"We're fucked."

[billyskank]

When things started to deteriorate, it took a while to register. We are accustomed, as sophisticated consumers of the 24-hour news media, to taking a rolling approach to disaster, which means never regarding a story as finite, which means pretending that nothing has ultimate consequences, which means, if you want to go the whole philosophical hog, existing in a constant state of denial about death. Anyway. In news as in life, the way we deal with disturbing events is to wrap them in analytical packaging, an evasion that makes us feel more in control. If you don't have a position on war in the Middle East, you at least have an appreciation for the range of positions at your disposal and as long as Sky News keeps booking the experts and loading the graphics, there is no catastrophe too great or too strange to absorb.

September 11 was the exception to this. But without a single event to focus on, it has been relatively easy, since then, to relegate the daily drip of bad news to the top shelf of the brain. One night last week, the main item on the 10'clock news was Israel sending troops into Lebanon. It was accompanied by footage of tanks throwing up dust and people crawling out of bomb damaged housing. The second item was news of three British soldiers being killed in an ambush in southern Afghanistan and nine hundred more British troops being committed to the region, bringing the total to 4,500. The third item was that Corporal Matthew Cornish, a 29-year-old British soldier, husband and father of two young children, had died in a mortar attack in Basra, bringing the total number of deaths in Iraq that day to 60, which the reporter pointed out was slightly below average, and the death toll over the past two months to nearly 6,000.

At this stage, the shelf starts to buckle. Embedded in these stories was speculation about Iran's nuclear threat, a reminder that Gaza is still under siege, analysis of Tony Blair's fallout with his cabinet and footage of his joint press conference with George Bush, which when it was shown the first time round - Blair frowning powerfully, Bush sinisterly jocular - was a tipping point into despair for lots of people. The final item on the news that evening couldn't have been more symbolic if it had shown the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Fidel Castro, the one constant in all our lives, was on the blink. That's when I reached for the phone and -

"We're fucked."

There is a time when the time for analysis has passed.

"We are."

"Shouldn't we being doing something? Panicking or something?"

There is nothing to do, of course, or at least there is nothing constructive to do. But unease of this kind requires external recognition, some small breach in your routine to show you're not just passively consuming it all - like frogs in a pan of slowly heating water, never quite making the decision to jump out. For the past five years my newsagent has had Capital FM playing in his shop in the morning, save for two occasions that I remember: the day after the July 7 bombings and the day after the death of the Queen Mother, when, to mark the seriousness of the occasion, he switched channels to Radio 5. He retuned it last week to Radio 5, on a morning when the news from around the world was bad, but no worse than the day before. Everyone has their own tipping point.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1837808,00.html

[Ghost Dog]

1. Excellent snip from a highly recommendable OP by Emma Brockes

<snip>

"These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the ending is George Bush, and you have to start again."

[itzamirakul]

8. Do you have a link for the rest of this article?

The line that really caught my eye and mind is the one referring to the "magnetic flip." I, too have felt this and I keep telling myself that it is age on my part and that I am just not keeping up with the new lifestyle of the 21st century.

I would like to read the rest of the article.

[BooScout]

10. link

Here it is......I read it first thing this morning......pretty much sums things up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1837808,00.html

[itzamirakul]

13. Thanks for the link...

:)

[malaise]

12. Great read

I like the intro
Almost two years ago, Emma Brockes spoke to liberal Britons the morning after George Bush's re-election and found a collective sense of foreboding and depression. Now, she asks, have our worst fears come to pass?

Yes our worst fears have come to pass.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Well, we've seen that leader here at DU often enough-"We're fucked." NOT.

I don't know why Tony Blair is still PM in England. THEY don't have electronic voting run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations--as we do. I've heard it's the EU issue--Blair is pro-EU, and so, despite his being a warmongering, Bush-ass-kissing S.O.B., and tight with the Carlyle Group, he is kept in power, since the opposition is anti-EU.

If that explains it.

But here--HERE!--we have a CLEAR, NO-BRAINER, PRACTICAL PROBLEM TO SOLVE: They've rigged our voting system, and we have to UN-rig it.

