the end of the Cold War. Did the CIA really believe this, or was the military/security complex trying to keep the profitable Cold War stalemate going?

Washington cannot exist without conflict. Now that the “Muslim threat” is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China. Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific. As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat.

Moving on to another topic, Americans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after.

As RT recently reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the mantra that “education is the answer.”

“Education is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment.

Education is not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them. Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond the ability of salaries to repay the loans.

Professional tradable service employment in the US is so scarce that the University of Florida has abolished its computer science department. As few of the graduates can find employment, the university has reallocated the department’s budget to football, a paying sport.

Americans plugged into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct information provided by a varied and “independent media.” In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by corporate advertising executives and Washington.

Recently, Bloomberg gave us the report that “Japan, Denmark and Switzerland are among the countries to rally this week to [IMF chief] Lagarde’s call for a bigger lending capacity beyond the current $380 billion to shield the world economy against any deepening of Europe’s debt turmoil.”

This Bloomberg report is nonsensical. The loans are not shielding the world economy. The loans are shielding the private banks from their own mistakes at the expense of the world economy. The Bloomberg report shows how completely the Western media is involved in forcing ordinary peoples to subsidize private bankers. It could not be more clear; yet, there is no embarrassment at Bloomberg for serving as the bankers’ propagandist.

Indeed, there is only honor. Serving the Matrix is where lie the rewards. Those who oppose the Matrix are the outcasts whose efforts might, as in the film, save the race of humans from the domination of evil, or else, if they lose, confine the outcasts to prosecution and death.

Across every front Americans are fed lies. The official media line is that the Japanese Fukushima nuclear threat from the earthquake and aftermath is well contained and over. However, the fact of the matter appears to be that an amazing radioactive inventory of both spent and unused fuel rods is in damaged cooling pools that could suffer collapse at any time (especially if there is another earthquake), thus releasing enormous radioactivity (reference link). This possibility presents a greater threat than the initial molten cores of the reactors themselves. Michael Chossudovsky points out that the media is yet to acknowledge the widespread contamination resulting from the Fukushima disaster, and there may be worse to come.

But who cares? Back to the Matrix and the “reality show.”

Corporate Welfare By Job Blackmail

by Robert Oak on Tue, 05/01/2012 - The Economic Populist

You know how States are hurting? How budgets are in the red to the point some towns cannot even hold elections? Adding insult to injury comes the news States are allowing corporations to pocket taxes they take out of your paycheck and pocket the money for themselves. I kid you not.

Nearly $700 million a year in state income taxes withheld from worker paychecks in 16 states is being used to provide lavish subsidies to corporations rather than paying for vital public services. These diversions have gone to more than 2,700 companies, including major firms such as Sears, Goldman Sachs and General Electric. Few if any of the affected workers are aware, because no state requires they be informed on their pay stubs.

David Cay Johnston put together this nifty video overviewing how corporations manage to take state taxes out of your paycheck yet pocket the money.

The problem with these subsidies is the lie they are used to create jobs. Instead, corporations move from state to state, counting the jobs lost from one state as new jobs in another, all to get the tax subsidy. From the Taxes to the Boss report:

Many of the programs analyzed in this study are routinely used in deals that involve interstate job piracy. 

Revealingly, none of the 22 programs examined here has any form of interstate job piracy prohibition. And when counting “new jobs,” none requires a company to distinguish between truly new jobs versus existing jobs that have been merely relocated from another state.

On the Good Jobs First website is a spreadsheet listing the tax subsidy amount and the number of jobs created, or claimed to be created by businesses receiving these state tax subsidies.

General Electric actually had one of the largest job creations, 5,000. Yet their subsidy, from Ohio, was $115.34 million. That is $23,000 per job. In other words, Ohio could simply remove the subsidy and pay 5,000 state residents directly $23,000 and get the same result, particularly in this day and age of permanent employment being an oxymoron phrase and firings happen routinely. This is also assuming the G.E. jobs listed are actually new and not using foreign guest workers or moved from another state. Many of the subsidies list no jobs data at all in the spreadsheet, which one would think would be mandatory to be publicly reported and verified if a business is getting a tax credit to supposedly create jobs.

The spreadsheet list is quite amusing. Arkema Inc., for example, in 2008 received $8 million in subsidies. The number of jobs counted? 10. Thank Kentucky for this lovely use of taxes paid by existing workers as corporate welfare. Not to be outdone, Carbide Industries LLC, also in Kentucky, received $6.5 million in subsidies, to create a whopping 9 jobs. General Aluminum Manufacturing Co. managed to get over $1 million dollars by creating zero, count 'em, jobs.

