Um, Ken, the photos are some of the proof we need to get those in gov’t for carrying out torture and murder in our name. [Hint: that is why we must not see them.]

Thank you Night-Gaunt for correcting my math! I apologize for the fuzzy math of my previous post, whereby I missed 6 zeros from the calculation! I guess if these six missed zeros were to the left of the numbers, it wouldn’t have mattered! (Laugh!)
I guess that the problem came as a result of my hearing about the billions that were given to the big banks and corporations to rescue them. For a poor man like myself the “trillion” number is even inconceivable!

However, the essence of my proposal is still valid since it helps directly the average citizen, not only the big banks and corporations. I guess the figures I suggested could be reduced to half or one third and yet would be significant enough to help in improving the bottom line for most taxpayers citizens.

Sorry Fadel but you math is off. The real number of just your first solution is $307* trillion and your second is $1,535 Quintillion!!! <<1,535,000,000,000,000>> So I am sorry to shoot down your idea. Good start though because the only way we will get to the solution is to work on it. Please try again. More power to you!

The obvious thing is to cut back on the backbone of the nascent police-state, i.e. the military, surveillance, logistics and enforcement. But then those who wish to have an empire need it once the elements of the republic have been swept away.

For you see we aren’t an empire just yet. Think of it as a part angel and part deamon. It can’t function well as either is antagonistic to the other. It wants to be one or the other. The deamon part is winning.

*Our current population is over 307 million.

I read somewhere on these TD’s threads someone who complained about posters’ only writing criticism without offering ideas for solutions. I believe that that poster is justified in his criticism. So it behooves those who criticize to offer ideas for solutions; hence my ideas! 

I have a proposal for a simple plan that would reduce or eliminate the high cost of the “empire” and simultaneously solve the unemployment problem, the health care problem, the spending problem, the debt problem and the home-foreclosure problem most middle class and poor citizens are facing.

The American population is estimated at 300 million. Let the treasury give each individual a million dollar with the stipulation that they pay their mortgage in full, get health insurance for themselves and their dependents, pay all their credit card debt and invest the remainder in starting small businesses or investments of their choice. The cost of this package is 300,000,000 X 1,000,000 = $ 300,000,000; a very tiny fraction of the billions that are spent monthly and yearly on the evil imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on further creating more enemies in every part of the world.

Furthermore, select one million from among the existing successful small business across the country and give each five million dollars, with the stipulation that they should expand their businesses and hire more workers and give them a generous health insurance. This will cost 1,000,000 X 5,000,000 = 50,000,000; again a very tiny fraction of what is spent monthly on the military machine in this country.

Furthermore, individuals or households whose assets or incomes exceed five million dollars could be excluded from receiving such assistance, thus bringing the cost of the package to even a lower figure.

This would have the effect of totally eliminating poverty and expanding the middle class whose survival and expansion is the essence of both the security and prosperity of America and by extension the whole world. There would be be no need for an overrated and over-sized military industrial complex.

I can see that there will be only few elites in the financial, military, and political sectors who would oppose this simple plan. I guess they can go to hell or find themselves a tiny island where they can live and die. Alternatively, we can build for them an ivory tower where they can live and die isolated from the general population.

I would say, Fadel, that the American crisis is an historical POWER problem with a moral dimension.The ruling class has amassed enormous financial inequality which it uses to control both parties and the truth media. Tle learned and mass media and other truth organs having been centralized, using modern advertising techniques, and made vivid by tv, has deluded and narcatized the population.  Who are getting ever more powerless.

ribald and Nigt-gaunt are probably right.  What has to be done first is to change people’s consciousness to develop a truth consensus from the population’s perspective rather than from the Elitist power perspective.  It is necessary to restore a distrust of the American people in their religous, political and scientific leaders.

What it is necessary to do is to unlearn the power delusionss that the Educated classes have imposed on the population historically to legitimate their power.  And to do so while Obama continues Bushite policies and will probably increase the civil oppression in the US. 

