Junior

Houston, TX 1972: Junior was flying high again, Mushmouth Shoutin’ by Z.Z. Top blared from the Mustang’s 8 track tape deck as it roared across three lanes at 75 mph, merging onto I-610 and narrowly missing a Caddy with Bat-mobile fins filled with blue hairs from Beaumont.

The prodigal son was returning from yet another long weekend south of the border. The Bolivian marching powder was kicking in again and the kid was beating the red-eyed monster back with whiskey and beer. Soon he would be back home and he would be able to sleep it off for a few days and to get his system cleaned up just in time to report for guard duty where he would heroically fly a desk for the weekend.

He had been reminiscing about Matamoros where he had spent several days engaged in the type of drunken debauchery that you just couldn’t find in America, even if he was a child of wealth and privilege. That sumbitch, high hatted father of his would go off on another rant about Junior being a god damned disgrace and a drunken embarrassment that would ruin his nascent political career. The booze and cooze were both cheap and plentiful and daddy’s spies weren’t everywhere like they were in Big H. Junior liked getting his groove on south of the border and took off whenever time allowed. He headed to Mexico for the type of cheap, kinky and degenerate sex with underage girls that the old man just wouldn’t think was cool if he were to stay around the homestead. His dick would practically point the way as he would make the run for the border…and he wasn’t going for any fucking enchirito…no sir, he was going for the all you can eat hair-taco buffet. The entertainment was boss as well, the strippers performed live lesbian sex acts on stage with dildos and the works and for a few pesos they would give him the private show back at the hacienda. Junior also really dug the fabled donkey show…and it was just fucking amazing how big it’s dick was.

“YEEEEE-FUCKING-HAAAAAAWWW!” roared Junior as he knocked back another belt of Wild Turkey draining the pint bottle and hurling it into the back seat which elicited a sick thud, he slammed his fist down on the ‘stang’s dashboard, “FUCKIN’ PARTY”…. There was a groan and then a pudgy, bespectacled figure clambered over the passenger seat, rolled down the window and stuck his head out, making violent retching noises”

“Jesus Christ Turdy….ya jist can’t take it with the big guys kin ya?”

‘Turdy’ was Junior’s sidekick, inseparable was he from the young scion’s side.

Little did Junior know, but Turdy had serious longings for him, he wanted nothing more than to saddle up on the baloney pony but he dared not to ever reveal the fact that he was a closeted homosexual which was a big NO-NO in those days, especially in the Lone Star state where they still dragged such folks down the street on a rope tied to the tailgates of their pickups.

The controversial Academy Award winning movie Midnight Cowboy left a lasting imprint on Turdy’s psyche, he had become so uncontrollably horny during the scene where a young Bob Balaban blew Jon Voight’s Joe Buck in a Times Square movie theater that he actually walked out, he was not alone as moviegoers in 1969 Ft. Worth, TX were shocked and horrified at the film’s lurid content, most of them diehard Baptists unbelieving at the incomprehensible sins being splayed out in 70 mm on the screen in front of them. In abandoning his seat during one of the first graphically displayed man on man sexual encounters committed to film he was not alone, what did however separate him was that instead of braying hellfire and brimstone at the poor concession stand clerks, ushers or anybody who would listen he ran to his pale blue VW bug, locked the doors and jerked off to the beat of a Jerry Lee Lewis song on the radio.

“Here, take a hit of this shit…it’ll make ya feel better” said Junior as he fished a doobie out of the Marlboro package that was sitting on the dash and punched in the lighter.

Junior stuck out like a turd in a punchbowl with his prim and proper transplanted eastern elitist family.

Junior swung the mustang into the circular driveway, narrowly missing the backside of his mother’s Cadillac.

Mommy was sitting on the plush sofa, jabbering on the telephone and chain smoking Kools, a half full green glass ashtray rested on the end table.

Daddy was furious as Junior stumbled through the door reeking of stale booze, illicit sex, reefer and the pungent stench of moral rot

“I can’t possibly express how disappointed that I am in you, you are on the wrong road through life son”

“This is the last fucking time that I am bailing your ass out……do you know what an abortion can do to my political career?”

“Fuck You!” , screamed Junior….”let’s get it on right now old man!”

“Who in the fuck do you think that you are? The president? …you’re an asshole” shouted Junior.

Junior then wound up and took a big roundhouse swing at his father who due to his tennis playing was far more agile than the clumsy and inebriated son. Daddy stepped to the side and Junior continued to flail like a pinwheel until he smacked into a chair, bounced off and then went crashing into the china cabinet, shattering hundred year old family heirlooms and making a noise so horrific that it downed out his mother’s horrified scream of “FUCK”!!.

Junior went down hard at his poppy’s feet.

Junior grunted and looked up at his father, his eyes glowering with Oedipal hate, then he groaned, rolled over and vomited on the floor.

Daddy just shook his head and thought if it weren’t for me this boy will forever be a fuckup.

Desperation Ain’t Pretty: Hillary Embraces Formerly Hated Foe

Murdoch Ditched For Richard Mellon Scaife – Niiiice!