The title of the tax credit which enabled a free, cool 1 mil to be handed to General Aluminum Manufacturing from Ohio workers is the Job Creation Tax Credit. You might ask yourself, is this a joke? Why, yes it is and the joke's on you, worker bee.

Organizations who clearly are questionable as job creating businesses are on this list. Take Benjamin Zolper, M.D. dba Northeast Pain Management. He received over $45 thousand for creating 9 jobs. Think about a individual MD getting a tax subsidy for 9 jobs and consider his clinic title, pain management. Now think about the pain Ohio goes through to provide basic services to state residents.


David Cay Johnston also went digging further and outlined his additional findings in the below interview.

This isn't by far the only corporate welfare scheme going. Apple just hit the news with an effective 9.8% tax rate, achieved by using the double dutch corporate tax loophole. The moving of assets around the globe in order to pay no taxes is the same trick Google and a host of other corporations use. The only businesses paying a high tax rate in the United States are the ones who cannot afford teams of corporate tax attorneys figuring out how to pay none. That's the little guy folks and squeezing regular people until the stone bleeds dry has become our new national mantra.


Naked Capitalism also covered this latest corporate tax gem. Good jobs first also has an online subsidy tracker so you too can see who the latest corporate welfare recipient is as your roads go unpaved, your water supply is undrinkable and your local police are laid off.

US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions

Monday, February 20, 2012 by Common Dreams
Republican Hypocrisy; Democratic Complicity; The Press’s Malfeasance; and Why You Don’t Have a Job and if You Do, Why it Doesn’t Pay Squat
by John Atcheson

The United States is a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want.

Why?

Because the country is running on lies, myths, deceptions and distractions. Not surprisingly, they aren’t working very well for us. Let’s run through a few of the most destructive lies and myths:

1. Corporations and the uber rich are the job creators: Uh, no. Corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion dollars in un-invested profits. What jobs they are creating are in China and other countries – which, by the way, engaged in huge government funded stimulus programs when the Great Recession first hit. 
2. Government can’t create jobs: This particular whopper is just plain counterfactual. Obama’s much maligned stimulus program created some 3 million jobs and would have created more if he hadn’t caved to Republicans and limited its size and agreed to put 40% of it into unproductive tax cuts. In short, government does create jobs – no one else can or will when there’s not enough consumer demand to justify corporate expansion. And as long as the middle class’s wealth is getting siphoned off by the 1%, there will not be enough demand.
3. The deficit is our main problem, therefore we need an austerity budget: The story line from deficit hawks is that a deficit will spook bond markets and make it difficult for the US to borrow. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, demand is so high for our bonds, we’re able to borrow at record low interest rates. And while folks are practically lining up to buy our debt instruments, they’re eschewing investments in countries which instituted austerity plans. Yet the Obama Administration continues to join with the Republicans in insane hand wringing over deficits. Yes, we must bring down the deficit eventually, but not in the midst of a jobs crisis. In the long term, there are two ways to cut the deficit: grow our way out of it, or cut spending to the bone, and face a stagnating economy for the foreseeable future. If we’re to avoid the latter, right now we need government investment to stimulate growth.
4. Republicans actually care about deficits: Let’s put a stake in the heart of this one right now. Reagan and the two Bushes created more than 66% of the country's debt -- an amount equal to more than twice as much as all other President's combined (including Obama). Did you hear any complaints while this record breaking debt was being wracked up? Not a word. Clinton, it’s worth remembering, had a surplus.
5. Republicans favor small government: In fact, the size of government exploded under Reagan and Bush II, and we didn’t hear a peep out of Republicans. In the last thirty years, only Clinton reduced the size of government significantly, and he did so while declaring “the era of big government” to be over. What they really favor is weak government, which brings us to …
6. Regulations stifle the economy; deregulation unleashes economic growth: The fact is, laissez-faire, free market policies have failed miserably every time they’ve been tried. They have a nasty habit of causing grotesque income inequalities, huge market volatility and severe financial collapses. In fact, the Great Recession we are now climbing out of should have been strike 3 for the Free Marketeers. Strike 1 was the Panic of 1893 and the depression which followed it. Strike 2 was the Great Depression of the 30’s. In all three cases, these collapses were preceded by conservative, laissez-faire policies featuring deregulation, low taxes and weak governments.  Three tries – each resulting in severe income inequality and the catastrophic economic meltdowns they inevitably cause. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this strategy doesn’t work.
7. Climate Change is “just a theory” and we can’t afford to address it: Leaving aside the fact that in the pantheon of science, “theories” are reserved for issues that are about as certain as the scientific method allows, the scientific consensus on global warming is as strong as it gets. And we know that the costs of not acting to prevent it are going to be far more than the cost of taking action, and it goes up with each year we delay. Thanks to Republican denial, Democratic complicity and press malfeasance, we’re literally sleepwalking into the worst catastrophe the human race has ever faced.
8. Republicans want to protect your freedom. Except when they want to tell you who you can sleep with, who you can marry, whether or not you can use birth control; when and whether you can choose to die; or when they want to tap your phone or detain you without due process, of course.