In this period what is requires first is consciousness raising, since power is firmly in the hands of oppression.  I rhink rhia ia feasible; with world communications and transportation, I don’t see how the US can stop it.

For the Scandinavians it was the Valkaries that were the ones who took care of the criminals at the behest of Odin/Wodan, the Thunder God.

We certainly in need of a Nemesis or an Arch Angel of retribution and balancing the scales of justice. But then such concepts are for thinking beings like ourselves. We must do it ourselves and unlike it is portrayed relentlessly in children’s fiction, the good don’t always win.

In a May 14 comment, I wrote the following:

“So, in this sense, Obama is no better or worse than his predecessors. He’s just the latest link of cause and effect that will bring us closer to the fall of the empire.”

I was hoping that some interlocutor would raise the question of whether the fall of the “empire” is good or bad for America! Since no one raised that question, I am volunteering to answer it by saying that, though on the surface it seems to be bad, in the long run it will be good for America and humanity at large. I say this for two reasons:

1. That America’s current crises is essentially a moral one. Once the crises reaches a climax, it will lead to moral awakening, which on its heals will cure America from arrogance, greed and that false feeling of exceptionalism and superiority.

2. That present day America has an artificially inflated image of itself. Political, social and economic crises have a tendency to humble people and force them to shrink back to their real sizes and their relative importance or no importance in the grand scheme of the world.

We don’t need to go far in human history to learn its lessons. Just think about the British Empire which dominated the world during the 18th and 19th centuries. Being humbled back into its actual size, Britain today is a more civilized, humane and relatively more peaceful country than what it was at the peak of the empire; her participation in the evil war in Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding!

What happens to nations when corruption and falsehood dominate has been called by different names. People who believe in the laws of nature, call it the law of cause and effect. Monotheists, who believe in one universal God, call it God’s retribution for the sins of recalcitrant human beings. Ancient Greeks even created a special goddess whom the named NEMESIS, the goddess of retribution, who punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.

One might add that due to the historical political-military crimes of white America against the Native Americans and against Afro-American slaves, what’s happening in America now might be called the “curse of the natives!”

Now, if you’re in the movie business, or you’re connected to one, you could make a contribution by making an epic movie entitled “The Curse of the Natives.” But don’t forget to acknowledge my copyrights and my royalties! (Laugh!)

By AbuMubarak, May 14 at 9:45 pm #

You guys need to realize that this is not about Obama. Nor is it about Bush.  They are all one in the same…

The people who run McDonalds are never seen.  They are the brains of McDonalds. Not the guy with the red hair.

And I would at that the operators of the cabal are just as anonymous and they are the ones who really set things up and create the plays we see on tv that takes up so much of the news time we need to see what is really going on under the surface. They give us the exotruth while the endotruth goes on wrecking our republic to make way for a new empire. A distinctly American one it will be too. A full and whole empire, not the mismatched Frankenstien‘s monster of republic and empire we have now.

They are as serious as torture and death. They will not stop unless we stop them. How? I really do not know since we need organizations and troops and police to track them down and bring them in for high treason. Obama just isn’t on our side that I can tell. He seems to be supporting them. By hook or by crook they want to win.

You guys need to realize that this is not about Obama. Nor is it about Bush.  They are all one in the same.

When you look at McDonald’s, who do you see? The clown with the red hair.  Everyone on this planet knows that clown with the red hair.  He is the face of McDonalds.

Tell me you believe he has a voice in the direction of McDonalds.  No, you know he doesnt. He is just a face for the public to see.

The people who run McDonalds are never seen.  They are the brains of McDonalds. Not the guy with the red hair.

Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/07/15/hersh/index.html

“Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

Jim Yell, May 14 at 11:08 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

Looking back to the election Obama was the only candidate to vote for.
.......

