Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News Editorials & Other Articles General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Mc Mike

Mc Mike's Journal
Mc Mike's Journal
May 31, 2012

Updated stats prove that Rand's post #s 72 and 90 are funnier than his #34.

He has 13 out of 92 posts, from the anti-o.p. end. Bop has 16. Those two are 'dynamic' on this o.p.

Sad that rand dropped from 16.7% to 14%, but bop rose to > 17%. Overall, the team went down from 33% to 31.5, but still receive the silver and gold medals for the anti team.

May 29, 2012

Maybe Dan Briody's 'The Halliburton Agenda'.

Briody reported that:

Johnson's deal with Herman Brown freed the Texas delegation to oppose the virulently anti-union John N. Garner, and back FDR in '40 instead, which gave freshman New Dealer Rep. Johnson leverage to win navy contracts for the Browns from Prez Roosevelt (p. 77).

The break between Brown and Johnson came when Johnson campaigned against Brown's antilabor national right-to-work legislation and also accepted the vp slot, in '60, (pp. 149 -50) after being outmaneuvered by the MA machine.

Halliburton ate Brown and Root (147) and Brown croaked (151) in '62.

Subsidiary B & R joined 3 other construction conglomerates to form a group that called themselves RMK-BRJ, in '65, which did $2 billion worth of work in Vietnam, in cost-plus contracts that B&R got 20% of. 40% of the money was stolen, $5 million was wasted in the first year of work in the country. They did 97% of the construction work in Vietnam during their 7 years of contracts. They built roads, cities, pipelines, hospitals, warehouses, bases, jetways in Da Nang, Chulai, Phangrang. (164-5.) (Seems to me that a stellar way to smuggle drugs is to do a ton of construction work on operating air-fields and their warehouses, but Briody didn't say that.)

George Brown was targeted by anti-Viet war protestors in '71, who handed him a 'special award' at a U of TX alumni honors ceremony held on his behalf -- they 'awarded' him a picture of the infamous tiger cages that were used for prison cells. Foreshadows KBR' s contract 30 years later to build GITMO prison in Cuba (pp. 166-7).



L'il bush era Halliburton KBR caused the deaths of at least 18 US soldiers and marines, electrocuted in war-zone base showers, by faulty wiring of water heaters in a cost plus contract. (Death toll as of '09, not final.) Like Blackwater-Xe-Academi, Halliburton is involved in a child sex slave trafficking scandal (source Chicago Trib 12-27-05, not blowhard Bircher A. Jones), a real one unlike O'Keefe's ACORN fake.

Tip O'Neill said Johnson was Sam Rayburn's protege, like O'Neill was John McCormack's (Boston-Austin axis), at 'The Board of Education' meetings. Which were held in the first floor of the Capitol, behind the members' dining room. Meetings were a tradition from Speaker Nick Longworth and John Nance Garner. (from O'Neill's 'Man of the House', p. 127.) That's where Johnson got his legislative savvy and connections. Johnson broke against Garner and Brown, for FDR, JFK, and labor. His insider knowledge of the Legislative branch helped him get things done as prez, as much as the Dem leg. majorities did.

MI complex contractors took America to the cleaners on Vietnam, a war which Johnson was forced to prosecute after late Nov. of '63. He used the situation to tell the big money people 'We have to give the American people something, or they'll slit your throats.' This resulted in Civil Rights, Great Society, Medicare, etc. They weren't a bribe and distraction, like Nixon's EPA and Cultural Preservation Act, but done with the same motivating factor.

May 28, 2012

WWII vet Vonnegut was really p.o. ed that they took Armistice Day,

a memorial to peace, and militarized it. The WWI vets didn't want 'The War to End All Wars' to happen again.

Separate issue: do you remember when Poppy bush was campaigning (9-7-88) and told his audience that September 7 was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor? Strange mistake for a Pacific theater WWII 'hero' to make. Previously, he had twice mislabeled Memorial Day, at the Kennebunkport Memorial Day event (5-30-88), as 'Veterans Day'.

+1 to your post for the correction Sirv, and +1 to the o.p. I just chimed in for the opportunity to bash the oil nazis.

