Are We Already In A World Government?

In a recent news summary commenting on a possible double dip reccession, a commentator on CNN stated that while China is the leading economic power of the world that the United States--the leading military power, is still relied upon for "world leadership" in this global economic crisis.

Every since the housing market crash of 2008--caused by the credit bubble resulting from living as an "empire of consumption," a unipolar world system dominated politically and economically by the United States has now given way to a set of nations interconnected through mass dissemination of English language and western corporate consumer culture, a process known as "globalization," with the U.S. in debt to the IMF/World bank and having its military garrison the world, but no longer dominating the globe financially. This was part of a deliberate plan over the decades to deindustrialize the U.S. manufacturing base in favor of building up Asia as the production center of the world.

With the military hub of world policing on one side of the globe and the new economic powerhouse of manufacturing on the other, we truly now live in a one world government system of corporate power enforcing a producer consumer relationship between the U.S., which polices the worlds second and third largest reserve oil resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, and China, which produces virtually all goods for the U.S. market.

Investigator and filmmaker Bob Fletcher says that this division of the world into specific interelated functions was planned years ago to undermine the soveriegnty of America.

"The corrupt people in government sat down years ago and said we have to take the two or three wealthiest nations of the world and bring them down to their knees to where they are all mutually requiring each other to exist. It used to be that years ago the United States was the world center for being not just the manufacturing but also for being able to provide services so we could be technically independent at any time if we needed to,"Fletcher said."Once you break the world down to one area of the world like Africa being the suppliers of the raw materials and countries like China being the manufacturer of most goods for the world and then someplace else in the world like the United States possibly being a servicing nation, then you have total financial interdependence on each other."

"The goal is to bring economic interdependence where the United States or any single country in the world isn't able to stand on its own. What they've slowly accomplished is that they have allowed the Chinese to be the manufacturers for everything. We don't make anything. This is a necessary step to bring along a singular world government, a body, maybe a body under the United Nations or at least under the general concepts of the United Nations where it would be a handful of people at the top," Fletcher added.

"It would be sort of a bureaucratic sort of a parliamentary quasi democracy only mixed where the real democracy would be gone, it would be synthetic and there would be a handful people in a parliamentary structure that own and control every single thing."

Radio Liberty host, physician and long time world geopolitical analyst Dr. Stan Monteith believes that the global drive among U.S. leaders to dominate the world militarily since World War II has been anything but "national" in its motives. Rather, hollowing out the domestic economy while placing our troops all across the globe and within the 50 United States is really part of bringing humanity under one single regime, he says.

"The reason you have this all powerful military is certainly not to protect us from other nations. It is to establish our world empire. America has an empire and that's so our military can be used right here in the United States," Monteith said. "We have a North American Command, we have a South American Command, we have an African Command and Asian Command, but why do we have a North American Command? Because we have our military stationed here to control our population. Our founding fathers didn't want a standing army because they knew it could be used against the people. They didn't want a standing army for the United States. Yes, you could have a framework for military officers, but they didn't want a standing army."

With the United States now the leading torturer in the world, holding hundreds of detainees without due process of law in Guantanamo, Bagram Air Base, Iraq and Somalia, and several U.S. citizens who have been held incommunicado and tortured for years before finally getting a sham trial such as Jose Padilla, John Walker Lind and now Bradley Manning, is it any wonder that Obama's national intelligence director, Adm. Dennis C. Blair, has now declared the right to kill American citizens anywhere in the world deemed a threat? Under Global government, civil and constitutional rights are redefined and this was the true reason for the U.S. moving from the "prisoner of war" definition of holding detainees under the Geneva Conventions to the "enemy combatant" designation under the Bush administration, which allowed violence against those held in U.S. custody to reach any point short of "organ failure" to occur without being called "torture," in other words, death.

The Obama Administration actually has a "kill list," that includes Anwar Al Awlaki, a U.S. born Yemeni, accused of but not judicially guilty of connections to the Fort Hood Massacre and the 2010 Times Square bombing. Having the U.S. government, the example to the rest of the world, placing American citizens of any kind on a kill list, especially when the U.S. military reach into the planet is global is surely an indication of the motives of global international government/financial world rulers to implement a world wide plan in utilizing police and military anywhere, including America, to assassanate/execute individuals deemed enemies to corporate/government power without due process of law. What's more, Awlaki actually dined at the Pentagon after 911 so what kind of Americans, specifically, could this law really be applied to? Could it be white Americans, Black Americans, Mexican Americans?