We are NOT fucked. We have an ILLEGITIMATE President and an ILLEGITIMATE Congress, (s)elected by Diebold and ES&S in NON-TRANSPARENT elections in 2004--a coup that can be pinpointed in time, to the 2002-2004 period, and to a SPECIFIC action of the Anthrax Congress, led by the biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by Bilderberg 'Democrat' Christopher Dodd), called the "Help American Vote Act." (A $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle intended to entirely corrupt our election system from one end of the country to the other, and render it OPAQUE, and give it over to private corporate control by corporations with very close ties to the Bush junta.)

It is ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that this President and this Congress DO NOT REPRESENT the majority of Americans. And the evidence of a destroyed election system is OVERWHELMING.

So....IF the problem can be identified, and if fixing it is doable--and both things are true in the case of the U.S.--we are NOT fucked. Or, rather, we are only fucked if we CONTINUE TO LET OURSELVES BE.

Throw Diebold and ES&S and ALL election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

One way to do that is by massive Absentee Ballot voting this fall. Boycott the machines! Don't vote on them! Send election officials MOUNTAINS of paper ballots to deal with. Let their expensive, shiny, new, election theft machines SIT IDLE, gathering dust. An AB vote is not "safe," and will NOT result in accurate vote counts this November, but if enough people vote Absentee (and many are--it's up to 50% in Los Angeles already), we can bring this rigged election system to its knees and FORCE reform.

Make voting fun again! Make it a PROTEST, instead of a passive act of despair. Rebel!

Bust the Machines--Vote Absentee!


-------------------

As for Great Britain, my suggestion: Pants him! (--right there, in Parliament!)

[billyskank]

7. We the electorate can't get rid of Blair without electing

a conservative government. Only the parliamentary Labour party can ditch Blair.

[HongKonger]

21. I hate to say it...

But Tony Blair has a lot of charisma, he's intelligent and persuasive... If he were a waste of oxygen like the boorish Bush - he would have been long gone. But Tony has the gift of the gab, and he gets away with a lot - despite being paradoxically aligned with his own party and much of his nation.

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. Theoretically, we could have elected a Lib Dem government

since they stood enough candidates to get an absolute majority. So, in one sense, we are to blame for Blair still being there.

[billyskank]

32. Theoretically, yes.

Theoretically the US could elect a Green party candidate as President. It isn't going to happen, and neither is a Lib Dem government.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. Getting Lib Dems into a coalition might have been possible

and that might have made it easier to chuck Blair at a time like this - a threat of a no confidence vote might have persuaded him to walk the plank in favour of Brown, say.

[Poppyseedman]

14. Small points

It doesn't matter how low bush goes in the polls. When you look at the internal poll data, we always score very low in the "safe and security" question. Aka: "terrorism" "national security"

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/CBSNews_polls/jul06congress.pdf Warning: pdf file

Americans as a whole are willing to give up their "rights" for "security" at the moment. One of the reasons I am not as optimistic as some about the Nov. election cycle is the more we come across as the party of "anti war", we will never capture the issue of "national security" We get painted as "cut and run" and we keep trying to make Iraq into Vietnam politically, which it simply isn't the same thing.

I fear the thing that we think will turn the tide for us in Nov. (anti war position) will be our Achilles heel. As much as I hate to say this, the main reason is the low american body count. In relative terms, we really have not had that many soldiers make the ultimate sacrifice for the american people to tire of the blood poured out.


As for the elections stolen, I'd probably get flamed for it, but after researching many sites and looking at it from many angles, I have yet to find any actual empirical evidence that a broad based election theft happened in 2004. To pull off an election fraud on that scale, you have to have willing democratic participation.

[DemonFighterLives]

17. 911 and several wars happened on dubya's watch

We are not safer with him at the helm.
Also, he only had to steal FL and Ohio to take it in 2004- much evidence exists of improprieties.

[Poppyseedman]

20. I live in florida and have extensively looked at the election

results for 2004. The bottom line for Florida is real simple. We were outworked. They didn't steal shit, they simply out worked us. GOTV and party registration as percentages of voters, we were left in the dust.

As for Ohio, there may be a point, but if my memory is correct, the numbers to over turn the results simply didn't add up.