May 22, 2012

Fire posted a vid from ABC 7, Chi, 2x

Says ~ min 12 sec 45 (14 min vid) that the bb s were travelling west along with dispersing protestors, and were forced back east by the police. They were already blocked to the south, and east. That 'kettling' makes a dispersal order unhelpful.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=710141

Wnd's eyewitness accounts are only good for the part of the field s\he was in. The photo sequence is incomplete, because it starts with the white shirted officer's helmet already off, which doesn't necessarily show an unprovoked attack on that officer. Doesn't show either side before the start of the altercation. When I see an officer with an old-style night stick, instead of the Okinawa-style grain grinder model, I think that officer is harking back to the 'good old days' of police-community relations. My opinion may be wrong, but that officer's bosses created the whole situation with the kettling.

There was no legit reason people couldn't march south in the first place. In Pgh.'s G-20 (the 9-25-09 march), the cops arbitrarily enforced bridge and street closures which clearly contradicted my State Rep.'s official route info, and the official established 'free speech' zone directly E-NE of the Convention center. Nobody was allowed to even approach the area. The cops were Keystone to a Chinese Fire drill degree. The field commanders made up the rules on the fly, to make a moving and constantly enveloping kettle around the legally permitted marchers, with overwhelming manpower on all sides, as they shunted the protest across the river from the G-20 site, tastefully out of the range of the WB and IMF big-shots.

If I saw a protestor launch an unprovoked attack on a cop, I'd do my best to restrain them, before the cops responded to the attack by ravaging the rest of the innocent protestors. All cops aren't bad, but they're bad in large groups, listening to their pin-head bosses. I don't want any physical harm to come to women or men who are on the job. But there isn't a large casualty list on the law enforcement side, and there is one on the protestors' side.

Either cops start the violence, or u.c. cops start the violence, or some agro protestor whose brain is in pawn to the system (so s\he is working for that cop system) starts the violence. So now it's obviously time for all DU hands to call each other cops, and pick which of the 3 flavors of cop they want to back, against other DU people. Sweet mother of mercy, we could screw up a 2 car funeral.

(cross posted as a re to posts 53, 60 in the link you just posted. That's ME screwing up a 2 car funeral. Sorry. Har har.)

May 22, 2012

+1, Thanks. Good analysis.

Prof. Klein's 'Shock Doctrine' talked about a lot of Third World nations turning their backs on WTO, IMF, and World Bank (pp 576-8, in her chapter 'Shock Wears Off'), by going with the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.) Greece isn't 3rd world, but it might as well be.

Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Equador, Bolivia all gave the finger to the banksters. The IMF's lending portfolio went from 80% Latin America in '05 to 1% in '07. Argentina's Kirchner said "There is life after the IMF, and it's a good life." The 'Financial Times' reported that when World Bank managers dispensed [austerity] advice to the developing world, "they were now laughed at." The Latins appear to be mirroring the Yeltsin group's strategy, when they all pulled their Republics out from under Gorbachev, and reassembled them into a new Russia, not ruled by Gorby. It would be good if Greece could join a Southern Hemisphere oriented alternative to western banksters, along with all the other nations getting bled by the financial leeches. The country is like a frog in a skillet, they have to jump some way. Why not jump toward giving their people hope? At minimum, Greece has a lot of shipping capacity to offer any new financial cooperative that they join.

Hitler's nazis promised to give the finger to banks and corporations, but were the flunkies of those financial interests. They were created by big money interests, and completely subservient to them. Fascism was defined as 'Corporatism + Reaction'. Hopefully the Greeks will see through the nazi flunkies' lies, despite their country's current level of austere misery and financial shock.

May 19, 2012

Here's an oldie but goodie,

re terror threats \ incidents from our two main political parties:

Governor Walker (repug-WI), says his office never saw that e-mail (by that other repug, from IN).

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/walkers-offi...

"Gov. Scott Walker's (R-WI) staff says that no one on the staff ever read an e-mail sent to them in February by a deputy prosecutor in Johnson County, Ind., which encouraged the Walker administration to stage a "false flag" assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit unions in the Wisconsin political battle over Walker's anti-public employee union legislation." -- Josh Michael Marshall's blog, 3/25/11.



So either an actual terror threat or incident occurs, and it's the repugs doing it to Dems, or a fake 'threat' or 'incident' occurs, and it's prefabricated by the repugs, and pinned on the Dems.


On edit, try this link instead:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/indiana-prosecutor-encouraged-false-flag-assault-on-walker-to-discredit-wisconsin-unions.php

May 12, 2012

The bosses control wages, and the workers can't control prices.

