Octafish
Octafish's JournalHa ha. It is to laugh.
You ever hear about Delta Sierra Juliet?
Life presents realities that are difficult to comprehend.
Just like in the USA.
Are You Ready for a Driver’s License for the Internet?The White House is leading efforts for a new authentication system that would have users prove their identity with a single ID across the Web. And states are starting to pilot the system.
http://www.govtech.com/security/Drivers-License-for-the-Internet.html
Bernard Gross published ''Friendly Fascism'' in 1980
The professor served FDR and the New Deal Democrats and is remembered today for his work to reduce poverty. Among his accomplishments, he helped author the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Later he taught at CUNY and Wayne State University in Detroit, where he founded the Center for Urban Studies.
Friendly Fascism
The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross
South End Press, 1980, paper
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html
INTRO EXCERPT...
Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."
The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...
These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".
A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.
But events soon began to change perceptions.
The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis crept out of the woodwork. An immoral minority of demagogues took to the airwaves. "Let me tell you something about the character of God," orated Jim Robison at a televised meeting personally endorsed by candidate Ronald Reagan. "If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who may not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom interests of the ethical and the godly." To protect Western oil companies, candidate Jimmy Carter proclaimed presidential willingness to send American troops into the Persian Gulf. Rosalyn Carter went further by telling an lowa campaign audience: "Jimmy is not afraid to declare war." Carter then proved himself unafraid to expand unemployment, presumably as an inflation cure, thereby reneging on his party's past full employment declarations.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/RiseFall_Friend_Fascism_FF.html
The good professor painted an accurate picture of what was to come.
James Madison
EXCERPT...
Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.
A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.
p177
Although American hegemony can scarcely return in its Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson form, this does not necessarily signify the end of the American Century. Nor does communist and socialist advance on some fronts mark American and capitalist retreat on all fronts. There are unmistakable tendencies toward a rather thoroughgoing reconstruction of the entire "Free World." Robert Osgood sees a transitional period of "limited readjustment" and "retrenchment without disengagement," after which America could establish a "more enduring rationale of global influence." Looking at foreign policy under the Nixon administration, Robert W. Tucker sees no intention to "dismantle the empire" but rather a continued commitment to the view that "America must still remain the principal guarantor of a global order now openly and without equivocation identified with the status quo." He describes America as a "settled imperial power shorn of much of the former exuberance." George Liska looks forward to a future in which Americans, having become more mature in the handling of global affairs, will at last be the leaders of a true empire.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Specter_FriendlyFascism_FF.html
Cough newworldorder.
Programmed by Penny Pritzker
"If you want to know why Obama would choose such a grifter and gamer to head the Fed, you have to ask, Who picked Obama? Ten years ago, Barry Obama was a nothing, a State Senator from the South Side of Chicago.
"But then, he got lucky. A local bank, Superior, was shut down by regulators for mortgage shenanigans ripping off Black folk. The bank’s Chairwoman, Penny Pritzker was so angry at regulators, she decided to eliminate them: and that required a new President.
"The billionaires connected Obama to Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan, but most importantly to Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary, but most important, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and mentor of Larry Summers. Without Rubin’s blessing and overwhelming fundraising power, Obama would still be arguing over zoning on Halsted Street.
"Rubin picked Obama and Obama picks whom Rubin picks for him.
"Because, in the end, Obama knows he must choose a Fed chief based on the answer to one question: What would Goldman think?"
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/
Raymond, do you want to play some $olitare?
Nov. 22, 1963
The moment President John F. Kennedy was killed, the democratic republic was overturned by a coup d'etat; evidently organized at the highest levels of the national security state by those who direct and manage the Secret Government. For the most part, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, it's been "Money trumps peace" ever since.
Here's what's wrong with NAFTA.
NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. WorkersJEFF FAUX
Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2013
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.
By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.
Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.
Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing class—in alliance with the financial elites of its trading partners—applied NAFTA’s principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of China’s huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.