Blatantly false. Obama may have been the only candidate who you would consider voting for , or who you considered had a chance to win the election but he was far from the best candidate and certainly far from the only one. Nader ran , McKinney ran, and both made excellent points and had platforms better conceived, in my own opinion, than did Obama.

You would say, I believe, that voting for either of those two was a wasted vote, I say that voting for Obama appears to have been that exactly. Further I would note that, as long as you only consider the two candidates of the major parties you are doing exactly what they want you to do.

Voting is not like a horse race, voting only for one who has a chance to win needs to be translated into voting for the one you wish to see in that office. How else can you hope to make changes?

Ribald that may be the only way to do it. I don’t see much in the way of recourse as we are further marginalized and deflected from what we need to be aware of. It isn’t an accident either. It is a way to keep us occupied as other things go on. [Remember the magician?] Bad things that are gnawing away at the bones of our republic.

The torture photos may also show some or all of those reported 100 that were murdered by this “enhanced interrogation” and also we need to identify all of those corporate torturers too who so far are invisible and untouchable.

There is no solution to the madness that doesn’t involve a substantial increase in the general awareness and knowledge of the populace at large, I think.

Yet, the lack of media that is both truthful and relevant is fueled by the low entertainment value of media that is both truthful and relevant. A vapid culture breeds vapid minds, which have decayed the structure of public debate to the point at which basic morality is an issue of controversy, and any argument that offends the status quo is viewed as irrational hysterics.

I doubt America will recover in time to avert yet more disaster. Cultural shifts can strike like lightning, though, when a critical point is reached. To that end, I would suggest that Obama needs to be confronted, in public, about the wrongdoing he is committing. His apology, along with a real reversal in policy, could catalyze a movement toward substantive improvements in government.

I’ve seen enough pictures, already - what’s the point? Stopping it is the important thing! And DICK (Cheney), you pasty faced old fart, why don’t you (in the words of Bill O’Really) just SHUT UP!

Did any of you libs REALLY expect anything better from Obama? I just love reading the disappointment in all of your posts. Am I spelling schadenfreude correctly?

if youre mad i have some catharsis for you:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Well, it is suffice to say that all of the hot air is now out of the Obama balloon. Howard Zinn on yesterday’s Democracy Now!, lamented if only BHO would consider what MLK would do… well good luck with that! The late Arthur Miller’s observation about how the American people want a President who will kill for them, seems rather timely. Perhaps that is why the electorate, or at least those who choose to participate with what the owners have decided to be the candidates, always choose the war mongering idiots. Always determined to drag this world’s peoples into the continuous quagmire of military violence. And now President Obama is afraid for the troops? Where have we heard that song and dance before? So the new bright President in the Washington firmament, now defers to the reptilian logic of Dick Cheney? Well what-do-you-know!

The link below was not copied right; here’s another attempt!

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_seyre t&Itemid=91&task=videodirectlink&id=1412

Kindly, watch the short video below to learn about a little-discussed topic that exposes another dimension to the ugliness of the American military establishment, which Obama serves now as its Commander-in-Chief, without any signs of reform on the horizon!

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_seyre t&Itemid=91&task=videodirectlink&id=1412

Ugh.
  From a disappointment to a disaster.
Now Cheney is ordering the scared house servant around.

On the “founding of our country”, Howard Zinn has some interesting new ideas, in his speech on the 100th Anniversary of The Progressive Magazine on May 3,2009.  The video is on the magazine’s website and YouTube.  He talks about 3 “just” wars that are “sacrosanct”:the Am.Revolution, the Civil War, and also mentions Korea. He talks about “just” causes, but can war be “just”?  He was also on DemocracyNow yesterday. http://www.democracynow.org

Comments on the Independent in England are interesting on Obama and the reneg.  It’s fascinating to see how some of the readers overseas view the US.

coloradokarl, May 14 at 7:38 am #

You hopeless people ! Our country was founded by optomistic people. get out from ubder your computer screens and do something, anything ! Bitching about things without offering at least a hint of solution is not healthy….....

