Author’s note:  I sort of consider myself to be a worldly and politically aware person, yet here I am just now realizing stuff about the deadly and treacherous men who run our planet — stuff that people like Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara and Evita Peron were painfully aware of even back in the 1950s, back when I was naively busy reading Nancy Drew and selling Girl Scout cookies. Better late than never?http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com

 Author’s note:  I sort of consider myself to be a worldly and politically aware person, yet here I am just now realizing stuff about the deadly and treacherous men who run our planet — stuff that people like Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara and Evita Peron were painfully aware of even back in the 1950s, back when I was naively busy reading Nancy Drew and selling Girl Scout cookies. Better late than never?

     I was talking with a friend recently regarding the role of America as the world’s only superpower.  “America is rapidly losing its place at the head of the table,” commented my friend, and I immediately agreed — but for a different reason than the one that he had in mind.

      “America as a country,” I replied, “is not only being forced to share its superpower status with China, Russia and the European Union at this point in time but, in the near future, things are going to get even worse for the U.S.  I’m thinking that even as soon as ten or 20 years from now, America will be pretty much known in the world as a second-rate has-been.”

      “Never happen!” exclaimed my friend.  “We’ve got the money, the people, the Constitutional government and the natural resources — not to mention the military power — to stay at the top of the heap for the rest of this century and beyond.”

      “Ah, but the key word in your argument here is the word ‘we’.  It strongly appears, however, that ‘we’ no longer control America’s bounty.  ‘THEY’ do.”

      Adolph Hitler was an idiot.  He chose to take over the world by force — whereas if he had just stayed cool and played his cards right, he could have taken over the world with his superb propaganda machine instead.  If he had done that instead of blitz-kreiging London and Poland and France and wherever, I bet you dollars to donuts that he would still be in power to this day.  But Hitler was a thug — not a con-man.

      And now the con-men are in charge.  They have the exact same agenda as Hitler — corporatism — but they are obviously succeeding where Hitler failed.  They now own America lock, stock and barrel — something that Hitler could only dream of.

      “Jane,” you might say, “You gotta be kidding.  Americans own America.”  Do we?

      Do “we” control the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court?  No.  Do “we” control Wall Street?  No.  Do “we” control our natural resources, our food supply, our foreign policy, our treasury, our voting machines, our banking system, our tariffs, our industry?  No, no, no, no, no, no, no and no.  Do we even control our own media?  Absolutely no!

      When George H. W. Bush announced his plans for a “New World Order” back in 1984 (or whenever), he let the cat out of the bag regarding what had apparently been in the works for years.  “New.  World.  Order.”  We all shoulda just read his lips.  But back then we all thought his plan was for AMERICA to rule the world.  Yeah right.  And it turns out from hindsight that Bush’s New World Order had no place for “We the People” in his plan — except as a source of cheap labor.  

      You think I’m wrong about this?  When you die and get up to heaven, just ask John Kennedy if I’m wrong!  

      At this point in time, it seems pretty clear that a handful of rich men at the top of the food chain run the world with an iron hand.  Not a blade of (genetically engineered) grass grows anywhere on the planet — except perhaps in Outer Mongolia — but that the New World Order doesn’t know about it, approve of it and milk it for all that it’s worth.  Hitler would have been so jealous!

      “Okay, Jane, these are outrageous charges — but where’s your proof?  Prove that you’re right!”

      No.  You (try to) prove that I’m wrong.

 PS:  Here’s a video of me and baby Mena taking a trip around South Berkeley, visiting Ashby Nails and the Berkeley Public Library and lamenting the planet’s take-over by the One World Order:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4sPiybYgs0

 PPS:   I’m currently trying to struggle through all five hours of that  2008 movie “Che” on Netflix, starring Benitio Del Toro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lT-VGqnQmo&fmt=18.  You might consider watching it too.  Way back in the 1950s, the rich dudes who run America now practiced up their “exploiting the masses” chops by exploiting Cuba.  And Iran.  And the Congo.  And what they did to Cuba, Iran and the Congo back then appears to be exactly what they are doing to America now — creating a peasant underclass whose only job is to provide the above-mentioned rich dudes with cheap labor.