Fletcher's research shows the startling implications of the U.S. military's new drone warfare technology which would use biometric face scan technology to seek out enemies within the world population. With new statements by our government leaders declaring the right to kill Americans as well as a 12 member council of governors appointed by Obama to replace our 50 governors under FEMA in a declared "national emergency," where up to 20,000 troops would be deployed in the U.S. should national rebellion arise, one can anticipate the startling implications in terms of Constitutional rights for Americans. It is also disturbing since there is now a world wide race to purchase drones among 50 nations of the world, including China, Isreal, Germany, China, Russia and Iran and local police departments in the U.S. are getting Homeland Security grants for these machines for surveilliance use in law enforcement.

"The expansion of the technology and the capability of robotic weapons has grown and grown and grown in rapid increments where some of these were just ideas a few years ago and now they're in full production and being used in a whole variety of forms in several ares of combat around the world. The scary thing is that this is almost a science fiction space story type thing--that is that they're moving forward to utilize and increase the capability of these remote control robots to share information, knowledge, directional information between each other and they've reached a point where they have these very small micro type flying robots that are called swarms where they actually can use five, ten or 15,000 at a time and they actually can take off and carry out a mission which can either be intelligence tracking and camera work to transmit micro camera images back wherever they want to but they actually share information between each other and they don't even have to have a complete designation of where they're going to go, they actually figure this out themselves with limited intelligence knowledge put into these machines," Fletcher said.

"The machine then shares its experiences and then they can actually end up--if there's five of them, they actually select the leader themselves and then the leader will go through the doorway first, the other four will line up behind the leading robot and follow it in and then analyze the terrain and carry out whatever it's supposed to carry out. This is the kind of thing that we sat and watched on Twilight Zone years and years ago--this is now a complete reality and the frightening thing is that now they have capabilities to decide themselves, the robots, what they're going to kill, blow up, shoot up or explode or what they will not. They actually have the capability to make those decisions themselves in the air without necessarily having to have an individual direct them and they can do it with the new facial identification that we've heard so much about now. They can program a person's face--the enemy, whoever that might be, into the computers, send out the drone robot, fly over an area, scan 30 to 45 people, find the person they need and then drop a bomb right into his lap and doing it without individual instruction by someone back at home base."

"Of course war is not extremally moral to begin with, but if you start where we are allocating the decision to kill in a non human, non feeling, emotionless machines, that's really reaching a scary point and time. We are there."

Imagine a future television scenario where Americans who are deemed a "threat" to the global government either for being anti-war, pro-labor, pro-environment, constitutionalist, or just poor people looking for food are hunted down for points by a hybrid military/police global force that uses drones to assassanate on American soil.

The FAA has already indicated it will enter negotiations with our government to lower the height limit that police department drones can fly when surveilling urban U.S. neighborhoods.

Journalist Allen Nairn agrees with my conclusions and thinks that this frightening scenario of drones from other nations targeting Americans is a real possibility if America doesn't stop its war/threat ideology and become a peaceful nation.

"The U.S. defines who the adversaries is. The default U.S. position is to kill the adversary. When you kill the adversary, you kill 10 civilians. What are the survivors, the loved ones of those civilians, supposed to do, when the international legal system is rigged so that there is no peaceful redress, so they have no place to go? It’s unjustified. It’s terrorism by the U.S. law’s own definition.

But it’s also ominous for Americans, especially ominous in a historical moment where the U.S. is losing its edge. Right now it still has the massive military advantage, but how long is that going to last? Other countries have more people to field as troops. Other countries can manufacture weapons more cheaply. The U.S. still has the edge in military technology, but in today’s information age, that can’t last very long. So, if the appeal to decency can’t wake up Americans and make them say stop, maybe the appeal to self-interest and fear can do it.