...

Said while seated at your computer bitching about other people bitching…...I found no optimism within your own post, nor did you bother to include any suggestions for a solution either. What did you accomplish other than embarrassing yourself?

You hopeless people ! Our country was founded by optomistic people. get out from ubder your computer screens and do something, anything ! Bitching about things without offering at least a hint of solution is not healthy….....

Besides just disagreeing Virginia777, you are allowed to actually elaborate and explain yourself. That is a full blown discussion not just empty criticism. Exercise you cerebra just a bit more to make and actual point.

Besides the body of the critique I find correct. You must too from the way you answered.

“The difference between him and his openly evil and ignorant predecessor is limited to superficial cosmetic differences, including his pigmentation”

NOPE, try a slight bit more reason here

“As a keen observer of current political affairs, and a student of history, it didn’t take me long to predict and learn that Obama is just the 44th president of the crumbling American empire. The difference between him and his openly evil and ignorant predecessor is limited to superficial cosmetic differences, including his pigmentation.”—Fadel Abdullah

I agree with the gist of your writing just that we don’t have a fully formed empire. More of a hybird of a republic with empire tendencies. It isn’t a good fit.

“This is the way it’s always been, and will continue to be till the final culmination in the downfall of the American empire. So, in this sense, Obama is no better or worse than his predecessors. He’s just the latest link of cause and effect that will bring us closer to the fall of the empire.”—Fadel Abdullah

As you said in the previous paragraph, Obama is cosmetically different but not in spirit. The same goes for what he does. Sugar helps the poison go down. But you will see that the architects of our destruction want to remove the tattered remnants of our republic and replace it with a shiny new imperious and cruel theocratic empire that will do what they want without anyone questioning them. No ACLU, no civil and political rights and no safety net. Plenary powers of the military-police over us and an austere life for the bulk of us. If we are lucky. We still must suffer a complete collapse of our economy before they come in with a helping claw that most will take immediately. All Obama is doing is keeping us teatering over the abyss, he hasn’t stopped the economic apocalypse just delayed it.

As a keen observer of current political affairs, and a student of history, it didn’t take me long to predict and learn that Obama is just the 44th president of the crumbling American empire. The difference between him and his openly evil and ignorant predecessor is limited to superficial cosmetic differences, including his pigmentation. 

Obama didn’t run to serve the nation or to effect a meaningful change; he’s the typical ambitious politician who was aided by great deceptive rhetorical skills and the grooming and backing by behind-the-scenes power brokers and lobbyists, who saw it was in their best interests to elect a man of color who can serve as convenient camouflage to further their aggressive greedy interests.

So now, after the short honeymoon with the deceived populace is over, he has to start serving his masters and the master-system that placed him in the White House. This is the way it’s always been, and will continue to be till the final culmination in the downfall of the American empire. So, in this sense, Obama is no better or worse than his predecessors. He’s just the latest link of cause and effect that will bring us closer to the fall of the empire.

He is in the position of Clinton to do the Bush’s work. That is what an obvious republican can’t do a democrat can do for him. Just like Clinton did to pass NAFTA, GATT, WTO and repeal Glass-Steagal among other infamies. Obama now is moving to his normal position in the cabal, on the reich wing of the fascist party. Corporate health (death) care, military/industrial complex getting fatter, Wall St. propped up but not you and me. Even his green initiative is soiled by nuclear and coal.

For such a smart man he believes in “Clean Coal” too. But then maybe it is the money in his pockets that color his perceptions.

Don’t worry, freedom, Obama is not following the policies of Clinton, he is following the policies of Bush.  He is continuing the torture policies of Bush by letting client states do it in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.  The Obama cheerleaders simply don’t want to know it.

If it turns out that President Obama is the same type of democrat as President Clinton was, then basically all is lost. America is no more.