First off let me be clear that I am not going to refer to the obviously psychotic uber bitch Hillary Rodham-Clinton as a C,U Next Tuesday again at least not in this post-probably a more appropriate anatomical description would be asshole but semantics are semantics. I just can’t deal with the weeping and gnashing of the teeth that such a volcanic little pejorative elicits and I have already basically been run off of one of my favorite blogs after being decried as the ‘Great Satan’ for such displays of down and dirty rhetorical tactics that set off some thinner skinned individuals on witch hunts and head hunting for their little lynch mobs. To those people I simply say – get a fucking sense of humor because if we can’t laugh as or rapidly dissipating little shit float of a country circles the drain on its way down into the fetid bowels of the sewer of history we would all just fucking never stop crying or just say fuck it all and chase fifty or so Xanax down with a fifth of Jim Beam to get a head start and beat the Rapture crowd to the exits.

So this is how it goes, the Clintons and their surrogates are becoming increasingly pissed off that we stupid fucking cattle just can’t just admit the obvious that they are entitled to an unimpeded path to the White House and will steamroll any uppity nigger or whimsical liberal with a childlike view of what really happens in this great, god anointed land of John Wayne style whup ass and flag sucking democracy aplenty that has turned billions into enemies seeking to destroy us for our way of life. The rubber is getting ready to meet the road now and the Clinton juggernaut is going to make road kill out of any simpering little piss ant or Judas politician who dared to sell out the great restoration for something as trivial as salvaging a bit of dignity after a full blown gang fuck orgy in the great and opulent whorehouse on the Potomac. Despite enough fuckups to give reigning king of the fuckups George W. Bush for his money the vengeful harpy flying the red flag under the brand name HILLARY the Queen in waiting is jacking up her testosterone levels for a full blown scorched earth “just fuck you all” onslaught, a category five shit storm of razor edged shrapnel forged from the discarded kitchen sinks of thousands of foreclosed homes and Jesus have mercy on anything, human, animal or cyborg that happens to get in the way. Hell hath no fury right? I just loved the classic reference to Tonya Harding politics as an analogy to the Hillary campaign and am pissed off that I didn’t think of it first.

Despite an ugly gaffe (some more cynical like me would say an outright fucking total bullshit four flushing lie) over her running from sniper fire on the Bosnian tarmac that brings back Ronald Reagan’s fabrications of reality that he cropped from old B movies as his brain slowly decomposed during the mid-1980’s that would have finished off lesser beings this thing ain’t over until the fat lady sings and that won’t be until the proper deference is given to Mrs. Clinton. This is a woman who has triangulated our way to within an inch of full blown jack-booted fascism by NEVER once taking any sort of a stand against the horrors of the Bushreich lest it cause a demographic problem but that is a story for another time, the historians are going to have a field day with this little national psychodrama.

Former President and reigning blow job king Bill Clinton is out on the hustings decrying Barack Obama’s lack of patriotism while making his pitch for the Queen, his silver mane and scowling face increasingly making him resemble Blade Runner replicant leader Roy Batty and sweet little Chelsea is regularly being pimped out to charm the credulous dickheads in the pocket media even if it means deflecting the occasional smart assed question about her daddy finger-fucking a chubby little trollop intern . James Carville, the screeching little cracker who resembles Nosferatu and sleeps with a fellow whore (much to the delight of dumbass TV loving idiots who wouldn’t know basic civics if it bit them in their fat asses) is decrying former loyalist Bill Richardson as “Judas” which at least would be technically correct in that the corpulent little spic was an integral player in the DLC pack of Iscariots who whored out every decent fucking value that the Democratic party ever stood for in order to play nice with corporate looters and accommodate the sale of our country to any foreign pig with a wad of cash and an anti-American trade deal to peddle. The DLC and their bastard siblings the neocons have a lot to lose if their win-win scenario of a ‘race’ between McClinton in November is derailed because let’s face it, the only real difference between Hillary Rodham-Clinton and John McCain is a dick…and that is only a matter of speculation because Hillary has never dropped trou in public.

Now the chutzpah is being cranked up in the battle over the super delegates with the news that a group of Clinton money mongers were sufficiently pissed over the lack of bang for their bucks and sent a nasty letter to Nancy Pelosi decrying her legitimate concern over the coming theft of the nomination in Bushesque fashion. The group of 20, primarily composed of media moguls, a feminist garment tycoon, real estate developers and the usual high rolling Jews is demanding that Pelosi sniff the glove and fall in line lest the DCCC be deprived of dollars for the coming election. If you don’t know what the DCCC is just think of bagman Rahm ‘Shit Eyes’ Emanuel and the organization that refused to fund the campaigns of progressive anti-war Democrats in 2006 and deprived the jackass party of a far larger majority (potentially a VETO PROOF majority) in the House. If anyone in the party had a lick of integrity they would tell these whiny little extortionists to stick their fucking money in the same place as their morals reside.