Imagine a moment not too far in the future — some of the technical magazines just started writing about this — where foreign countries would have the capacity to put drones in the skies over New York, over San Diego, over Alabama, over Chicago. How would Americans feel about that, when the discretion on whether to push the button on the missile and launch it at anyone — at anyone in the U.S. — a member of Congress, a member of the President’s staff, a GI, someone walking down the street — when that discretion lies with someone in some foreign capital, some commander? And imagine how Americans would feel if those overseas controllers of the drones flying in the skies over the U.S. decided to apply American standards; if they decided to apply the Brookings standard that says, OK, if we target one American military planner and we kill 10 civilians, that’s OK; if they decide to apply General Hayden’s standard that, well, it’s our default position to kill these adversaries; and if they decide to apply the U.S. State Department standard, which says no matter what we do, we can’t be prosecuted. That’s the situation that the U.S. is setting up. And it’s going to be increasingly dangerous for Americans as time goes by."
(C) Bill Lewis

Sources:
Global race on to match U.S. drone capabiliti​es
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/global-race-on-to-match-us-drone-capabilities/2011/06/30/gHQACWdmxH_print.html

Drone surveillance in the US? Alex Jones says 'the whole world is in danger'


Allan Nairn: As U.S. Loses Its Economic Edge, Its "One Clear Competitive Advantage is in Killing"


AFRICAN UNION PART OF WORLD GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL SOMALIA


U.S. PENTAGON WILL EMPLOY MILITARY APPROACH TO WEATHER DISASTERS AROUND THE WORLD

Jobs or Resignation--You Choose!

If people are looking for work unsuccessfully and cannot find jobs after years of repeated searches, while the government now ruthlessly slashes social services to continues giving corporations tax breaks and continue squandering money on imperial no win wars, then it doesn't make sense to continue the arduous process of looking for jobs without also questioning why they no longer seem to exist or are increasingly difficult to obtain.
Americans really need to go to the White House and demand that the jobs which were sent overseas be brought back immediately so that when they apply for work, they actually get it in a reasonable amount of time. If this cannot be achieved, then Americans need to demand the resignation of their representatives. Saying that people need to retrain when new employment is not being created is a bullshit lie. Billions of dollars are spent to manufacture predator reaper drones to assassanate people around the world without due process of law which violates the U.S. constitution and these crooks in the Congress turn a blind eye or openly advocate such global police state tactics. War stimulates the economy.
Most people are just looking to put a roof over their heads and this is seen to them as more of a threat than the possibility that someone might commit an act of "terrorism," defined by the United States government as acts of violence not committed by the Pentagon, the CIA, or private contractors such as Blackwater and Dyncorp, who have murdered thousands upon thousands of people in the Middle East just in recent years. The CIA and Military drone assassanation programs, where insulated military and intelligence personnel target "militants" in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somolia from remote locations including within bases in the United States routinely kill innocent civilians because of faulty human intelligence and a general lack of concern for human life other than the lives of Americans. On average, 10-15 civilians are murdered for every so called "militant" fighter the Department of Defense and CIA assassanate, without due process, of course. This is terrorism and cannot be claimed as an accident since it occurs on a routine day-to-day basis and oftentimes kills anywhere from 18-40 people, including children, with one "accidental" strike.
Americans need jobs, not phony wars. Economic oppression and fear for their futures,is what really terrorizes Americans. Billions of dollars wasted on drones, bases, wars, bombs. There is no credible "enemy" for the United States. This is all about empire. The Soviet Union crashed in 1989, largely due to a CIA proxy war funded by the national security state that trained Jihadis in terrorism against the Soviet Union to induce a Soviet troop invasion. These same Jihadis from various Central Asian and Middle Eastern countries like Yemen, Azerbajan and Saudi Arabia, to name a few passed on their CIA training in everything from bicycle suicides, camel bombings and the use of RPG's (rocket propelled grenades) to a later generation of Jihadis which the U.S. now fights. The CIA and the Pakistani ISI trained various Mujahadeen fighters in the use of RPG's to target the tail of Soviet Helicopters during the Soviet Afghan conflict, which causes the helicopters to crash. This later came back to haunt the United States during its intervention in Somolia, when North African rebels used training provided to them by CIA trained Mujahadeen Jihadis to shoot down American helicopters (Black Hawk Down affair). After the U.S. invaded Iraq (but not before) similiar jihadist elements migrated to that country using the same techniques to shoot down helicopters. In this sense we can see how covert operations/wars of the past serve as backdrops for future imperial adventures and all of this revolves around the public not holding Congress accountable for reigning in the Pentagon and the CIA.
The jihadis that committed the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 were also Al Qaeda trained by the CIA. Anwar Al Awlaki the American born Yemeni (therefore an American citizen) whom the Obama administration wants to assassanate without due process due to alleged but not judicially proven connections to the Fort Hood Massacre and the 2010 Times Square bombing attempt actually dined at the Pentagon after 911. How could this happen if the government is really concerned about stopping the jihadis? It funds, trains and befriends them when it is convenient for Washington's interests.
the U.S. bombing of Libya--clearly an act of war and not a "kinetic action," as Obama alleges is killing innocent Libyan civilians while the U.S. simultaneously funds/arms the Libyan National Fighting group against Qaddafi. Libyan National fighting group contains Jihadist fighters connected to Al Qaeda, in stark hypocritical contrast to the Obama Administrations stance of opposing these similiar forces in Yemen(Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and Pakistan. This on it's face makes the entire "war on terror," a superficial resource wasting artifically constructed conflict against a loose group of individuals who clearly have no capacity to overtake the United States in any way shape or form, a complete fantasy laden lie! This generation of children are being trained to push buttons to kill people and be soldiers in future phony wars. Stop the phony wars to make more and more money on rockets, bombs, planes, tanks and military bases bring the money home for jobs!