Collective bargaining is the only way to try to squeeze a living wage out of the ownership class. Your aunt is getting her talking points from repug 'christians', who get them from Ralph Reed and Rove, who get them from their rich masters.

The cost drivers for her industry are the for-profit hospital system, the parasitic insurance industry, and big Pharma. The costs for health care have gone up hundreds of percentage points, and most of the health care workers make beans. There's no profit sharing.

Even a 'non-profit' like U Pitt Med Center made $600 mil in profits in one year, while paying no taxes. They hid the profits in subsequent years by buying up local hospitals (the competition) and shutting them down; buying foreign hospitals; undertaking unnecessary building and renovation projects at their many hospitals; purchasing supplies and services from industry insiders via sweetheart contracts, with kickbacks to administrators. The unionized and non-union hospital workers still get none of the money generated by the UPMC system.

UPMC bought Children's Hospital, then built an (unnecessary) new Children's Hospital complex, causing the total amount of property in Pgh that is non-taxable because it's owned by 'non-profits' to top 40%. That means the tax-paying workers pay more taxes, and get less services to boot.

It's funny how the teabag repugs scream and cry about taxing the rich, saying 'you can't punish success, Americans want shared prosperity, not shared sacrifice.' Then the teabags scream and cry about a unionized worker making almost a living wage, saying 'how dare they make so much money, they're too prosperous, the economy is bad and we need shared sacrifice.' While Wall St and the rich are making more money than ever before. Heads-repugs win, tails-America loses.

I guess you love your aunt, and are trying to reach her with reason. Good luck, Erik.

May 8, 2012

Naomi Klein's '07 book. P. 61 on Milton Friedman.

It looks like there's 2 different issues on this post. 1) Whether to back Sec. Clinton and how much power and independence she has.
2)Exactly what's happening in Greece and other European Union partners that are teetering economically (and politically, socially).

I back Pres Obama and Sec Clinton in '12. How much foreign and econ policy control they can exert over this serious situation in Greece is debatable. My opt out scenario of re-taking Grenada wasn't a slur vs. our current Dem admin, just whistling in the dark. I know Sec. Clinton had nothing to do with Raygun pulling out of the Lebanon hot-spot and hitting Grenada, to chalk up a 'win'. I believe the harsh response to Ken here is by people that want Clinton in '16, and I'm thinking about '12. Adverse post-ers on this thread might also just want some recognition of the enormous amount of work our S.O.S. is doing, and I freely admit it.

Chicago boy shock doctrine addresses # 2. Didn't mean for it to be cryptic. Ms. Klein is a syndicated writer for The Nation, The Guardian, and Harpers; and Former Fellow at the London School of Econ. Her book 'The Shock Doctrine' covered the Milton Friedman University of Chicago neo-liberal school of economic thought, whose adherents sometimes self-appelate as the Chicago Boys (p. 95). It was interesting watching Prof. Krugman recently on R. Maddow trying to 're-claim' Friedman, but I think he was just saying current repug economic policy makes Friedman look reasonable, like how Dem politicians will sometimes 'appropriate' the positive aspects of Nixon or Reagan in order to illustrate how out of whack current GOP 'thinking' is.

Prof. Klein talks about WTO \ IMF {"business-friendly policies imposed through arm twisting...The three trademark demands -- privatization, government deregulation, and deep cuts to social spending ... extremely unpopular with citizens..." (p. 10).} That's Greece. I saw Kieros the Athens protest dog running around on this site a while back, ironically putting a 'human face' on the struggle there, which looks like Arab Spring and Occupy. As a Rainbow Coalition labor Dem, I see the Greek protestors and those other groups as allies, who are against the shock doctrine measures enacted against the 99%, by WTO (GATT, Free Trade agreements), IMF-World Bank, G-8 \ G-20, and E. U. economic policy.

Prof. Klein discussed how that alphabet soup of governmental and quasi-governmental groups actually use crises (social, political, economic), wars, and natural disasters to impose austerity on the citizens, and their corporate and financial industry 1%-er friends make a heap of money in the process. She shows where those groups precipitate crises, then use them and make profits. That's the shock doctrine. Her book gives a ton of good info, I have it dog-eared and marked up extensively.