And Mrs. Clinton is using Richard Mellon Scaife’s shitrag Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to throw out innuendos intended only to further besmirch Obama and go to the soon to be beaten into American skulls 24/7 Reverend Wright SCARY MILITANT NIGGER card one more time to sow fear with the Pennsylvanians. The embrace of Scaife is interesting since he was largely responsible for the rumors of Clinton complicity in the alleged suicide of Vince Foster which was at the time quashed as just another smearing from the right wing slime machine. Now though I’m not so sure, the more that I get to know about the Clintons and their dirty dealings the more I start to think that there is more to all of those stories about the murders, rapes and corruption than meets the eye. The joint venture between the Clintons and the Ollie North drug and gun running operations that flew threw Mena while America’s favorite doofus dysfunctional family was in the governors mansion is a dead giveaway as to the morality of the Clintons as well as the ongoing schmoozing between Bubba and arch-criminal mastermind George Herbert Walker Bush.

Mrs. Rodham-Clinton’s alliance with the right-wing extremist slime mogul Scaife is just one more example that the former ‘Goldwater Girl’ is a fake leftist or more appropriately a longtime mole in a Democratic party that has increasingly tilted towards Mussolini light as it sprints rightward as fast as it’s chicken legs can carry it away from the New Deal and the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over at Op Ed News where I regularly post Jerry Zeifman had an interesting post on how a 27 year old Hillary tried to block the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon back in 1974 and lost her Judiciary Committee job, I haven’t seen this anywhere else so pass it around.

While using the Scaife scandal sheet as a forum to declare that Wright “would not have been my pastor” Rodham-Clinton’s association with the ultra-conservative and highly secretive fascist order The Fellowship is not a topic worthy of serious scrutiny. Now in the land of dumbass, flag swaddled, television lobotomized whitey the failure to hold the radical clerics of the ‘Christian’ faith to the same standards as Reverend Wright or any other preacher who dares to bring down the hellfire and brimstone against the American empire of blood and murder is commonplace but The Fellowship is something more than your ordinary religious cult. I personally suspect that it is a CIA front group given the long history of flirtations with fascism and its ranks being populated with many serious honchos who can be free to discuss their machinations to ruthlessly support global finance capitalism and the colonization of the planet under the façade of legitimacy that convening for religious reasons offers up. Some folks have conspiracy theories of the Freemasons and the Illuminati, I don’t personally buy into those but there is a degree of truth in that such quasi-religious organizations are perfect cover for the building and cultivation of underground networks of those with ideals that run counter to those great myths of democracy and liberty and The Fellowship as well as the equally spooky Council For National Policy (CNP) certainly fit that criteria as did World Vision which should immediately strike a chord with those in the know on covert mind control black ops and programmed assassins, that too is a story for another time but I promise to get at it some day. Anyway stay tuned for future details on this because these front groups along with the Reverend Moon’s empire need to be exposed as the menace to American that they long have been however don’t count on much more from the corporate pocket media kingmakers.

Now if the Clintons can’t destroy Obama through the normal media takedown (the Reverend Wright thing really blew up) or political corruption – the bribing of the super delegates to back the Queen’s coronation then there is the LBJ option – force Obama to accept Mrs. Rodham-Clinton as the Vice President on the ‘dream ticket’. Running the country from the veep’s office may work well with a reptilian longtime shadow government kahuna like Dick Cheney but Hillary craves the limelight and will not be satisfied with being viewed as anybody’s second banana, that act already has been finished. I love Matt Taibbi’s comments on this in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in his piece “ Hillary’s Flimsy Case” that to my knowledge is NOT available online (a disturbing pattern with recent anti-Clinton diatribes) but from which I excerpt below:

It doesn’t matter what Obama does at this point. He’s fucked either way. If he gets into a catfight with Hillary, the peanut gallery will slam him for being just another typical politician. If he sits there and just lets her plunge knife after knife into his abdomen, he’ll have every hack at Time and Newsweek saying he doesn’t have “what it takes to compete in the “blood sport” that is politics (as if any of those news-mag yuppie turds know anything about actual “blood sports”.

I’ll say one thing: This endless he-said/she-said piss-fighting between the two camps, with its attendant daily purging of loose-lipped campaign staffers of the Samantha Powers/Geraldine Ferraro genus, is a bad place for Barack Obama to be Nobody in American history has ever been better than the Clintons at calculating the electoral math of resentment, paranoia, media-aggression and just flat-out, back-alley nastiness. Everyday, the Clintons come up with some new and brilliantly devious way to color the subliminal background of the electoral canvas, from using comparisons to Jesse Jackson to buttonhole Obama as a “black candidate”, to floating rumors of an “unstoppable” Hillary-Obama ticket – despite the fact that Hillary would rather eat a KFC bucket of her own shit than run with Obama – in order to con the on-the-fence voters into thinking that a vote for Hillary might also be a vote for Obama.

It’s quite obvious the white woman on top ‘Clinton Mandingo’ isn’t going to fly after the great Obama speech on race and the out and out lies of the great Bosnian sniper attack so if Medusa is going to be on the ticket it is going to be as the number two and that is only going to last long enough until the establishment finds a way to off Barack in an ugly public manner unseen since Dealy Plaza. Obama would essentially be signing his own death warrant were he to cave in to pressure to include Mrs. Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket.