(C) Bill Lewis
sources:
Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?

Peter Dale Scott's Libyan Notebook
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3504

Al Qaeda's Anwar Al-Awlaki Dined at the Pentagon After 9/11

THE WAR ECONOMY FAILS TO HELP MOST AMERICANS

With no end in sight to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and covert wars involving special operations military occurring in Yemen, Pakistan, Somolia, along with a protracted bombing campaign in Libya, Americans must ask themselves where is the funding for the domestic economy?

The military industrial complex--that combination of congressmen, big businessmen in the defense industry and the Pentagon, has usurped the Constitution of the United States. At the command of President Obama Congress appropriates $700 million dollars on the joint U.S. Nato operation in Libya even though the legislature was not even so much as consulted before the Pentagon committed resources to this intervention, a violation of the Declaration of War, Article I section 8 of the U.S. constitution. As the Libyan intervention has far exceeded 90 days, Obama is also violating the War Powers Act of 1973, a law written by Congress to limit presidential war-making proclivities after the disasterous American occupation of Vietnam.

If that's not enough, the U.S. bombing of Libya--clearly an act of war and not a "kinetic action," as Obama alleges is killing innocent Libyan civilians while the U.S. simultaneously funds/arms the Libyan National Fighting group against Qaddafi. Libyan National fighting group contains Jihadist fighters connected to Al Qaeda, in stark hypocritical contrast to the Obama Administrations stance of opposing these similiar forces in Yemen(Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and Pakistan. This on it's face makes the entire "war on terror," a superficial resource wasting artifically constructed conflict against a loose group of individuals who clearly have no capacity to overtake the United States in any way shape or form, a complete fantasy laden lie!

Turning to other areas of the world, the bungled U.S. occupation in Afghanistan seems that it will continue indefinitely as the Pentagon states that it plans to still have 70,000 military occupying this country in 2014. What is the objective of this occupation anyways? Is it to give them a stable government? According to Peter Dale Scott's book American War Machine, during the 2010 U.S. military campaigns in population areas dominated by the Pashtun Persian ethnic group, such as Khandahar and Helmand Province, the Americans worked with the Afghan National Army to suppress Pashtun Taliban strongholds, yet there is an overepresentation of Tajiks from Tajikistan in the Afghan National Army. The Tajiks speak Dari, a form of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority in these areas. So how is a stable government to come about when Tajiks, let alone Americans don't even speak the language of the natives they allege to be helping, but are really killing with disproporationate use of fire power every day? Four of the senior members presiding over the rampantly corrupt Afghan government are involved in the heroin trade. The recently assassanated brother of President Hamid Karzai,Walid Karzai, was a CIA asset who trained paramilitaries for the U.S. in Kandahar while simultaneously profiting off of collecting bridge tolls from the lucrative heroin trade that funds the Taliban at war with U.S. soldiers.