"We are not safer with him at the helm."

The vast majority of American people think we are, according to the polls, which was my point.

[DemonFighterLives]

29. You have to take Diebold into consideration

Vast Majority think we are safer- I would like to see that poll.
dubby has led us into a war without end and in reply to the statement to another poster- we are not far from joining WW3 with Israel and it will not take a big attack on the mainland.
This rudderless administration is preparing as we speak. See Axis of Evil and PNAC.
That is all!

[Peace Patriot]

22. NON-TRANSPARENT election system, installed in 2002-2004.

Votes "tabulated" by TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, controlled by two Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. And they are...

DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and

ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.

These are people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy.

ONE THIRD of the country voted on PAPERLESS electronic machines--no recount even possible. The rest voted on electronic machines, or had their votes "counted" by central electronic tabulators--also run on secret code--with zero auditing, or very inadequate auditing, and with recounts extremely rare, expensive and manipulable.

No evidence is needed.

Transparent elections = good government, of, by and for the people.

Non-transparent elections = tyranny.

That's what we have--tyranny. And it's blatantly obvious in everything Bush does, and everything this Congress does.

EIGHTY-FOUR PERCENT of the American people oppose any U.S. participation in a widened Mideast war. Yet the Bush junta is heading us right into it. We are a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident away from them jumping into "Israel's war." NEARLY 60% of the American people opposed Bush's preemptive war on Iraq way back in Feb. 03, BEFORE the invasion, and that opposition has only grown since. It's OVER SEVENTY PERCENT opposing this war/occupation today, and 55% now want an immediate pullout.

With numbers like these, you're PEDDLING WAR as the Democratic Party's salvation?!

These sniveling little "talking points" are making me sick. Not enough US soldiers dead yet. Americans willing to "give up their rights" for "security." BULLSHIT! The American people have NOT BEEN CONSULTED!

[Poppyseedman]

25. No, I'm not peddling war as salvation, just making the point

as a party we are being so easily painted as a "cut and run" party because we have no consensus until recently on national security, no effective way out of Iraq that doesn't look like a "loss", several different voices speaking as the democratic position all saying different things.

Bottom Line: The American people will not put us back in power if they think they will be less safe under a democratic governance. You may not believe that, think I'm nuts, a troll, a moron, but the rethugs know that and will politically take us to the cleaners over it.

"We are a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident away from them jumping into "Israel's war.""

Do you have any actual evidence besides fear and loathing making you think ridiculous thoughts? There is absolutely no way we are entering into the Israel conflict unless we are physically attacked on mainland USA and even that I am not even sure. The American people may support Israel in general, but I don't think would support shedding blood for her

[CrispyQ]

27. I worked as an election judge in a very progressive county,

& we hand counted paper ballots that were later scanned. The first column of the ballot had the presidential selection & our senate selection. I was stunned how many "Salazar" voters also voted "Bush." It was depressing.

CNN just showed a poll where 46% of the people said we should continue on course in the Israel/Lebanon conflict. :wtf: —almost half are against a cease fire?

That said, we should not wait until an irrefutable stolen election to address electronic voting, elections irregularities & voter disenfranchisement!!! These issues need to be confronted, now. It will be interesting, if the dems gain control of the house, will they pursue a more serious investigation of our election process? What if we get a dem prez in '08? We'll know where the dems stand then! ;)

[Poppyseedman]

28. I agree there are issues that need to be addressed,

the sooner the better.

My biggest concern is the further we get out on the conspiracy limb with outlandish claims, the less credible those claims become. People eventually turn a deaf ear and consider all legitimate concerns with :crazy: :eyes: going :wtf: and start to get :boring:

[MissWaverly]

31. "willing democratic participation"

it's hard to explain our voting system here in the states, our polling places are manned by senior
citizens, they man their posts without being able to leave the polling place from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. With the advent of touchscreen voting machines forced upon the states with the lure of
federal money and the illusion of science and reliability, these machines were placed under the
care of our seniors, many of whom have no computer experience at all. These machines "had" secret
software which means that all problems with the machines are handled by the manufacturers. So
there is no "QC" no verifiable software and no random audits to make sure that the machines function properly. Now the congressman who "wrote" the HAVA bill, (Mr. Ney) is one of the individuals closely tied with Jack Abramoff and has received some of the largest "donatiions" from him. Tie this up with the fact that the Secretary of State in Ohio was Kenneth Blackwell,
who was to oversee the elections in Ohio to make sure they were fair was co-chair of Bush campaign for Ohio. And in Florida, the other key to Bush re-election, his brother was the
governor.