I am constantly reminded of that old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” even though if that is what was in my fortune cookie which was the only edible part of my dinner because the shrewd Chinese owners of my favorite takee-outee restaurant in my neighborhood that actually delivered had the good sense to sell their business to a bunch of lilly white chumps who can’t cook fucking chicken egg foo-yung back when it became obvious that gas prices were headed towards 4 bucks a gallon. That little parable my friends is the story of 21st century schizoid America.

On Little Cats Feet

I recently had the opportunity to catch the late Aaron Russo’s provocative and controversial America: Freedom To Fascism . While it was an uneven film (in my opinion far too much time was spent on the tax segment) and had a tendency to become drawn out it is a worthwhile watch that I would recommend primarily for supplementary knowledge to those who already have a basis in the true reality of a rotting system gone to fascist seed. The movie is far too much for newcomers still soundly asleep in a world of make believe and television. Regarding the film, I can certainly understand why the subject matter is so volatile (the title itself is so in your face that it alone ensures censorship in the corporate media) and the widespread acceptance of even a small portion it would be very dangerous to the established order. The film has been largely suppressed by the mockingbirds of the MSM (swift boated when mentioned at all) who along with the bought politicians are nothing but servants of a filthy and corrupt oligarchy.

The same cone of silence also extends to the two outstanding BBC documentaries by filmmaker Adam Curtis. The Power Of Nightmares explores the parallels between the neocons and the Islamists and dares to debunk the war on terror as nothing more than being conjured up for the sake of political expediency. The Century of The Self examines the origins of the use of propaganda in manufacturing consent in America based on the ideas of Freud that were used to combine the ideas of capitalism and democracy. Both are fascinating and are absolute musts for those seeking to make sense of all of this insanity. Neither been aired domestically nor are they available on DVD for the obvious reasons that they represent a serious threat to the illusory world that we now inhabit. These two are every bit as incendiary as Russo’s film although on a different level in that they make a damning case against beliefs long held dear by pulling back the curtain to allow a glimpse at the ugliness behind. They are both widely available online.

America: Freedom to Fascism is far more militant of a film in that it dares to attack the sacred cows of the legitimacy of the federal income tax as well as the Federal Reserve System itself. I felt that the inordinate amount of time spent in attacking the tax system took away the very serious issues that are addressed after the opening. Russo trots out tax protesters, former IRS agents and to his credit does make a case that there is no law that actually requires a federal tax on individual income. You can argue that six ways till Sunday and you are always going to lose because as the familiar saying goes “you can’t fight city hall” and there is no way in hell short of an outright revolution that the federal government is ever going to cave in on their sucking out of money from the average working Joe.

I think that a far more compelling argument would be to state that there is a systemic problem where there is taxation without representation unless you are a high roller or a tax cheating corporation – either of which is able to unfairly rig the system so as to not pay their fair share. The class war that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan and was the midwife to hellspawn like the insipid Grover Norquist has been nothing other than a looting spree and a mass redistribution of wealth unseen since the days of the robber barons and gilded age exploitation. No surprise since Karl Rove is on record as idolizing the infamous Mark Hannah but that is a story for another time. In short the tax portion of this film detracts from the rest of it and leaves it open to attacks from those who like to pigeonhole tax protesters as ‘money cranks’ and extremist fanatics.

When American: Freedom to Fascism finally gets past the hurdle of the overly long income tax segment and into more sincerely important territory is when the transition is made for a look at the Federal Reserve System itself. This is an area where Americans (including myself) are lacking in even rudimentary levels of knowledge over this monolithic Ponzi scheme that has it’s hooks into every single one of us. Russo does well in giving a high level overview of this banker’s cartel and the unaccountable power that it has over not only our national economy but to each and every American who entrapped in an inescapable web of debt as a fly stuck in a spiders we. The Fed is an entity created by banking interests to ensure that their rapacious practices and vulture capitalism would be a preeminent force in enslaving debtors in perpetuity to a system where money is created out of nothing and backed by nothing and which facilitates the practice of state sanctioned usury.

Rather than even attempt to explain the complexities of the Federal Reserve and the con game of fractional reserve banking – I am certainly no financial genius although I do have an acute sense of smell for something rotten I suggest that readers all do their own research and draw their own conclusions. Russo’s film is only a jumping off point for taking a knife to the stinking carcass of a looming economic disaster due to this particular house of cards built on a foundation of greed. Check out G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island, he is in the film and is able to cut through the banking and financial jargon to make a case against The Fed in layman’s terms. The only problem that I have with this book is that it is referenced often by fringe elements of the extreme Christian right (and the paranoid anti-United Nations freaks fed by the delusions of Timothy LaHaye and the Secretary General Antichrist of the Left Behind empire) who also take issue the monetary policies of this country but I would not let that discourage anybody from taking a look at it. There are many other books and other materials out there to back up Griffin and to expose the system as the debt slavery sham that it is. I would recommend the short video Money As Debt as essential viewing – and pass it around too!