      While watching this movie, which is set way back in the day, all I could think of was that, 60 years later, the rich dudes are now doing to Haiti and Afghanistan and Iraq exactly what they did to Cuba back in the days of Baptista, to Argentina after Evita died and Chile after Allende was killed.  You’re next, suckers!

      But then on the other hand, perhaps America won’t need another Che Guevara in order to save the day here.  Perhaps the innate goodness that lies in the hearts of you and me and all of us other average Americans will finally wise up and tell the rich dudes where to go all by ourselves.

      I’m waiting….

 ****

 Sterling Greenwood asks an important question:  We’ve got Bush guys running the economy, bailing out the big banks and credit card companies.  Bush generals are prosecuting a widened war in Afghanistan.  A Bush puppet is being propped up in Mexico, the result of a fraudulent presidential election.  The health-care reform debate in Congress remains behind closed doors — Bush style.  And it seems the Bush Supreme Court is still doings its thing, too.  Dubya definitely left a legacy.  I wonder when Obama will take office?

 ****

 From Joe Thompson regarding healthcare for retirees:  I just received a call from my cardiologist’s office, wanting to know if I wanted to schedule an appointment for a checkup.  My wife said we no longer have insurance of any kind and asked how much the visit would be for cash.  Now get this, it will blow your minds.  EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS, for maybe fifteen minutes.  If I still had Medicare it would still cost me over TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS.  This would be just a stethoscope and Hmm mm, visit.  Keep taking the one asprin a day and see me next year, thang.  And cash, no insurance paperwork for the doctor.

      Medical costs are out of reach for most of us out here.  Last year we were paying over six thousand dollars in insurance premiums, plus over three thousand dollars in co-pays with the prescriptions on top of all that.  That left us with about ten thousand dollars to live on.  Almost half of our yearly income in medical costs.  Hell the nurse practitionar we use now charges one hundred and ten dollars a visit.

     No, we didn’t get booted off Medicare, we cancelled it.  Jane, even with Medicare we could no longer afford to go to a doctor or purchase prescriptions.  The charges are outrageous and continue to climb.  It leaves a person with no alternative but to sit around waiting for the grim reaper.  Were it not for our reverse mortgage we would have already been out on the streets with the rest of the homeless.

     Something has to give for all of us.  There’s gonna be a whole lot more retirees moving in with their children if the present trend continues.  We have to choose between paying the bills or medical care and believe me medical care is one of the largest rip-offs in this country, bar none.  The medical profession is ripping off the people big time.  To top it off we can’t turn on the TV without being bombarded with health insurance ads or hospitals advertising how much better they are than all the rest.

     On top of all that the prescription drug companies are bambarding us with the fear factors and how much better their drugs are than anyone else’s.  It’s the largest legal racket in the world.  It puts the Mafia to shame.

     One of my next door neighbors was just telling me what they pay for health insurance every week out of her husband’s paycheck and this is with company insurance.  Five hundred dollars plus a month.  They just barely make the mortgage on their home and she buys her groceries with nickels and pennies.  Her son’s piggy bank is almost empty.

     I say to hell with Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to be taking care of our own first.  People are dying by the thousands all over this country every day for lack of affordable medical care.  Children are going to school on empty stomachs.  And retirees are caught between a rock and a hard place.  They have to choose between food and shelter or medical care.

     Lets stop all the politcal stuff and get down to the business of providing affordable healthcare for every man, woman and child in this country.

  ****

 From Robert: The Kidnapping of Haiti, By John Pilger:  The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude.  On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads.  No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law.  Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

     The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic.  All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton.  Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated.  Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

     The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem.  Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”.  In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.”  Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims.  “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”

     In a sense, he was right.  Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done.  In pursuing George W. Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion.  He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.

     For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque.  With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the “relief effort”: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti.  As president, Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population.  In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa.  The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.

     When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant.  Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out.  Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing.  Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pajamas, for next to nothing.  The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal.  Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing.  Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

      Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti.  Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy … bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons.  Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.

     Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince.   Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry.  More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America.  The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

     The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax.  Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America.  Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, “combat anti-US governments in the region”.

     Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war.  On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela.  Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

    Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media.  People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24519.htm