So why is it that these myths and lies – so easily disproven – persist. Indeed, why have they become conventional wisdom for many Americans, and why do they shape the national debate?

Here’s where the Democrats, distractions and the press’s malfeasance comes in.

Republicans throw up a lot of flack to keep people from focusing on the fact that they’re basically getting screwed by the 1%. Red meat issues like gay marriage, abortion and contraception, family values, and immigration do their part. Bald-faced lies like “Obama apologizes for America,” or he was born in Kenya contribute as well. But it only works because Democrats are too wimpy – or too complicit – to confront this bait-and-switch bullshit.

It doesn’t help that Democrats are feeding at the same corporate trough. No doubt that explains why they act like the class cowards and cringe in the last stall in the bathroom every time one of these faux issues get raised.

But the real culprit is the press – they’ve simply abrogated their responsibility to give people accurate, truthful information. Several weeks ago, New York Times “reader’s representative” Andy Brisbane actually asked readers whether reporters should be concerned with the truth. Honestly. He did.

We are now stuck with a media that puts “balance” or “objectivity” before truth. As Eric Sevareid said:

“Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity … have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.”

This is more true today than it was then. And without a press devoted to honesty and accuracy, our ship of state runs on yarns, myths and the modern day equivalent of “bread and circuses,” and we are at the mercy of the evil, the foolish and the ignorant.

As long as that’s the case, the whims of the 1% will rule and your pay will continue to erode, or your job will exported to China or India or Honduras or anywhere the plutocrats are free to exploit workers and the environment. Or to places like Germany, where they don’t buy into the myths, and an active government role assures high-wage jobs and general prosperity.

At the end of the day, trying to run a country according to the rules of fantasy island isn’t a recipe for success. But it does serve the interests of the 1%.

Six Big Lies About The Economy

From The Uptake -- Reich Debunks Six Big Lies About The Economy:

Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme as Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry claims? Noted author and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich debunks that claim and five other lies the right-wing tells about taxes, government and the economy. The lies Reich debunks:

1. Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us. (No it doesn't and it never has.)
2. If you shrink government you create jobs. (No, you get rid of jobs that way.)
3. High taxes on the rich hurts the economy. (No, the economy grew when the US did this under Eisenhower.)
4. Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare. (No, if debt is properly used to grow the economy, it becomes a smaller part of the budget because of increased revenue and Medicare has the lowest overhead of any health insurance plan out there.)
5. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (No, its solid for 26 years. Rick Perry is "lying through his teeth" says Reich. Social Security is solid beyond that if the rich pay the same percentage in social security taxes as the rest of us do.)
6. We need to tax the poor. (This is what Republicans have been proposing when they say any tax reform needs to involve all Americans because poor people pay no income tax. The poor have no money and taxing them will not solve our budget problems.)

Responding to PolitiFact, Stewart reads laundry list of Fox News lies

By Stephen C. Webster | 06.22.11 | RAW Story

When comedian Jon Stewart told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Fox News viewers are the “most consistently misinformed” in “every poll,” he may have let his rhetoric run away from him, just a little — and he got fact checked by PolitiFact, which called his allegation “false.”

On Tuesday night’s show, Stewart apologized and corrected the statement, then turned around a laundry list of Fox News lies and PolitiFact’s ratings.

“Well, I tell ya what … They’ve got a lot of fucking correcting to do,” he concluded.

This video is from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, broadcast Tuesday, June 22, 2011.

The Daily Show

Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Here is Stewart's unedited appearance on FOX News Sunday.

Wall Street's Biggest Lies of 2010

What a great year for Wall Street: profits up, bonuses up and, best of all, criticism down. Somehow Wall Street has much of America believing its lies and rationalizations.
By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on December 29, 2010

What a great year for Wall Street: profits up, bonuses up and, best of all, criticism down, especially from Washington. Somehow Wall Street has much of America believing its lies and rationalizations. We're even beginning to forget that Wall Street is largely responsible for the economic mess we're in.