Greece has strikes and riots, hopeless citizens turning to nazi strong men for an answer, and the possibility of another far-right military coup. The Greeks and Turks are militarized and have long-standing problems with each other. The Turks are embroiled against the Kurds, down into Iraq. The Greeks oppose the existence of Macedonia, which western financial interests carved out of the carcass of Yugoslavia. Last I heard, they oppose its recognition in the UN. So we're looking at a flash point that stretches from the Balkan WWI flash point right down into Iraq, where the whole Middle East is a tinder-box. Not an easy job for our Sec. of State.

Lastly, I call the Dailey bros the Dailey 'Boys', myself. Mayor Emmanuel has a certain boyish charm, and boyish good looks, but I was sorry to hear his opinion on progressives' mental capacities. Klein and Palast both cover the Friedman economic 'Chicago Boys' ethically shaky moves. I'd never call the Pres a 'boy', or the Sec a 'girl', but their connections to Chicago are extensive. I opposed the DLC, in every election primary for the last 20 years, even before the Koch-connection was revealed. But given the GOP penchant for constantly fielding a candidate that is more stupid, craven, and feckless than their previous election cycle offering, I anticipate them running Pauly Shore in '16. So whoever the repugs run, if Sec. Clinton is our party's nominee, I'll cast my first vote for a DLC candidate.





May 4, 2012

Thanks for the welcome. Sorry if I offended you.

Dutch brought the porn up, and I just gave my opinion. Even a measly < 100 post-er is apparently allowed to do that, on this site.

Thanks also for mentioning Alex Jones, the fat blowhard Bircher from Dallas. The Rolling Stone article on him half a year ago covered his many Bircher connections.

I never talk about the Bilderbergers, Illuminati, CFR-Trilateral Commission, Protocols of the Elders, Rothschilds, or NWO. A very experienced post-er like you should be able to argue without putting words in their 'opponent's' mouth. My go-to bad guys are the masons, nazis, and Birchers (LaRouche, Beck, Paul, Jones). I also like to bash Opus Dei and P-2, because I'm an anti-nazi Catholic.

I notice how you and D believe I'm involved in a conspiracy with red and sea, while simultaneously painting me as a wacky conspiracy-theorist. My word to you, that I'm not a former radical fem post-er who has been TSed and reincarnated, is not going to disabuse you of that notion. If you could point to a post where I ever weighed in on 'radical' Women's issues, you'd have at least one substantiating fact to back your assertion. In reality, I just back red and sea on the simple sociological issue that the OP poll brought up, and have never clapped eyes on them or their posts in DU before.

Simply put, I've said I don't believe that I have a right to tell a woman what word she uses to self-appelate. I don't believe that it's any of my business what two consenting adults do with their sexuality. I don't believe that I have the right to tell anyone what to do regarding porn consumption, I just know why I endorse an economic boycott of it. You can enjoy yourself, however you want, alone or with your significant other, and it's not my business. D brought up prostitution and porn, in one of his many (many, many) postings that tend to divert from the simple idea Red polled DU women on.

Since you're an OPE fan, I'd like to mention that the Lavender Mafia owns the porn distribution sites in the Pittsburgh area, kind of like how the Pagan bikers and the Farrakhan-ites own illegal drug distribution around here. I don't know what to make of it, in terms of conclusions to be drawn from the fact. But thought I'd mention it, in case it would be helpful to you, either to have further evidence to pigeon-hole me as a conspiracy theorist, or just for purely informational purposes.

May 2, 2012

Dang, Dutch.

You have thousands of posts, so you must be a good Dem. You surely must be seeing the current unprecedented level of repug attacks vs. women.

The O.P. is talking about one fundamental reinforcing mechanism used by bad people, to keep doing bad things. It's about colonization of minds, (belittlement, infantilization, objectification, call it what you will), achieved through the language a person uses when addressing another person. The post doesn't even make a statement, it just asks DU women what they think. Everyone that uses that language isn't bad, but it is aiding the people who are thinking and doing bad. And using it because it is 'traditional', or 'no big deal', is lazy thinking at best.

Maybe Dworkin hurt you. But you're capable of making your own O.P. that addresses the excesses that you feel Feminists are guilty of perpetrating, instead of making umpteen postings on this one. Bitter infighting among Progressive Democratic allies serves no one.

VOChoice.org could use your energy (brains, fighting spirit), if you're willing to help women and Dems against the real bad guys, who are the repugs and not the Feminists. It's a very positive channel, check their org out.

Profile Information

Member since: Wed Nov 23, 2011, 04:50 PM
Number of posts: 9,173
Latest Discussions»Mc Mike's Journal