According to Leon Pannetta, there are fewer than 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan anyways, so what is the purpose of staying in Afghanistan? Every night raid on homes or drone strike in which U.S. forces indiscriminately kill innocent civilians and then pay a cash compensation to the families of the slain serves to fuel the anger of the population, who resent being occupied, and as a consequence of this, side with the Taliban against the United States. What amount of cash can replace a lost human being?

Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends says that ever since the Vietnam war, military spending has played a huge role in deindustrializing the American economy. This is due to the simple fact that spending money abroad destroying other people's lives and infrastructure and attempting to rebuild what the American government/and private corporate contractors want these countries to have is a scheme to make big business construction firms and weapons companies connected to corrupt politicans rich. This explains the big money involved not only in weapons production and rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, but also military base construction for foriegn occupations. Over 700 military bases varying in different sizes and built by private firms exist in Afghanistan alone.

"If you have a Pentagon contract—a Pentagon contract is cost-plus. The higher they[arms/defense companies] spend on airplanes, on armaments, the more money they get. So you have them engineering not to cut costs, but to maximize costs, because that’s how they make their profit," says Hudson. "So you have a warping of American engineering, American technology, towards the military, and that’s why the industrial core has been shifting to Asia, because they don’t have this military. The economy is being sacrificed to the military. And that’s somehow evaded discussion here."

A failed campaign of brutal occupation that killed three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans took enormous resources out of the U.S. economy that could have been spent creating productive government funded employment in the areas of construction, manufacturing and related industries in the U.S. Vietnam was only the start, as interventions in Panama, Iraq 1990 (Bush Sr.) Afghanistan, 2001, Iraq II, 2003, Af/Pak, Libya/Somalia II (Obama 2009-Present) Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia,(Clinton)have all provided the impetus for increased weapons production, which stimulates the economy at the expense of human lives, and in turn caused successive U.S. presidents throughout all of these years of intervention, to desire to use more surplus weapons and the power of the imperial presidency to start new wars. In addition, after the Kosovo and Iraq interventions, the Pentagon spent billions of tax payer dollars to build sprawling city-like military base communities replete with all of the amenities of a major urban city such as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and Balad Air Base in Iraq while the subject group of the U.S. bombing campaigns were in many cases left without electricity or running water.

In 1961, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people about the perils of what he coined "the military industrial complex" and how it took money away from services such as schools, hospitals and productive employment for Americans at home by squandering the money away on useless wars abroad.

"And we’re spending twice as much on the military as we did when Eisenhower gave that speech. So, we’ve got a huge imbalance in our budget," adds William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

"You can’t really defend your country if people are sick, people aren’t healthy, people aren’t educated. So it’s kind of undermining the roots of the ability to defend the country, going forward, to throw money at weapons makers, to throw money at this huge military base infrastructure that isn’t needed for defense proper of the country. So, it’s completely out of balance, and we’re going to pay a price for that if we don’t turn that around."

EX-INTEL CHIEF SAYS IN RISKY GAME OVER OIL, NATO SUPPORTS AL-QAEDA REBELS IN LIBYA

WALID KARZAI A CIA ASSET

TROOPS SMUGGLE HEROIN

HALLIBURTON/CHENEY BANK OFF OF PRIVATIZING WAR SERVICES. WAR IS BIG BUSINESS


(C)Bill Lewis

Sources: Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine

Chalmers Johnson: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism Secrecy and the End of the Republic

After Months of Partisan Wrangling, Wall Street & Pentagon Emerge Victorious on Debt Deal

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/2/after_months_of_partisan_wrangling_wall

The Need For Strong Left Wing Political Parties

The world is literally a raving mad mess. Human needs are increasingly not being satisfied for increasing numbers within the global population. Increasingly corrupt nations cannot provide jobs for their populations and cannot escape debt from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. People around the world--and in the United States, many of whom lack true knowledge of the cause of their plight are angry. They subconsciously feel so outraged from the injustice committed against them by global political and economic elites that most people's animosity is in latent form, but could go off given the right combination of events.