It is when America: Freedom To Fascism gets into the rise of the police state and the surveillance society when it is at it’s best. The erosion of civil liberties and the implementation of programs more commonly associated with totalitarian systems since the Reagan era (and even prior to that but that is a seriously indepth topic for another time) that have been accelerated during the reign of the Bush-Cheney-Neocon Axis of Evil is an existential threat to America. The corporatization of our voting processes through black box vendors like Diebold make all elections subject to being rigged by those with vested interests and proprietary software place the machines outside the authority of local elections officials. As Joe Stalin once famously said: “Those who vote decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything”. Stalin would be undoubtedly be a high level neocon were he alive today.

There is a look at the increasing use of RFID chips for tracking purposes. These little electronic spying devices were rolled out by corporations ostensibly to manage inventory but are being used increasingly to monitor consumer behavior and demographics for marketing. The technology is here right now and is examined in depth in the book Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, a copy can probably be picked up used on Half.com or some other online bookseller but this is not futuristic paranoid stuff…it’s real. Worse the corporatists and interests within the government have designs on using this and similar technologies to use for social control. Pets are already being implanted with tracking chips and the fear mongering media uses lurid stories of child abductions to soften up the public for implantation into humans. The possibility that Americans one day in the not distant future will be tracked and managed like a laboratory rat faster than you can say Amber Alert is an imminent danger! Of course our friends in the mainstream media will soothingly assure the public that it is only for our own good and will protect us from the ‘terrorists’ and that any who object are conspiracy theorists or more ominously those who have something to hide. After all, what good American wouldn’t trust the word of Homeland Security?

The Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act that was rolled out in the aftermath of 9/11 guarantees that the police state was already in the planning stages and waiting for an opportunity. The attacks presented that to a ruthless fascist elitist element who had rose to power on the backs of an idiot scion with a brand name and a rigged election took advantage of that opening. And have used every minute since that day to destroy the American system and that ‘goddamned piece of paper’ the U.S. Constitution. This was all planned. Paranoid? It’s a compliment in these days of mass ignorance, fear and apathy. I strongly recommend this movie despite it’s flaws because it scares the living shit out of the establishment. It can either be purchased or it is widely available on the internet as are the Curtis films. See them all now….while there is still time but the clock is ticking.

And now with the public growing restive and the war plans for Iran still on the table with that pesky Admiral Fallon out of the way the neocons and the oligarchy are desperately trying to complete their deal with the devil, the consumation of which led to 9/11. They are like rats slowly clambering on top of each other while drowning in a septic tank largely filled with their own shit and as the dead enders that they truly are would rather go with the scorched earth plan than face the condemnation and justice that they truly deserve….just look at Dick Cheney, do you really think that you can negotiate with terrorists like that?

Basically just fuck them, keep it up truth seekers, rebels and patriots because every little bit of research is yet another slice in the death of a thousand cuts that these global fascists are incurring which will ultimately bring them down. To hell with their scare tactics, just keep circulating the information and circumventing the mockingbirds in the mainstream media. A decentralized swarm attack is the most successful of all battle plans and hundreds if not thousands of individual researchers working to dig up information is what will ultimately dig these fuckers’ graves and god willing we can all live long enough to piss on those graves.

And pay heed to your Second Amendment rights, arm yourselves to the teeth now while you still can before the fascists are able to disarm America through creeping ‘legal’ incrementalism and before the goon squads are able to capitalize on an event where they can pile into their black vans and start picking up the future residents of those KBR camps.They are coming, they are coming to take you down. To take you down to Chinatown and make no mistake that there will be any mercy or a functional system of due process to resort to when the jackboot kicks in your door.

By Ed Encho

Interview With An Iconoclast: Part Four

The conclusion of my participation in a study on the progressive blogosphere, I have posted this over the past several weeks to give readers an idea of where I am coming from as well as to ensure that if it is published my comments will not be taken out of context.

Question: So what is your opinion on things like “friday cat blogging” or music threads? Why are they so pervasive? what purpose do their serve?

Ed Encho: These are not things that have any interest for me personally but the internet is a lot like television in some respects. Take the electronic crackpipe for instance, there are some worthwhile things on but hardly anybody ever watches them choosing instead to surf through a tsunami of trivial bullshit like cooking shows, reality shows, end times crap, sports, courtroom shows and anything on FOX but they bypass community television, educational programming, history, CSPAN, BBC News and anything of even remotely socially redemptive quality. The internet is quite like this too because of the things that you mention and of course the porn which is hugely popular. You know the saying of casting pearls before swine…

Not everybody is a political firebrand, an iconoclast or an activist and even some who are need diversions once in awhile, such things serve their purpose but the vastness of the internet as a place where nearly everything that could possibly be wanted to be known is largely responsible for the backlash against the tyranny of the Bush administration. Without the internet we would all be in that bizarre period leading up to and directly the attack on Iraq where Bush’s face was on billboards, yellow ribbon magnets were on three quarters of the SUV’s, all dissent was treated as treasonous and the PNAC boys were riding tall in the saddle. The internet is a real threat to the powers that be and the system that they serve and you are going to start working at closing it down – at least from elements that are exposing the bastards and organizing.