So before we're completely overtaken by financial Alzheimer's, let's revisit Wall Street's greatest fabrications for 2010. (For the full story, please see The Looting of America.)

1."Honest, we didn't do it!"
Two years ago Wall Street's colossal greed crashed our economy. Our financial elites created and spewed highly leveraged toxic assets around the globe. These poisonous "innovations" pumped up the housing bubble and Wall Street grew insanely rich in the process. When it all burst, we learned that the big Wall Street institutions that had caused the crash were far too big to fail -- and too connected. High government officials came to their rescue with trillions in cash and guarantees -- underwritten, of course, by we taxpayers. Everyone knew this at the time. But if you asked just about anyone on "The Street" they denied all culpability and pointed the finger everywhere else: Fannie, Freddie, the Fed, the Community Reinvestment Act, tax deductions for home buying, bad regulations, not enough regulations, too many regulations, too much consumer debt, the rating agencies, the Chinese -- and on and on. Sadly, their blame-shifting strategy worked, bamboozling the media and people across the political spectrum. The GOP members of the Financial Crisis Commission are so drunk with this Kool-Aid that in their minority report, they refuse even to use the words "Wall Street" or "speculation" in assessing the causes of the crash. Hypocrites? Crooks? Morons? Take your pick.

2."The overall costs will be incredibly small in comparison to almost any experience we can look at in the United States or around the world."
Ever since Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner screwed up his tax returns we knew he was numerically challenged. But his statement to Congress on December 16, 2010, on the cost of the bailout shows a willful inability to count. Yes, Wall Street has paid back most of our bailout funds. Whoopee! Our economy is in shambles, and millions of people are suffering. With his offensive "no big deal" analysis, Geithner glosses over all this human misery, and sidesteps the hidden costs of the bailout, including the financial insurance we taxpayers provided to every giant financial company in the country via the Fed. On the open market, that insurance -- which guarantees trillions of dollars in toxic assets -- would come at a very steep price. We coughed it up for free. But that's still chump change compared to the human costs of the worst employment crisis since the Great Depression -- the lost income, the depleted savings, the ravaged neighborhoods. Then there's the capsized state and local budgets, the public service reductions, the laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers -- all resulting from a plunge in public revenues caused by Wall Street's crash. Why aren't these costs on Geithner's balance sheet? A cynic might think Tim was priming us to accept the latest round of Wall Street bonuses. Hey -- they paid us back, so why should we care how much they earn?

3. "It's a war. It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."
Steven Schwarzman is supposed to be brilliant. After all, he made billions as head of the Blackstone Group, a private equity company and hedge fund. But last August, as some members of Congress mulled about eliminating a very lucrative tax loophole, he suffered a mental meltdown and saw an impending Nazi invasion. But the awful attack never happened. Schwartzman and his fellow hedge fund honchos all held onto their unbelievable tax break: Hedge fund and private equity income is still only taxed at 15 percent rather than at the top income tax rate of 35 percent. (That's because, inexplicably, it's considered "capital gains," not income.) Taxing Schwartzman's income as income would cost him hundreds of millions of dollars -- and the prospect of this apparently triggered a shock spasm that catapulted his foot into his mouth. I'm sure my IQ isn't high enough to keep up with the genius logic behind Steve's analogy. But just who is Hitler and who is Poland in his scenario? Maybe in his grandiose conceit, his firm is as big as Poland? Or it would require a Blitzkrieg to wipe out his tax loophole? In reality, even if Schwarzman had to pay a 90 percent tax rate (as he would have under Eisenhower), it would hardly have been a hardship -- let alone World War 3. He'd still have more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime. Schwarzman should be proud though: He gets 2010's Dumbest Wall Street Quote of the Year Award. Bravo! (In 2009 the honor went to Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who claimed he was "doing God's work."