Linguist/political analyst Noam Chomsky says that in the United States in particular, he is troubled by the fact that the population is angry but, unlike the years during the Great Depression, when radical left parties such as the Communist Party USA, the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) and other progressive parties formed unemployed councils, the current U.S. population--for the most part, isn't seeking out positive solutions such as organizing for jobs and justice. Rather, they are falling under the influence of right-wing groups who don't believe that any public programs within the domestic society are beneficial to human needs or the political system in general.

"What they're hearing is that every institution is rotten," Chomsky said. "That's what they're hearing from the Tea Party Movement.The government isn't doing anything for us, corporations don't, the parties aren't doing anything for us. Antagonism towards the Republican party is even higher than towards the democrats. Congress should be thrown out and started over again. They have resentment against professions, they don't believe scientists, everything isn't working."

"They're not hearing anything constructive and the trouble is they're not hearing anything constructive from anyone else. The democrats are not telling them, 'look, we understand you're problem and it's because of the financialization of the economy which we supported'--they're not going to tell them that. The Tea Party message against power and institutions, that's about the only message they're hearing," he added.

According to Chomsky, the Tea Party supporters who have fallen victim to housing market crisis induced forclosures, declining services and unemployment caused by globalization have legitimate grievances against the economic system that everyone concerned with the political direction of the nation should take seriously. The real dillemma is that unlike during the depression era of last century, no real radical left-wing social movmement exists to counter the Tea Party and respond to what amounts to "cry's for help" among its supporters within the populace.

"These people shouldn't be ridiculed," Chomsky said. "They should be organized and be the kind of people who in the 1930's reacted in a very constructive way and compelled the government to institute the New Deal measures which were not superb but they did save the country from a very serious crisis. This was a hopeful period. You didn't have this sense of the kind of despair that you see now. The kind of anger. You may have found it somewhere but among the urban working class--a large part of the population, my impression was that there was hopefulness that we can do something," Chomsky said.

"The CIO was organizing there was the labor movement. The labor movement is more than just, let's have jobs. It's an educational process. My unemployed seamstress aunts got a week in the country from the union. Social circles, educational circles, workers education. There was a remarkably high cultural level but also a sense that there's something we can do. It's going to get better. Now there's a sense of real despair and anger and that nothing is going to work and no hope for the future. We just have to get rid of everything but not replace it by anything."

While disagreeing with their sense of hoplessness for the future, Chomsky, a radical activist for social justice and human rights since the 1960's clearly identifies with the sense of injustice that these people feel due to the loss of America's manufacturing base over the last several decades. Manufacturing, it should be noted, is a major stimulator of the economy when it is strong.

"Manufacturing, which is really the core of an economy is just collapsing. I mean manufacturing--unemployment in manufacturing is at depression levels. There isn't much prospect of those jobs coming back. These people see that there is tremendous wealth in the country but very highly concentrated. Inequality in the country has soared maybe to the highest level ever," Chomsky said.

"For about 30 years they have seen their incomes pretty much stagnate--working hours going way up, far behind Europe, above Europe, benefits which were always weak here are declining. They just went through a shattering catastrophe with the housing bubble burst which for many of them was most of their assets and unemployment is way up," he added.