I predict that in the next year at the most you will see an increasing focus on trumped up charges of domestic terrorism and anarchism being used to justify a crackdown. It is already in the works with that demon love children of Jane Harman and Joe Lieberman (they have interesting histories of loyalties to those that seek to remain unthreatened by exposure because there is a lot of money riding on it) H.R. 1955 and S. 1959 which are bills that will allow for committees to determine what constitutes thought crimes and potential domestic terrorists. Look at that Ricin thing in Nevada last week, that is going to be used big time as justification and when they search the guy’s library I am willing to bet money on it that they are going to find a lot of things that are very critical of the establishment including books and materials questioning the official story of 9/11. Now this may sound overly paranoid to some but trust me, by now I know the tactics and the internet and blogosphere are regarded as threats. The military even has some exercise, I believe it is called CYBERSTORM or something that particularly focuses on muting the blogosphere.

But they won’t be trying to close down the Friday cat blogging or Brittney Spears stuff, that you can count on.

Question: But why then do so many political blogs, feminist blogs, and progressive blogs take part in those types of things? What purpose might they serve for a blog like Feministing for example?

Ed Encho: I am unfamiliar with that one blog in particular but I do see these things on other blogs on a fairly regular basis so I understand what you are talking about. A lot of people really are into these things as areas where they have their little cyber communities and put up their personal stories, pet pictures, the music stuff that you mentioned, movie reviews yada, yada, yada. These are the sort of things that you have to deal with if anyone is kind enough to offer a forum although I largely feel that it is self-defeating to a large degree because it takes the focus away from the issues and the politics which are really the purpose for any of the blogs to begin with but my opinion is that it diminishes the power of a blog rather than enhances it and allows for it to not be more taken seriously. The real political junkies and diehards just don’t really give a damn about pet stories etc so they are not going to end up being repeat posters on blogs that devote too much space to that sort of thing they will seek out something where there are others that are more issue focused. Anyway, a lot of that stuff more fittingly belongs on MySpace, Facebook or some of those networking sites that are so popular right now. I post on a number of different sites and there is a real eclectic mix with some of them and things are put out there that I personally would never feel comfortable with doing.

One thing that I really would like to advise progressive bloggers to be cautious about is that I feel that it is potentially dangerous is for people to post personal videos of themselves, their families and their pets on blogs where there are often contentions political opinions being thrown around. Now you call me paranoid but I fully respect and understand just the sort of vicious psychopathic rat bastards that are out there in cyberspace and I sure as hell wouldn’t want them knowing what myself or my kids looked like –especially since the reports of child molestation and sexual predators more often than not involve right wing, authoritarian oriented type personalities. I read about too many of these things where some whacko gets pissed off and gives out a home address, phone number or other information on a blogger who is then stalked or threatened and I would strongly advise people to use extreme care when posting this sort of thing. The sort of people who are drawn to the Republican side of things – like FREEP and some of the other more fascistic sites are not people who should be taken lightly. One thing that liberals and progressives have a problem with is that they are often too trusting and too inclusive and you never know what sort of snakes might slither into the tent if you aren’t careful.

Now of course this is all just my opinion and I don’t intend to somehow demean people from posting what they want but the sharing of things better suits a smaller and more intimate online community than really serious advocates of social change and the reigning in of the warfare state which should be the first and foremost priority of anyone who is really serious about this stuff. I guess that I am a bit guilty myself because I have a guy who primarily does a sports take once a week or so although it is mixed with political and social commentary to make it a bit more in line with the regular content but I really try to stick with social and political stuff because that is what is really important. I also do not have any personal pictures of myself out there that would serve to make me a potential target although I do have a security system, dogs and several firearms so there would be easier prey if one were so inclined as to engage in any sort of illegal stalking or other threatening activities over postings that they may not dig. You would be amazed at just how hostile that some of those out there on the rabid right get over some things and they are easily manipulated by ass clowns like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk who have no qualms about using their own little brand of terrorism to quash dissent- look at that kid that Michelle Malkin was stalking over S Chip and that is really pretty minor compared to some of the organized thuggery that I have heard about. There was a series on this that ran on Buzzflash awhile back by Pamela Troy called Dangerous Clowns that you need to read at least the part about FREEP grassroots activism that sends a chill up my spine.

There are a lot of very frustrated and angry people out there who are unable to channel that into more productive things but are always looking for scapegoats and given the nature of the blogosphere it really only takes that one great posting where everything falls into place and it goes viral resulting in massive denunciations from extremists and threats. I did one a few years back, a vicious rant on the red states called “Peckerwood Nation” that not only got me the threats from the usual right wing scum and southern racist separatists but also was denounced by that colossal asshole Jonah Goldberg who is a pretty big player when it comes to right wing propagandists, the foul product of the vile womb of Lucianne Goldberg who along with Linda Tripp colluded to tape those calls from Monica Lewinsky during the great blowjob inquisition. I believe that he was actually the worst person in the world on Olberman last night. You never really know when you are going to smack that one great post out of the park that will take you from obscurity to infamy overnight and having a bunch of family pictures out there is only an invitation for trouble.

Question: I feel that a lot of those types of blogging allows for the creation of authenticity, by sharing life stories etc it creates a connection with the writer that one cannot get with the heads of large movements, or main stream media types. People seem to care about that.

