Charlie Chaplin’s words are still very relevant…
By: James Burge
January 19th, 2012
Today’s video is a great example showing how the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is an old video of Charlie Chaplin, obviously imitating Hitler. It is amazing to me how his words still speak to us so many years later.
It is amazing to watch America’s recent slip into tyranny similar to pre WW-II Germany. I think the most amazing thing is I have heard a lot of people ask, when learning about the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, why didn’t more Germans speak out against the government and I guess the simple answer is, would you?
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out.-Martin Niemöller
You have a government that has given itself the authority to capture and imprison anyone, even its own citizens, indefinitely, without trial, or even the ability to hear charges against you (isn’t this the kind of shit that lead to the independence movement in Amrica?). And now America, which had once considered itself a pillar of morality, can now use various methods of torture on those it suspects of ‘terrorism’ at a time when catching terrorists has become so important to those in the bowels of power in Washington, used as proof that fear is justified and encouraged. Does this seem overly convenient to anyone else? The US needed a war, they seemed willing to take any war with anyone (as long as it is in the middle east of course, those Arab bastards have a lot of oil), so they try to radicalize those who will eventually become their enemy to goad them into organizing hostilities (any hostilities) against the very nation that radicalized them through their egregious actions in the middle east over the course of the last century. And as Americans forget about the actions of their own government, they then use these hostilities to justify their heavy handed actions saying “how many people could have died had we not tortured those terrorists?” Are Americans so bad at history (thanks department of propaganda, I mean education) that they don’t know that the US (with help from the British) overthrew the last democracy in Iran because they were worried they would nationalize the oil industry thereby transferring profits from British Oil companies and to the Iranians, which of course started another middle east theocracy, and they have the gall to ask why Iranians aren’t demanding democracy, they did but you took it away from them, do you understand why Iranians might not be all that fond of the US? The US has been aided by Israel since it’s theft from the Palestinians, which some say are the true ancestors of Jesus (but these religious nuts don’t seem to care about Jesus anymore, take the booing of Dr. Ron Paul when he tried to use the golden rule to explain his stance on foreign policy during the South Carolina debate, wait isn’t that part of the Bible belt, I cant remember). It is amazing that in people’s apparent attempt to spread and strengthen their religion they seem to loose sight of its origin and what it claims to teach. Things like morality and acceptance and are replaced by judgments and dehumanization. Painting an entire culture in a false light to vilify them which somehow seems to justify their heinous treatment at the hands of their ‘liberators’ seems to be the true face of terrorism. I’ve heard it said, by those Jews involved in the Bombing at the King David hotel, that Israel is the founding father of modern day terrorism, and that the Israelis dressed up as Arabs, in order to confuse the issue and vilify their neighbors to help justify draconian policies that would never pass through a democratic government had the general public not been deceived into hating and fearing radical Muslims.
Anyway, enough rant for one day, here is the video…
Humanitarian Warfare…
By: James Burge
January 10th, 2012
This video is for those who claimed theUSwould be greeted as liberators.
This is what war looks like, we have no idea of this because in our lifetime, we have yet to see war and the pain it causes those who are left behind after these types of attacks.
To claim that these people welcome this type of intervention is a sadistic lie. We are not making our world safer by bombing the hell out of the Middle East; we are creating a generation who will come to loath and revile the United States and the ‘freedom’ they brought at the end of a bomb drastically affecting their livelihood, their family, and their collective history. It amazes me that people attack Ron Paul for saying that actions such as theses are what lead to 9/11. Yeah it seems much more likely they attack us because of our ‘freedoms’.
The problem is that more and more I realize that our ‘freedoms’ are pseudo-freedoms, they look good, and in some cases it makes us feel good and feel like a free people; but to put this in perspective, I’m sure you’ve heard that ‘the land of the free’ has the largest prison population in the world; mostly because rich men have found a way to make a lot of money protecting us from those we are taught to irrationally fear (like those suffering from substance abuse and various chemical dependencies) while stripping those same individuals of their rights and in some cases their dignity. Yet they let rapists and child molesters out only after a few years of incarceration, and those involved in petty drug crimes get 30+, (and of course bankers and politicians guilty of fraud, get zero) it seems obvious to me that this is completely bas-ackwards.