Noam Chomsky on U.S. Rage & Ruin 2/4

WALL STREET FAT CATS THAT DON"T PAY THEIR FARE SHARE ARE SCREWING THE REST OF US

The fat cat crooksters on wall street would have us think that all of the money for society is virtually gone and that we might as well roll over, die and allow corporations to privatize our social security safety net.
Nothing--indeed could be further from the truth. These cats are rolling in dough and are smoking up our dollar bills like a wet cigarrete. Now let me tell you something you probably haven't heard because it wasn't always this way.
In the 1940's the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50, but now every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents.
After the Great Depression and World War II, the people in the top income tax bracket during the 1950's and the 1960's paid 91 cents for every dollar they earned above $100,000 to the federal government, but now they pay 35 percent for every such earned dollar.
The debt limit is something that's been raised decade after decade. Deficits are nothing new as historian William Blum writes in his August Anti-Empire report.
"The most prosperous period in American history occurred in the decades following the Second World War — from 1946 to 1973. And guess what? We had a budget deficit in the large majority of those years. Clearly such a deficit was not an impediment to growth and increasing prosperity in the United States — a prosperity much more widely shared than it is now," Blum said.
"Yet we're often fed the idea of the sanctity of a balanced budget. This and other "crises" are typically overblown for political reasons; the current "crisis" about the debt ceiling for example."
The U.S. became a debtor nation for the first time in 1914, when the United States owed more money to foreigners than it was owed. In other words, this so called "debt crisis" is nothing but pure manufactured hoax.
Richard Wolff, a visiting professor at New School University said on this Thursday's Democracy Now that the reason so much debt has accrued to the bankers in the first place is that the plutocratic American government won't tax these filthy rich cats whose feast on the lucrative profits, free of taxation, doesn't give them any incentive to put Americans to work, which would provide a strong taxable labor force. This is because they currently do not deem it in their economic interests to do so.
"The government spends more than it takes in, because it’s not taxing them. And here comes the punchline. It then turns around to the people it didn’t tax—corporations and the rich—and borrows the money from them, paying them interest and paying them back," Wolff said. "It maybe a bit of a shock to folks who don’t follow this, what the corporations are doing when they hold back the money because it’s not profitable for them to hire—is that they lend it to the United States government to fund these deficits. The United States government refuses to tax corporations and the rich. It then runs a deficit."
"If the government really wanted to do something, you wouldn’t have a national debt. We’re running a deficit because the people who run this society would like us to deal with our economic problems, not by taxing those who have money, the way we used to, but instead by endlessly borrowing from them. And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt," he added. "They want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation."
Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan Administration Paul Craig Roberts speculates that the current "political theater" occuring between Congress and Obama might really be a Wall Street Obama Republican conspiracy to privatize social security, a.k.a., turn this beneficial social program into a for-profit system.
"If the drama continues to the absolute deadline without a deal, Obama, who perhaps favors cutting the safety net as much as do the Republicans, would have to accept the Republican package in order that the troops are not cut off from supplies, Social Security checks can continue to go out, and the dollar be saved. Having opposed the Republicans to the last minute, Obama can say that he had no other recourse," Roberts said.
This would indeed be horiffic with the exception of the soldiers being cut off of supplies, which would no longer allow them to wage brutality in foriegn lands. By feigning the crash of the dollar and the possibility of seniors not getting their checks, the President could very easily ram through the Republican right-wing agenda that so bountifully melts his butter.
As long as the United States appropriates more money to launch foreign wars of occupation across the globe than it spends on domestic job creation and refuses to reign in the fatties that enslave the people to the powerful rich, we'll remain lingering in the ashtray of despondency like so many wet ciggarettes.

Richard Wolff: Debt Debate is "Political Theater"

Where are you America?

With a 14.3 trillion dollar debt and America now involved in seven wars--including full-scale occupations or covert campaigns in North Africa/ The Middle East, hundreds of military bases stretched across the world and no end to peace in sight, I ask the question, is America up shit creek without a paddle.

I think so. What better way to destroy a country and it's currency than to continue borrowing money to mire it's military down and destroy our national currency through a series of protracted, unwinnable quagmire wars where the population hates the occupier. And think about it, who would want someone else occupying them? The British and the Soviet Union have already failed in what is known as "the graveyard of empires." There are hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, but only 50 known members of Al Qaeda according to the CIA's own director, Leon Pannetta. That leaves about 100 soldiers for every one member so called member. Fictitious enemy anyone? Some Americans are starting to wake up to this reality and are figuring out that war is a scheme to make the weapons companies rich, but it is a weak inertia, unlikely to catalyze into any social force significant enough to stop the madness.

Just the other day, the Obama administration backed a bipartisan Senate budget plan to cut tax breaks such as write off deductions for home mortgage interest and employee health insurance. These cuts--however, would be used to lower top individual and corporate tax rates from 35 ro 29 percent. The plan would also "overhaul of Social Security and Medicare." If passed, the bill would save $500 billion dollars and generate over $1 Trillion in revenue.

No cuts are being implemented in the military budget for wars or to reduce the U.S. foriegn presence around the world. Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who most Americans didn't vote for, and whom many progressive liberals shunned in favor of Obama during the 2008 elections said about our current costly global foriegn committments,

"Get out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, stop being engaged in these criminal wars of aggression, and get out of Iraq, you’ll save another $150 billion. So, there are a lot of ways. Cutting the huge amount of redundancy and waste and out-of-date weapons programs in the Pentagon, again, another one. Bringing back the soldiers from Europe and East Asia, 65 years after World War II. What are they doing? Defending prosperous countries, like England and Germany and Italy and Japan, against what? Inner Mongolia or Moldova?"