4. "The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government."
But not by Wall Street. President Obama words of November 29th came only days before he "compromised" with the Republicans to continue the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich and to bestow an enormous estate tax gift to the 6,600 richest families in America. Mr. President, the "hard truth" is that you're slapping around public sector workers because you don't have the nerve to take on Wall Street. If you had the guts, you could raise real money by going to war with Steven Schwartzman and eliminating the hedge fund tax loophole. By the way, closing that loophole for just the top 25 hedge fund managers would raise twice the revenue than you'll get by freezing the wages of all two million federal workers! (See "The Wall Street Tax Debate that Never Was" )

5. "25 hedge fund managers are worth 658,000 teachers."
Nearly everyone on Wall Street sincerely believes that they are "worth" the enormous sums they "earn." You see, their pay is determined by the market, and markets don't lie. They reflect the high value our skilled elites bring to the economy. So we shouldn't be shocked that the top 25 hedge fund managers together "earn" $25 billion a year, even at a moment when more than 29 million Americans can't find full-time work. The outrageous economic logic of Wall Street compensation has those 25 moguls taking home as much as 658,000 entry level teachers (they earn about $38,000 per year). How can that be justified? It can't. These obscene "earnings" are the product of 30 years of financial deregulation, as well as the tax cuts and tax loopholes that our government has just extended. The hedge fund honchos get most of their money by siphoning off wealth from the rest of us, not by creating new value. I dare Wall Street to prove otherwise.

6. "To bolster the economy we need .... an improvement in the relationship between business and government (the current antagonism, even if not the primary explanation for slow hiring and sluggish investment, does seem to be affecting hiring and other business behavior)."
In this op-ed, Peter Orszag, Obama's former budget director, parrots the Wall Street line that employers aren't hiring because of "regulatory uncertainty." Mother of God, how much more certainty do they want? The Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats aren't about to let Obama seriously regulate Wall Street, even if he wanted to, which he doesn't. The truth is that employers aren't hiring because there's insufficient consumer demand for goods and services. But at least Peter Orszag is a man of his word. He personally plans to "improve the relationship between business and government" by tapping his government contacts at his new fat job at Citigroup, the nearly failed mega-bank that he helped to save at taxpayer expense. Orszag could have landed a coveted professorship at just about any university in the world. But apparently the 42-year-old wiz kid prefers Citigroup's multi-million dollar compensation package. Any bets on how long it takes for Larry Summers to cash in?

7. "Lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points."
You see, the unemployed cause their own unemployment, at least if you believe this assessment from a March 17th research note from JP Morgan Chase. (Next, Wall Street will call for a return of the Poor Houses.) The theory is simple -- you give people money not to work and they won't look for jobs. Still, it takes chutzpah for JP Morgan Chase, the beneficiary of billions of dollars in taxpayer largess, to criticize the unemployed for not finding jobs that aren't there, precisely because JP Morgan Chase helped to destroy them! Dear JP Morgan research staff: Five to six workers are now competing for every available job. If that's too complicated for you quants to grasp, maybe you should try a game of musical chairs in the trading room.

8. "Private employers, led by our revitalized financial sector, will create the jobs we need -- that is, if the government would just stay out of the way."
We now need 22 million new jobs to get us back to full employment (5 percent unemployment). In addition, each month the economy must generate another 105,000 jobs just to keep up with new entrants into the workforce. To get to full employment, the private sector would have to create about 630 firms the size of Apple (35,000 employees each). These numbers don't lie. Does anyone on Wall Street really believe that the private sector alone can pull off this miracle? But really, why should they care? They've got theirs, thank you very much. The painful truth that both Wall Street and Washington refuse to face is that if the big, bad government doesn't fund or create millions of new jobs, we'll face crippling unemployment for decades to come.

9. "Tim Geithner extolled 'the benefits of financial innovation' to the American economy." (Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2010)
Sorry to beat up on Tim again, but it's sometimes hard to tell who he's working for. Whenever you hear the phrase "financial innovation" put your hand on your wallet. That's the phrase Wall Street uses to justify its casinos and its outlandish profits and bonuses. People who talk about "financial innovation" are either getting big bucks on Wall Street, want more bucks on Wall Street, or hope to get a job on Wall Street the nano-second their public service ends. My question for Tim is: If Apple creates iPhones, what does Wall Street create? Warren Buffett says it creates "financial weapons of mass destruction." Paul Volcker, Reagan's Fed Chair, said there is not a "shred of evidence" that "financial innovation" is beneficial. Volcker also believes that the economy "was quite good in the 1980s without credit-default swaps and without securitization and without CDOs." Volcker gets the Smartest Wall Street Quote of the Year Award: "The most important financial innovation I've seen in the last 25 years is the automatic teller machine." How could Tim get it so wrong?