Over the years the US has had problems with multiple un-investigated allegations of voter fraud and stolen elections, high crime rates that are only increasing, high rates of mental illness and a population placated by mind-altering drugs with little to no admittance of any long term side effects all while ‘professionals’ prescribe them to younger and younger children. There has been an increase in rate of suicide (especially among those returning veterans) as people feel a sense of helplessness, feel isolated and see no light at the end of their tunnel. They have a health care system that is bloated and dieing forcing doctors to quit their practice or seek work elsewhere. A generation of mildly educated* individuals chasing the highly touted bachelor’s degree only to be stuck as an economic slave spending your first few years of decent pay to cover student loans used to pay for highly inflated costs of learning, and that’s if they are lucky. With no jobs in sight, since they have all been off shored to India and elsewhere because of the tax breaks congress has been providing corporations since the Clinton administration, new grads should count themselves lucky to have a job at all right now. Oh and did I forget to mention their crumbling infrastructure, once admired the world over, now a ticking time bomb, especially for those areas with high probability of earthquakes and other forces of nature. And, although it nearly never makes news, the nuclear reactors throughout theUSare not only old, they also routinely vent highly radioactive gases without any indication of risks to the public. Oh and since it’s inception in the early 1900s the Federal Reserve, a private (for profit) bank, which is allowed to legally counterfeit the dollar, has devalued the US dollar by over 95%. Oh and don’t forget the biggest threat to American Hegemony, Global Warming, or at least according to Al ‘Glutton’ Gore.
Is this the type of democracy we want to bring to theMiddle East?? A parasitic government more worried about maintaining world supremacy through debt money and endless wars, than those citizens who give them their mandate to lead.
I’m not sure if those in the bowels of power inWashingtonunderstand that without manufacturing jobs, how theUSwill support itself once it attacksIranforIsraelunleashing world war III on us all. Oh but it will beIran’s fault, and we will just have to buy our bombs fromChinaor something. (Oh what, they will be onIran’s side along withRussia, crap) okay we’ll have to get it fromIndiaorPakistan, (what, Obama has unleashed a silent UAV war inPakistan, crap). And what happens when Iran blocks the strait of hormuz causing the price of Oil to skyrocket (we can just use the strategic oil reserves, that is what they are for, assuming the war only lasts 30 days that is)
I just want to warn you this video has parts that can be disturbing.
(* sorry to those adequately educated Americans, you are a dying breed in my opinion)
America is Humanitarian, Iran is evil, Black is White, Down is Up…
By: James Burge
January 10th, 2012
Most Americans are currently looking down their nose at Iranians calling them a threat. First off a threat to whom exactly?Iranhas not attacked another nation in over 200 years. Oh Iran is a threat to Israel, but doesn’t Israel have nuclear weapons, if they feel so threatened why is it that they expect American Soldiers to die in wars to exert Israeli supremacy in the region?
They also look atIran’s current theocracy and say look we are tying to bring democracy? But what most people are unaware is that theUnited StatesandBritainactually put an end to Iranian democracy back in the 50s because they were worried it would affect their bottom line. Britain’s were much to use to getting rich off Iranian oil while the Iranians lived in near squallier to allow a new democracy to limit their control over the natural resource.
So as those in power try to convince us to deliver democracy toIranwith the bomb, ask them why we didn’t just allow democracy to grow from withinIranwhen it began.
This is a great story of unintended consequences.
How the 9/11 myth was sold..
By: James Burge
December 21st, 2011
Very good video which looks at the ‘news’ the morning of 9/11 and some of the interviews that ran on some of the major networks. The fact that the majority of the US mainstream media (as some are now rightfully calling the dinosaur media, which I like) had the entire narrative behind the attack within minuets of the second plane hitting the tower, sand even before the towers fell, is fishy at best. It uses some very familiar techniques to inject pseudo-science into the narrative about intense heat from fire as the cause of structural failure, which was the first time in history, fire took down a steal framed high-rise building (of course physics took the day off, because 3 buildings collapsed into their own footprint due to ‘intense fire’ that day). It always seemed strange to me on that day that at the same time I was learning about the attack, they already knew who did it, like they got a letter from Al-Qaeda that morning saying, our bad, sorry about the towers. Of course, the fact that they ‘knew’ it was Bin-Laden before the towers even came down, and that the Bin-Laden family was flown out of the US that morning, when all other flights had been grounded, stinks of an inside job. It tends to look like a bunch of unrelated coincidences, but every year that passes, the event seems to become a bit clearer. I wonder how much longer they will be able to successfully convince people of this official narrative? More and more people are waking up to this atrocity every day.
Keep questioning people, we are closer now than we have ever been.
Now this what it used to mean to be a reporter…
By: James Burge
December 14th, 2011
She asks some very tough questions and I give her props for asking them, but you can’t have actually expected someone involved in the bowls of power during the run up to Iraq war to admit we shouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq, knowing what we know now. For most of us it seems obvious, but for American politicians it was still the right decision.