According to recent news reports, China already concedes that the U.S. is defaulting on its loans. A new phenomenon is occuring where wealthy businessmen from China and other parts of Asia are already buying up property in the United States.

Millions of Americans are jobless through no fault of their own. In addition, approximately 46 million Americans are now on food stamps. Could food stamps and social security be next on the chopping block as we head into yet another decade long succession of imperialist wars that eventually morph into land invasions in Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Pakistan?

What most people don't realize is that in addition to our foriegn troop presence in Afghanistan/Iraq--which entails hundreds of permanent military bases to gaurd the oil for the multinational corporations and future war usage, the special operations(JSOC)troops are already conducting night raids and killing civilians in Yemen and Pakistan to supplement the deadly drone assassanation program.

All of this money is, of course, being sucked out of the domestic economy while American workers desperately need jobs, the funds for which are sent to the imperial standing armies now occupying the Middle East, North Africa and 75 addition countries where special operations assassanation teams are located.

Former National Security Advisor Zbegnew Brzenzski acknowledged on MSNBC a few weeks back that the potential consequences of a failing economy could ignite a sense of fury in an increasingly marginalized public who feels abandoned by the politicians and the society at large.

"If America were really expanding economically--becoming more productive, more wealthy, more innovative, that kind of disparity would become more or less pallatable," Brezenski said. "But when you have stagnation and have a rather severe case of unemployment, the sense of social injustice can be terribly demoralizing and politically in the long run very dangerous. It can politicize social/economic issues, create radicalism, class conflict, extremism. I think that's a real risk in our society."

The problem with such uprisings, which violent global government elites like Brezinski are allowed to sieze upon the crisis to their advantage is that technological solutions involving the police and military are usually the systemic response. The more crisis occur, the more "threat" they can capitalize on and the bigger the bloated size of their government budgets and goons to police the poor become. Given that when the shit finally hits the fan, most people are going to get angry at scapegoats, i.e., whites will blame "blacks on welfare," blacks will blame whites, whites will be mad at hispanics, hispanics will resent whites, the mass of the people will unlikely go after the military, political, economic and global elites truly responsible for this entire mess.

This means that different segments of racial groups will be pitted against one another as they fend for themselves in a crisis resulting from anger over the economy collapsing.

Historian Alfred Mccoy reports that the government has already been preparing for such a situation and could possibly use divisions of the American military who occupied Iraq should public unrest arise.

"Indeed, in September 2008, the Army’s Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division’s brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with “civil unrest and crowd control.” According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit’s civil-control equipment featured “a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities” designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals — including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating.

Mccoy goes on to explain how the technology used in war abroad could come home to haunt Americans if they're not careful.

"after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia," Mccoy said.

"Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state," he added.

It remainst to be seen whether this will happen.

US troops on US streets?!- 1/2

US troops on US streets?!- 2/2

Excess

Wars are just a way to help corporations waste/induce obsolesence at a profit including with human lives. The electric car and curbside charging stations were in the works in the early 1900's but the cartels went with the internal combustion machine. Shortly after came the weaponization of the automobile in world war one and its associated dependency on petroleum that this entailed The leading cause of violence in a society is inequality and stratification. Keeps the cycle going, but at what cost to the planet and humans. Already the world is littered with landfills containing broken computers like the one's in your apartment, in addition to cellular phones. So what you may say? Your experience in your apartment right now is a direct product of the social relations. Plus, all of the mining for resources for the minerals to make the computers/cell phones--part of the reason why the U.S. is in Afghanistan. which I was just watching a moment ago said that the people who run society deliberately manufacture goods that don't last so they can continue the cyclicle production consumption employee emplyer social relations and maximize profit with the outcome being mass waste. The narrator said this contradicts the term "economy" because to economize means to be sustainable or conservative with the worlds resources and not harm the environment. They could make computers that don't break down but there is a conscious decision not to, just like with automobiles.The electric car and curbside charging stations were in the works in the early 1900's but the cartels went with the internal combustion machine.

(C) Bill Lewis