Ed Encho: Yeah I see your point on the connection thing but how far does that really go offline, I mean are we really substituting our authenticity and ability to interact with others by doing so via the computer only? This is a question that has been asked by people who are far smarter (and better paid) than I am. But let’s put that thought aside and deal with your comment on authenticity. This is a unique new medium and the mainstream can’t really get a good handle on it because it really offers empowerment to people despite the lack of organization. I really attribute a lot of credit on the successes of the blogs to the total arrogance, corruption and lack of integrity of the mainstream media that has done nothing but carry water for a system that is thoroughly compromised, is being discredited by the day and acts as nothing but water carriers for the elite who really run things.

Using myself as an example (and I am far from the only one), I would never have been able to write the things that I do and expect to have any sort of a forum in the mainstream media, such things are only obtainable by an ability to survive a filtering process that serves the interests of the corporatists and certainly never encourages originality – at least not anymore. The blogs offer an opportunity for those who have a bit of talent and are passionate about bringing about change and propagating ideas to do so without having to go through the process of having every decent intention leeched out of them by a journalistic educational institution that is increasingly looking for flacks, hacks and shills rather than real muckrakers in the finest traditions of American journalism. I challenge you to show me any decent story that has originated in the lapdog press that the alternative media/bloggers haven’t been way out ahead of.

I will guarantee you one thing though and that the next Hunter S. Thompson, H.L. Mencken, I.F. Stone or any one of a long list of great American writers will come from the blogosphere and not the corrupt mainstream corporate media. The secret is that the best of us do this because we are passionate and we really care about the truth and American ideals and are doing this for nothing rather than playing careerist games. It’s almost like we have gone back in time where journalism and writing is done by the REAL people instead of those whose paychecks and lifestyles depend on their ongoing and continued ignorance whether it be real or a compromise by folks with mortgages to pay, social status to be maintained and kids to put through school. American journalism is a sad state and every great writer is likely spinning in his or her grave at the mind numbing lemming food that passes for honest reportage and opinion in this sorry land of fear and Idiocracy. I could probably name you at the bare minimum FIFTY bloggers and columnists who are not mainstream that just shame the corporate media that is more intent on trying to pass off phonies like Katie Couric and every big haired bimbo with nice tits who is able to read off of a teleprompter as legitimate journalists. And as far as the other bloggers go you could find thousands of them who have more credibility than Couric and the rest of the MSM shithacks – I mean look at the ‘experts’ who were trotted out for last night’s latest dog and pony show in this sham democracy, Bill Bennett? Give me a fucking break. This stuff is cutting edge and more and more people are renouncing the corporate media by the day, it is a dinosaur wailing away and sucking in it’s last breath as it is mired in a tar pit and the hunters and predators are closing in.

Question: That kind of leads to my next question, do blogs lead to more chances for agent provocateurs to infiltrate? How much success can one have in changing a system when most of the planning/postings etc are public?

Ed Encho: As for the agent provocateurs if you have any knowledge at all of history as well as the way that the big boys really play they are out there and they are doing everything that they can to fragment, discredit or otherwise seduce, this sadly is the nature of our modern society and the empire and the blogs really make such tactics much easier as there is a lack of face to face contact. The military regularly trains cyber warriors to go out and influence public opinion on blogs, political parties do it all of the time, there is the Israeli online tool Megaphone that was made available specifically for perception management and the ever present “TROLLS” who disrupt the conversations on blogs with rudeness and thread hijackings. To answer the second part of your question there is a chance to actually change the system through the blogosphere but I maintain that the first part of any such change must come through education simply because of the corruption of the mainstream media, that is one hell of a rock to roll up a hill by itself because the damage has been so massive to the American mind but I have a lot of hope on this one because of the availability of the information to the public.

As for planning for events, protests etc in my opinion this part is going to have to be done by those partaking in it to come up with some sort of hybrid communication system utilizing both blogging, online participation but keeping some of the key details compartmentalized and offline. This especially applies to anything that could potentially resuscitate the failed labor movement which the oligarchy absolutely will do everything in it’s power to stop, they have spent too much money in destroying it and enabling the corporate goliaths but there is hope because a lot of good things are happening as awareness of this malignant system grows and the inability to change things using the existing political framework continues to be eroded. As for the future who knows, I am just a blogger and like to howl at the moon, spread awareness and work at building that precious coming alliance between progressives and antiwar libertarians and conservatives through postings and essays. I am not an organizer but if I were I would start to give some very serious thought to adapting to a future where limitations will be slapped on the internet by studying communication methods utilized by past resistance movements and then being able to use both modern and historical tactics for grass roots organizing and agitation. The big boys are already making plans for such things in the British Ministry Of Defense report that this story Revolution, Flashmobs and Brainchips references that is warning of social unrest due to the dismantling of the middle classes to fully globalize – they are already winning the propaganda war by slapping the old Marxist devil horns on them. This is very interesting stuff and it gives a peek into what the power structures are planning for.

Question: So if blogs to be successful as a movement have to go somewhat offline or behind the scenes (to protect from infiltration), is the concept of a fully blog movement even possible?