10. "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here." Okay, okay, Claude Raines said that in Casablanca, not on Wall Street. But Wall Street and its defenders say exactly the same thing about their opaque derivatives games. Louise Story's excellent piece in The New York Times shows how a handful of banks have cornered the market clearinghouses for derivatives - entities that are supposed to make derivatives less risky. The big banks are limiting competition, according to Story, because they "want to preserve their profit margins, and they are the ones who helped write the membership rules." Meanwhile, Wall Street is quietly pushing to exempt its most profitable derivatives from even these rigged exchanges. So don't be "shocked, shocked" when Wall Street crashes again and we're asked to foot the bill. And that's when, not if.

How to Create an Angry American

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Film Shows How Bush Admin Lies Marred Legacy of Pat Tillman

The "Tillman story," tells the struggle his family went through to learn the truth about Tillman's death and how political leaders covered-up the real story
By Rory O'Connor, MediaChannel.org
Posted on August 16, 2010

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Of the many lies George W. Bush told us about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some were larger but none worse than that told about the death of Pat Tillman.

In 2004 – just after Bush’s invasion of Iraq, ostensibly in search of those non-existent weapons of mass destruction — Tillman became a military-and media-manufactured symbol of duty, sacrifice, patriotism and heroism. But the truth about Tillman’s life is much more complex, and his death ultimately far more heroic, than the convenient, self-serving lie served up by the military and then sent out by our ever-gullible media.

Tillman, a truly remarkable young man who walked away from a multi-million dollar contract as a professional football player to enlist as in the Army Rangers after the 9/11 attacks, is the subject of The Tillman Story, a moving documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev that opens in theatres in New York and Los Angeles this week. Although the film rightly tells the story of Pat Tillman’s remarkable life, it also focuses on a parallel Tillman story, that of the struggle his family went through to learn the truth about Tillman’s death from “friendly fire” and the ongoing cover-up of how and why our military and political leaders lied in order to exploit his heroism for propaganda purposes.

Tillman was on his second tour of duty when he was killed in Afghanistan — a victim of “fratricide,” inadvertently killed by his own troops during an ill-fated expedition. Our leaders should have told the truth — namely, that Corporal Tillman’s death was a senseless accident coupled with incompetence. Instead they lied — to all of us, but most despicably to his family – rewrote the details of his death, awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star, America’s third-highest military decoration, and turned the tragedy into an opportunity to promote their endless and unpopular wars.

Why did they lie? No doubt it began because at the time of Tillman’s death, in April 2004, the Bush war machine was roiled by a number of negative images that threatened to adversely affect public perception of the war in Iraq. Remember those haunting photographs and videos of the bodies of American contractors strung up in Fallujah? Can you ever forget the searing images depicting abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in the Abu Ghraib prison? Adding the news that American soldiers had gunned down a celebrated NFL star certainly wouldn’t help the war effort… So Pat Tillman was recast, in death, as a war hero and lesson to us all.

The Tillman Story excels in teaching us other lessons, however — not only about Corporal Pat Tillman, but also about his remarkable family, led by his indefatigable mother Dannie. It shows the arduous journey his family undertook to find the truth about what happened and to have someone held accountable not only for their son’s death but also for the added insult of its use as a propaganda tool. Handed a massive, confusing box of intelligence records — thousands of pages of documents about her son’s death – Dannie Tillman patiently dug through the voluminous material to uncover the roots of a carefully coordinated cover-up. Her efforts, along with that of Tillman’s father and other family members and friends, eventually forced a Congressional hearing into the matter. As the film dramatically demonstrates in its stunning climax, however, the ultimate fix was in… and although the many obvious lies and cover-ups can be tracked up to and even well beyond such military brass as the recently fired general Stanley McChrystal, in the end no one among the higher-ups was ever found blameworthy or even responsible for lying to the Tillman family and the nation.

In lieu of presenting a hagiography, Director Bar-Lev does an excellent job of humanizing Tillman and offering a multi-dimensional look at his actual character. Scenes with Tillman’s family as they lovingly describe his character and his close, funny and frequently profane relationship with two brothers (the film is unfortunately and unfairly burdened with an “R” rating as a result) along with testimony from family friends and fellow soldiers paint a clear portrait of who Tillman really was — warts and all. As Bar-Lev points out, Pat Tillman was no “paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view.” That impulse is what the director attempts to give back to his subject, after he had been dehumanized and exploited for political gain by America’s leaders, aided and abetted as usual by the complicit cheerleaders of the national news media.

“I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex,” Bar-Lev told Documentary magazine. “‘Hero’ is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they’re speaking about….

“I knew there were myths around his death,” Bar-Lev added, “but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life.”