[Ghost Dog]

18. Right. Here's some more relevant comment from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1837623,00.html
by Barbara Toner

<snip>

Mrs Goldwasser won't have known that whatever our prime minister says when he's standing next to George Bush is not a reflection of what the rest of the country thinks. We used to hope this was because he had influence. We imagined him agreeing with the ridiculous US administration in public just so he could lean on it in private. But, having seen him lean in private, we now know this isn't true. And his predicament, now he knows we know, is awkward in the extreme.

With the Middle East exposed as an area well beyond his influence, he's had to ask himself, where do I go from here? In a crooked line, came the answer. The crooked line of a very potty or a very cunning man. The clue was in his hair. He appeared several times during the week with markedly potty hair to say first one thing and then its opposite.

In California, he announced to a gathering of News Corp executives that he had "complete inner self-confidence in the analysis of the struggle" against international terrorists, by which he apparently meant bomb them out of existence as per Israel and Hizbullah. Days later, in a speech to the World Affairs Council, he said actually, they'd got it all wrong. What was needed was an alliance of moderation: "You can't defeat a fanatical ideology by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas."

On his return to the UK, by which time he knew he was in trouble with the cabinet, the parliamentary Labour party, the EU and the UN secretariat - forget the rest of us - he was bleating that he'd been misunderstood. He wanted a ceasefire, but only if it was coupled with an agreement with Hizbullah to disarm. Which was what we'd always thought he meant because it's what the US has said from the off.

/more...

[LaurenG]

3. K & R

:kick: :thumbsup: :hi: :loveya:

[billyskank]

4. Hey you!

:loveya:

[shadowknows69]

5. I've been panicking openly for a while now

It helps a little. Too little.

[DemonFighterLives]

6. Things are a little bleak

but there is an new day dawning.
:donut:

[bronxiteforever]

9. I believe you are right,assuming we live to see it.

The reckless, violent and arrogant foreign policy of Shrub is going to make life difficult for generations of Americans. But we must stop him in 2006. I think the Iraq disaster, especially with the anti-american tones of yesterday's protests, may really break the camels back.
I appreciate your optimism. That is stuff that keeps me from jumping off the roof!

[DemonFighterLives]

16. One can only hope for things to improve

dubby and the gang have been rewriting History and dropping Science.
We are not moving or improving- people will not stand for that forever.

illegitimus non carborundum Don't let the bastards grind you down
:hi:

[The Backlash Cometh]

11. You don't reach this level of disaster overnight.

So many people in this country, are so accustom to screwing others, and being screwed over, that we just took it to a global level. We tolerate so much corruption at a local level, that we're so desensitized by it all.

[Peace Patriot]

19. "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" I object to this "we." "We" didn't

"take it to a global level." 50,000 of us objected, in Seattle in 1999--and got our heads bashed, and our faces hosed with pepper spray, and got universally SLANDERED by the corporate news monopolies, for our trouble.

"We" don't screw people over. Most Americans are law abiding, justice-loving, peace-loving, generous people, who believe in fairness, equity, tolerance and civil and human rights. Don't buy into this negative view of Americans. Our democracy has been HIJACKED. Our views are not represented in Congress or in the press. And it is a great and positive ACCOMPLISHMENT that the vast majority of the American people have RESISTED 24/7 fascist propaganda, and have stuck to their progressive views!

Look at the PEOPLES' response to Katrina! Then look at the junta's response. There is a huge divide between them, and the dividing line is on the matter of "screwing others." Americans jumped at the chance to give, give, give, and found creative ways to try to GET AROUND government inaction and callousness--and found the latter heinous!