Japanese message intercepted a week before Pearl Harbour…
By: James Burge
December 7th, 2011
This video from Mike Rivero looks at the remains of Station H, which intercepted a Japanese message directing its fleet to Hawaii a week before the ‘surprise’ attack on Pearl Harbour. It was sent to the FBI who ignored it, in favour of goading Japan into attacking so that the US could enter the war, against Japan and Germany, although they had funded Hitler’s escapades since the beginning. Take a second to look up Bush’s Great Grand Father, Prescott Bush, who was CIA (Evidence shows both Bush’s later fallowed in his footsteps) and his involvement in funding the Nazis and then operation paperclip. Looks like a trator where I am standing. Just saying.
What If??
By: James Burge
November 28th, 2011
Interesting and Enlightening Comment…
By: James Burge
November 23rd, 2011
Came across this comment posted in an article titled “JPMorgan Sued by BayernLB Over Mortgage-Backed Securities” which is amazing in itself, because there have been no federal charges against the banks found to be lending toxic assets with AAA ratings, but a German Lending Company Bayerische Landesbank sues over losses totaling $2.1 Billion due to the mortgage backed securities fraud.
The comment from Michael Rivero, (should have known since it covers all the bases, as he usually tends to) reads as follows:
After the last Depression, Congress enacted a law, Glass-Steagall, which forbid banks, insurance companies, and investment houses to be in the same institution, to deter reckless speculation with depositors’ money, which was seen as a major contributor to the stock market instability of the time. Then in 1999, at the height of the “Deregulation” craze, Citigroup and Travelers merged, a clear violation of Glass-Steagall. But rather than enforce the law, Congress repealed the prohibitions of Glass-Steagall with the passage of the 1999 Financial Services Act.
That opened the floodgates for runaway financial speculation. Wall Street knew that if they made money they would be allowed to keep it, but if their investments lost money, the US Government would step in to transfer the losses to the American people, because that is what had been demonstrated during the S&L debacle of the 1980s.
Starting about in 2005, Wall Street started bundling mortgages together into investment bundles. The initial offerings were greeted with great success, and soon everybody wanted to get in this new “product.” So great was the demand for Mortgage-backed Securities (MBS, also called Collateralized Debt Obligations) that Wall Street started running out of mortgages to front-load the system! This led to the creation of the “sub-prime” mortgage; granting mortgages to people who normally would not qualify. Congress, themselves invested in the Wall Street firms that were profiting from selling MBS, passed an $8000 first-time homebuyer tax credit (actually a loan repaid in future taxes) to lure more buyers in which helped front-load the process even faster. This sudden surge in new homebuyers increased demand and home prices skyrocketed! This made investors and homebuyers even more confident, demand for homes and MBS soared even higher and a genuine bubble was being formed.
Demand for MBS was so great that as the supply of available mortgages began to dwindle, brokers started taking ‘shortcuts’. Bear Sterns was pledging the same mortgages into multiple investment bundles; a clear case of fraud. Other brokers were blending mortgages into the bundles that were already in foreclosure. As the returns from the MBS failed to materialize evidence surfaced that the earlier earnings had not been genuine, but were “ponzi” payoffs, using money collected from new investors to send dividends to older investors.
The whole scan started to unravel in 2008 and here is where things took a dark turn. Because Congress had their own fortunes invested in the companies at the heart of the fraud, Congress decided to prop up the scam with taxpayer money and block any efforts to investigate or prosecute. That is why TARP was passed by the Congress despite 90% popular opposition. Congress were saving themselves at the expense of the taxpayers. The phrase “toxic asset” was DC-speak for the fraudulent mortgages backed securities, which were being repurchased in order to avoid investors seeking to jail the Wall Street criminals, which would have brought all of Wall Street down. Despite claims that the US taxpayer would be refunded when the “Toxic Assets” were resold at some point in the future, the reality is that none of those assets will ever see a penny of repayment, because they are all the product of the biggest financial swindle in history. Bigger than Tulip mania. Bigger than the Great South Seas Company disaster.
These fraudulent mortgage-backed securities were being given triple-A ratings by the Wall Street ratings agencies, which were supposed to provide independent analysis of the value of investments. But as we saw with Arthur Anderson and ENRON, the supposed independent authority colluded to make the swindle look better than it was. Because the ratings agencies were giving triple-A ratings to the mortgage-backed securities, even as they reeled from losses, pension funds and retirement funds were allowed to purchase them, which is the real reason why public pensions for teachers, police, and firefighters have gone broke.
Together with having to cover the credit default swaps sold with those mortgage backed securities, it is estimated that the swindle has cost the nation $27 trillion, at least $16 trillion admitted to by the Federal Reserve in “loans” and “bailouts” (actually buy-backs) from foreign investors such as Credit Suisse, Deutchebank, the Bank of Libya (boy, did THEY get hosed; 98% of their sovereign wealth fund destroyed by Goldman Sachs aka Gold In My Sacks!), etc. Globalism took a major swindle in the US financial system and turned it into a global cataclysm from which we are all still reeling.