“Ultimately, what I would want to have happen is just the truth,” Pat’s youngest brother Richard told ESPN.com. “At the end of the day, Pat deserves the truth. This isn’t about our family. This isn’t about the Tillmans. This is about Pat Tillman. And he deserves the truth, period. He sacrificed so much for his country, and then the government turns around and uses him for propaganda. That is totally unacceptable.”

Larry "Professor Pants-on-Fire" Summers

Geithner isn't the only douchebag making things worse. There's ol' Larry Summers putting his greasy thumbprints all over the place, too.

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Professor Pants-on-Fire
by WILLIAM GREIDER
April 23, 2010

How can I say this nicely? Larry Summers is a clumsy public liar. His noxious, condescending manner helps explain why he failed as president of Harvard. But it is the crude mendacity that ought to bother people now. The man is President Obama's top economic adviser.

Watching Summers befog the mild-mannered interviewer on the PBS NewsHour the other night, I found myself yelling back at the TV. It takes real arrogance for the former Harvard professor to imagine he can away with such evasions and falsehoods. I lost count on the fibs. If this is how Summers explains the financial mess to the president, maybe that's why Obama has been a reluctant reformer.

Banks "made mistakes" or "errors." That is as far as Summers would go in his critique. Instead of bailing out "too big to fail" banks, he was asked, why not just limit the size of the banks?

Bad idea, Summers said.

"Most observers who study this believe that to try to break banks up into a lot of little pieces would hurt our ability to try to serve large companies, and hurt the competitiveness of the United States.... They believe it would actually make us less stable because the individual banks would be less diversified.... dealing with the simultaneous failure of many small institutions would actually generate more need for bailouts and reliance on taxpayers than the current economic environment."

Say what? If Obama has other sources of information, like reading the newspapers, he can quickly determine that every element in Summer's statement ranges from dubious to flat-out false.

Summers's claims about what caused the banking crisis were, likewise, aggressively misleading to plain deceitful. "Regulators didn't have the specific mandate for the consumer." Wrong. The Federal Reserve and other agencies had plenty of legal authority to protect consumers. They chose not to use it. Their dereliction actually occurred on Summers's watch, when he himself was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.

"Regulators didn't have authority in a comprehensive way to monitor the derivatives market." This is a flaming lie. The principal regulatory agency--the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission--was actually preparing to impose stricter oversight on derivatives in the late 1990s when Larry Summers stopped it. Summers and Republican allies intervened in 2000 with legislation that castrated that agency and prohibited it from acting further. Derivatives exploded thereafter.

When Summers was finally asked about his own responsibility for encouraging the dangerous financial instruments, he responded with a mouthful of double talk. "You know, the situation's changed hugely.... So people were actually focused on a very different set of issues." Summers even tried to make it sound like he personally had wanted to tighten the oversight, but was blocked by "Congressional opposition."

Liar, liar, pants on fire. If Obama wants to have an economic adviser so loose with the truth, that's his choice. But if the president wants his own words to be taken seriously, I suggest he keep Larry Summers off television.

You are being lied to

In nearly every aspect of your life, you are being lied to. You are being sold a concept, a world view that isn't real--the American Dream you grew up hearing about doesn't belong to you. It doesn't exist. It never existed. And if it did, it only existed for certain people.


The America you studied in history class is the product of a carefully written myth. It's a trashy romance novel, a shitty comic book, a  crazy fable. In it, WE have always been the good guys, and our enemies were always so clearly written as bad guys. And we want to believe that, no matter what our political orientation is/was: we ARE the good guys...right?


In every election, we voted with our conscience thinking we made the right choice, our decisions were informed. We were solid in that understanding, but unaware that our choices have always been made for us. The candidates for political office were picked by their corporate sponsors. It used to be a secret, but it doesn't have to be a secret anymore. The Supreme Court said as much recently.(Look it up.)


It's sort of like when you were under 21 and had a fake ID. You used it at this one bar and everyone got to know you, even the door guy. But when you finally turned 21, you used your real ID and told everyone in the bar it was your 21st birthday and now you're legal. Nobody says anything, but they're pretty pissed you risked their bar getting in trouble.


That's how we are. Most of us have long suspected that our politicians were controlled, influenced, beholden to something greater than they with lots of money. It has many "projected" names: the "new world order," "illuminati," "they"--but it's just Corporate America's plutocratic oligarchy. And that's bad enough.