Americans also have the handicap of massive disinformation. We're reduced almost to word of mouth communications (--and the internet, our "Committees of Correspondence"). Yeah, we're into business, but so were the Phoenicians, and the Italian city states (birthplace of modern democracy and the secular state), and all kinds of other healthy, thriving cultures. Trade is human. But we are the VICTIMS of this colossus of U.S.-based global corporate predation, as much as anyone. We were to some extent sucked in by it, and non-vigilant--and certainly propagandized (big time)--but it is not entirely our fault that power and money kept beating us down, and buying our politicians, and corrupting our government. Were French peasants responsible for their oppression by the pre-revolution French aristocracy? Were Russian peasants and workers responsible for Tsarist oppression? That's what we are now--peasants and peons and cannon fodder.

"We," as a people, on the whole, don't screw people over. Quite the contrary. We want FAIRNESS. We want a decent wage. We want a decent life. We want EVERYONE to have a chance. These are the things we have fought for. The American middle class has been an extraordinarily generous and far-thinking and progressive population. We wanted voting rights and civil rights for blacks. We wanted equality for women. We moved human progress along at every opportunity.

That we have been outmaneuvered and outgunned by a fascist/corporate coup is obvious. But the strategy for overthrowing that coup is not helped by ragging on Americans. We need to be bolstered up and re-empowered, not flagellated further. And we above all need to be RE-ENFRANCHISED. If the will of the majority were being implemented in this country--if we had honest vote counts--I think you would be quite amazed at the revolution that would occur. (Indeed, that's WHY they took our right to vote away!). Americans ROUTINELY vote for FAIRNESS, when their votes are COUNTED.

We just need to get this barnacle of the Corporate War Machine off our backs. And the key to that--step one, priority one--is election reform!

[The Backlash Cometh]

24. We all have a right to determine what our fellow man is capable

of doing based on what we see them do on a local level. And, I'm sorry, but I have every right to have a negative view of Americans based on my own neighborhood, because I have seen them up, close and personal to see what they'll do when they're faced with extraordinary circumstances, and time and time again, they disappoint me. Of course, I'm talking about an upper middle class community, where I suspect people get here by following their own self-interest. Something tells me that if this were a solid to lower middle class neighborhood, things may be as you say they are.

As for the wider, national community and why things don't seem to be moving fast enough, it's because there aren't enough of us "fair and good" American citizens to make a difference. Yes, the media is to blame to some extent for keeping most people dumb in this country, but at what point do you blame them for allowing themselves to be lulled into a sense of security, which most people suspect is false to begin with? Who wants to face the fact that most Americans have more to fear from that upstanding member of the community who sits next to him in the pew in church, than he does from the strange dark person living in the neighborhood ten miles away?

You and I can see where the problems are, but the more we jump up and down and stamp our feet, the more people think we're "iconoclasts." That must be the new alienation word. Use to be dissenter, activist and even the odious, "Liberal."

We have to sit and wait until something unexpected happens, and not like 9/11. I mean, something truly unexpected. Then everybody wakes up and everything we've been telling them for years, finally seeps through cracks in their mental shackles, and suddenly they're free. Or maybe not. Because that's the point you have to look out for the cowboy who comes to head-off the stampede away from the open prairie, and back into the box canyon.

[exlrrp]

15. when you don't know what to do, throw a grenade!

Just a little something I learned a few wars ago

[Doctor_J]

23. * really is a disaster of historic proportion

We can be thankful that his invasion of Iraq wasn't greeted by the world the way that Hitler's invasion of Poland was. I also think that the world realizes that he is not our president - that we tried like hell to remove him from office, and were beaten back by corruption and by force. They view the sane 60% of us as victims of the evil minority.

[treestar]

26. Oh come on, humankind has dealt with far worse

There is plenty we can do. And with fewer and less sophisticated tools.

Everything doesn't happen on the instant. We expect too much in the way of dramatics. That's the effect TV has had on us.

[Hoping4Change]

33. Brilliant. Especially powerful is the line

"taking a rolling approach to disaster, which means never regarding a story as finite, which means pretending that nothing has ultimate consequences, which means, if you want to go the whole philosophical hog, existing in a constant state of denial about death."