But while the “Too Big To Fail” banks were being bailed out by the US Government, smaller banks caught in the mess were struggling to stay solvent as cash poured out of their coffers to buy back all that bad paper they had sold to investors. Those monthly payments made by home-owners were not sufficient to cover the losses; the whole value of those homes needed to be returned to the banks’ balance sheets to keep the banks technically solvent. So again, starting in 2008, Washington DC sent out a private message to banks and mortgage companies that DC would look the other way if foreclosures to home loans were “short-cutted.” This kicked off the “Foreclosuregate” scandal in which phony foreclosure paper mills, bogus notaries, MERS were all used to facilitate a massive land grab from the American people. As Damon Slivers put it during Congress’ hearings into the foreclosure mess, “We can have a realistic discussion of the foreclosure mess, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We cannot do both. Which shall we do?”
In hindsight, it is obvious which choice the government made. We are seeing wealth confiscation, no different than when FDR confiscated the gold from the American people to save the banks, only this time, done in a covert way to trick Americans into thinking it was their own fault they lost their homes. But again, this was the result of official US policy which gave tax credits to corporations that actually encouraged offshoring of American jobs. In short, the US Government took their jobs to make it easer for the banks to take their homes, to save themselves from going to prison over the mortgage-backed securities fraud.
Iceland had the right solution. They tossed the crooked bankers in jail and fired the government that tried to loot the people to save those bankers and Iceland’s economy is already on the rise. (Which is why you don’t see much mention of them any more in the American media)
That is it in a nutshell!
OWS turning point(s)???
By: James Burge
November 23rd, 2011
This is both scary and terribly sad. In the last few days (weeks) we have seen quite a few incidences of police brutality which only serves to prove a few tragic truths to those paying attention (which seems to be more than it used to be).
- We live as second (or third) class citizens in a police state
- Local police forces have been heavily militarized in the years following 9/11
- Most Police work for the 1%
- Police do not see citizens/students as people and treat them worse than animals
- The establishment is afraid of what the 99% are accomplishing
First, we have the first major catalyzing incident in occupy Oakland, when police thugs hit a US Veteran in the head with a tear gas canister, and then lobed another into the crowd that comes to his aid. Deplorable, but wait it gets worse.
I saw a video the other day of a woman punched in the face by police as she tried to show them a court order allowing them to re-enter Zuccotti Park. At the same time, I saw another video of police attacking a protester because he got to close to the fences so they bashed his face to the ground causing severe bleeding. I’m not sure how long it took for him to get medical attention.
There was also the story of another US Vet who was beaten and left in a jail cell for 24 hours before they realized he was actually injured and he went to the hospital for surgery on damage to his spleen obviously due to the police beating. Before letting him seek medical attention, Police accused him of being a drunk
There was also a photo going around of an 84 year-old woman who was pepper sprayed by cops at Occupy in New York I believe. There are the videos of cops dragging woman through the streets by their hair, and the now infamous video of Officer Pike pepper spraying 11 students who refused to move and were posing no threat to the officer. Apparently pepper spray is okay when someone isn’t listening to you; Shame Officer Pike, shame indeed. I wasn’t sure there was much else to say on this matter, but then I was proved wrong again.
Recently there was a story, I think I heard about it around the time of the 84 year-old woman being pepper sprayed, a story about a woman, Jennifer Fox, a pregnant woman who was pepper sprayed and kicked in the stomach by police at an occupy Seattle protest. Well the sad news to report is that Jennifer went to the doctor the other day and found out her baby had no heartbeat.
“They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too.”
Our thoughts go out to her at this tough time, and I hope she can be strong, because I think all of the events mentioned above have something in common. All have the possibility, whether alone or collectively, to spark a turning point in our society. When people realize that the cops are not here for our benefit and the injustice system is not here to provide justice for you and I. Modern justice comes at a price, a price which you and I are unable to pay, but the top 1% seem to be making out just fine with the new arrangement as it is usually only a fraction of a percent of the profits they make of toxic assets.
I heard a story the other day about a man who stole $100 and then felt guilty and returned it; he got 30 years in prison. Yet a banker who was found guilty of embezzling $3 Million gets 10-15 years and will likely serve less than 5 years at a posh prison. People need to wake up to the growing inequality in our world, right now you see protests about the economic inequality, but it shines a flood light on the social inequality that has been building for quite some time.
Why can’t we all just get along…
By: James Burge
November 10th, 2011