We are corporate Americans--well, until we no longer participate to our fullest extent in the economy. Many of us are being phased out--whether by layoffs or outsourcing--and unable to find new jobs. It's a weeding out process that runs concurrently with this "small 'd' depression." Some of us have been unemployed for so long, we aren't even considered in the unemployment stats--just in the "real unemployment rate" you get from sources that aren't mainstream. The jobs that have gone away are gone forever. They aren't coming back. They won't be "recovered." McDonald's is the only corporation hiring, even though many corporations and whole industries have earned record profits over the past two years, and are sitting on over $3 trillion in pure profits, they still aren't hiring, making those left with jobs having to do the work of the people in their departments who were laid-off in addition to their own jobs.


Mainstream news pumps out the government propaganda that unemployment is 9%, that the economy is recovering. They paint such a rosy picture, such a positive outlook, one can't help but be inspired. But it's all bullshit. They only report what is in their corporate ownership's best interest. You know it, you feel it, you hope the feelings you have are wrong, that they are just residual pangs of pessimism left over from the past couple of years. No, that is your soul trying to wake you the fuck up. The real unemployment rate is nearer to 22%. That's 1 in 5 people who are able to work can't work because there aren't enough jobs. Again, those jobs are gone forever and won't be coming back, despite what your politicians might say. It's almost as bad today as it was during the Great Depression. There are plenty of reasons why it can get a whole lot worse, and it's not over--not by a longshot. (Look it up.)


The guy that ran on "Hope and Change?" We all thought he was something special--even those who voted against him. They knew he couldn't lose. But none of us saw him bailing out banks instead of people after being such a populist while campaigning. Or extending the Patriot Act after campaigning against it. And campaigning against detaining suspects as "unlawful enemy combatants" then later saying it was now the US policy to detain UECs indefinitely. Demanding the public option in health care reform, then backing way off the public option. What a disappointment to find out he's just a regular old politician, talking a good talk about reining in the corporations, though his actions say he is beholden to his corporate benefactors who selected him--not the people who elected him. He ran against war, he won a Nobel Peace Prize, and he has escalated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while starting one in Libya. Don't even think Iran is off the radar.


If you are a Republican, you are a fool. If you are a Democrat, you are a poor fool. If you believe in your party, you believe in nothing--you need to wake up. Both parties are branches of the same corporation. They are two sides of the same coin, etc. You are not their priority. Your rights are not a concern of theirs, unless you inhabit the category of richest top 1% . They serve and protect the corporations and the banks and the corporate military industrial complex (about which we were warned by America's last great president in his farewell address.)


You are being lied to by the same people who slaughtered the indigenous people who lived here before anybody else did. By the same people who enslaved a whole other race of people for 400 years. Then oppressed them and suppressed their rights after they were freed. You are being lied to by the same people who financed Hitler during his rise to power. You are being lied to by the people who fight wars in the name of Jesus; who gain fortunes with the blessings of Jesus; who think Jesus was a white man who hates homosexuals. (Saul/Paul hated homosexuals--Jesus never even mentioned homosexuals, not once.)(Look it up.)


You are being lied to by your elected representatives, by the media you choose for the source of your news, by the PR firms for the products you buy, by the processors of the food you eat, by the manufacturers of the drugs you take, by the future you expected but don't get.


The food you eat is full of harmful chemicals that over time, make you sick...so you go to the doctor who prescribes you drugs that lessen the symptoms but don't treat the cause of what ails you (there's no money in the cure, after all). The drugs make you well enough to continue working, to buy the nutritionally depleted food full of chemicals that makes you sick, the insurance that covers part of your doctor's fee, and the drugs that make you a little better without curing you. And they'll even invent a condition or hype an existing sickness to include general symptoms so you'll see your doctor and ask for a certain drug you saw on a TV commercial.


Health care is seldom about prevention, diet or exercise. Health care is about dealing with symptoms of sickness, not preventing the cause of sickness. Preventing sickness also prevents profit. And in corporate America, profit is always the bottom line.


You are an obsolete, devalued commodity--when you are no longer needed, then what? Remember: your government does not value you or think you are special. It thinks you are a liability, someone with the potential to wake up and see the world for what it really is, and that you might be one of those who does something about it and seeks out other people who feel the same way you do. Every single day, more and more people wake up and are pissed off when they do. It's natural to resist what your conscience has been telling you for a while. It's natural. Look these things up for yourself, and use unconventional resources. Cross reference the items you read to make sure the information they provide is legitimate. Take the initiative and either prove that I'm nuts, or that you are nuts--or that you are way too sane and perceptive.


When you do finally see, wake up someone else. "Pay" it forward...or will it take gas going up to $5 a gallon to snap you out of it.

--jef