CONTINUED...
http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/
So, there's that.
BTW: President Obama, despite his vow as candidate to amend NAFTA, never has.
Thank you, alp227! Oberstar got the FBI involved in August...
...Of course, FBI Washington didn't want Coleen Rowley and the office in Minneapolis violating the guy's rights (which is weird as it's the only time I can remember the FBI respecting any suspect's rights) and thought it would be OK to just deport the man who wasn't interested in taking off or landing 747s, just in turning them.
One more weird twist, the unnamed flight instructor, Michael Guess, was co-pilot aboard the aircraft that crashed with Paul Wellstone, his wife and their party less than two weeks before the 2002 elections.
FTR: Oberstar endorsed Rowley when she ran for Congress in 2006.
PS: An entire generation will soon come of age that has no clue to any of this, alp227. I imagine jaws would drop when discovering Crisco General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial in July 2001. For some reason, most all the rest of the flying public was not so warned.
Oberstar was one who asked FBI about the 20th hijacker Moussaoui BEFORE 9/11.
Eagan flight trainer wouldn't let unease about Moussaoui restGreg Gordon, Star Tribune
Published December 21, 2001 FLIT21
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When a Twin Cities flight instructor phoned the FBI last August to alert the agency that a terrorist might be taking lessons to fly a jumbo jet, he did it in a dramatic way:
"Do you realize how serious this is?" the instructor asked an FBI agent. "This man wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!"
SNIP…
The still-unidentified flight instructor became wary of Moussaoui immediately, according to Minnesota Rep. Jim Oberstar and others with direct knowledge of the briefings.
SNIP…
Besides alerting the FBI about Moussaoui, the school's Phoenix office called the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) early this year about another student – Hani Hanjour, who was believed to be the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. The school had raised questions about Hanjour's limited ability to speak English, the universal language of aviation.
An FAA representative sat in on a class to observe Hanjour, who was from Saudi Arabia, and discussed with school officials finding an Arabic-speaking person to help him with his English, said Oberstar and others with direct knowledge of the school's briefings.
Oberstar and Minnesota Rep. Martin Sabo, who also was briefed by the school, praised Pan Am for its efforts to safeguard the skies and for passing federal authorities clues to possible terrorist activities before Sept. 11.
CONTINUED…
http://www.startribune.com/stories/843/913687.html
Links gone bad. More from 2002: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x757860
You've called me a conspiracy theorist for a long time.
Yet, when I ask you to show me where I theorize, you can't.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=801819
Obama calls critics of TPP secrecy 'Conspiracy Theorists'
Seeing how well NAFTA turned out, count me a critic.
Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with 'Conspiracy Theorists'
'If the president is concerned that people don't know what's going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Published on Friday, May 2, 2014 by Common Dreams
Critics of the highly-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations responded with outrage after U.S. President Barack Obama charged they have a "lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations" and dismissed their concerns as "conspiracy theories."
The president made the comments this week during a press conference in Malaysia—one of the stops on his Asia-Pacific tour, aimed at advancing the TPP and the U.S. military "pivot" to the region. His tour has been met with region-wide protests against the economic and military agenda of the U.S.
SNIP...
Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S., told Common Dreams, "President Obama lacks knowledge of how so-called 'free trade agreements' impact people on the ground. The push-back he has gotten over the TPP comes from people who have long-suffered from these impacts."
"He should go back and talk with the parent-less children in the region, whose parents had no choice but to look for work overseas because they couldn't find work in their own country due to these so-called 'free trade' agreements," she added. "He should go back and talk to the indigenous children whose parents were killed by paramilitary groups because greater foreign investment stipulations in these agreements have led to forced evacuations and militarization of their land for the purpose of large scale foreign mining."
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/02-5
Cass Sunstein must be right: The United States government is incapable of lying or doing anything criminal.
The people in it, OTOH...
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