Ed Encho: Given current conditions I would say that it is a mixture of what the blog and the owner of the blog are trying to accomplish. If it is a blog that is based largely on putting out information and educating then no because at this point we are not quite at the point where that in and of itself represents enough of a danger to the existing establishment to merit them totally cracking down. There are so many blogs right now that the ones with the real serious information are pretty much appealing to a fairly limited audience but one day that may change and the system will address that when that time comes. Never for one minute think that the sole purpose of everything is in maintaining the illusion of true freedom and a wholesale crackdown on bloggers would be bad P.R. Not to say that there aren’t efforts being made to actively engage and suppress certain information but right now most of the efforts are focused on anything that really represents a threat to the war machine. Look at that thing with the Marine throwing that puppy off of a cliff the other day, now that resonates with people and there was mass outrage (strange that more empathy is felt for pets than Iraqi babies) cooking but a counter offensive was launched to beat it back. The military does have actual information warfare specialists (as well as the giant surveillance industrial complex records our every activity for profit and control) that track such things but don’t believe me, just do the research.

So now we get to the big question about the blog movement and actual social change and my opinion is that in and of itself the progressive blogs are not going to be capable of bringing about such changes without somehow translating that into grass roots activism. Don’t get me wrong, it is a huge influence on public opinion though and just the myriad of groups that are capable of mounting mass email campaigns, doing research and the like are largely a reason why we have not slid even deeper into fascism during this sad period in American history. The blogs are limited in that they can only go so far and ultimately that action is going to have get to the streets, it took years of massive protests to bring about the end of the Vietnam war or for that matter to make the civil rights and women’s rights movements into reality, a lot of good people laid it all on the line and suffered for the grossest of injustices to be not only recognized but rolled back and it took a hell of a lot more courage than sitting in front of a computer and writing screeds, manifestos and rants.

So when do I or anybody else finally reach that point? Who knows, that is yet to be seen and largely depends on uncontrollable circumstances but the blogs are a hugely important part of whatever change will be coming primarily because they provide the seeds for ideas and then once the ideas sprout the blogs can nurture them and eventually spread them into other camps who will also adapt the best parts of those ideas and incorporate them into their particular messages. I look at the best of the bloggers as the pamphleteers and essayists of the modern age and it took a lot of time for those early Americans of hearty souls who loved freedom and despised tyranny who they have descended from to gather enough support and courage in order to get the revolution up and running.

Interview With An Iconoclast: Part Three

Recently I was asked to participate in a Q and A exchange for a project on the effects of the progressive blogosphere, here is part three.

How do you feel you can address those bigger things? Is creating a collective identity for your readers an important part of that? It seems to me that it could be similar to Marx’s false consciousness, and that part of a blogs role then is to foster a group identity to try to break down that wall? If this is the case, what tools do you use to forge that identity?

EE: Actually the group identity thing is not what I am getting at, that is just another system with slightly different drones. The larger thing that I believe needs to be instilled is an appreciation for American ideals, liberty and a renunciation of the torture state and what Gore Vidal calls perpetual war for perpetual peace. The collective identy is a big thing over at Daily Kos and if you hang out for awhile you will find out that it really is not something that encourages free thinking so I really don’t think that false consciousness or a cult of personality is a very good thing to strive for.

What I want to emphasize is the importance of educating people because let’s face it, Michael Moore was really onto something when he called Americans the dumbest people on the planet and let’s face it, when you look at a recent study that says that something around 20 percent of Americans couldn’t find the country on a map that kind of speaks volumes and that kind of utterly futile stupidity combined with fear and a sheeplike ability to comply with authority the future isn’t exactly looking very bright. I don’t know if you have ever heard of Mike Judge’s brilliant satire Idiocracy but it is spot on and a dystopian vision far more terrifying than Soylent Green or Blade Runner and guess what, we are already halfway there! I mean you have to admit as an American that it is pretty fucking embarassing when our two most recognized figures to the world are George W. Bush and Michael Jackson.

I really feel that a lot of us bloggers need to really be a bit more focused on providing that education that Americans in this most bizarre and dangerous of historical periods have been been deprived of. I mean what do most people know about civics? Two words: American Idol. We as a society have been detached from our history and of those who fought and sacrificed all so that we could manage to enjoy the freedoms that we have so easily pissed away for a little bit of security in the post 9/11 era.

That is a really good question though because while I really don’t think that a collective identity is the way to go it presents and interesting paradox in that we do need to achieve that common identity as Americans and revel in our ideals rather than in the abomination of the Bush years and the feared and despised torture state. I think that we all need to work at taking back our revised and sanitized history and looking at it despite all of the warts while setting aside the rose colored glasses of exceptionalism, upon introspection we will find that while we have really become a loathsome collection of misfits that will one day serve as an example to future historians of what NOT to be like that we can salvage what remains of our dignity and work towards actually becoming something that is admired.

But we have to clean our own house first and that means an uncompromising push to restore our lost civil liberties and reign in the empire while there is still time. Again, I stress that ideas need to be cross pollinated between the PB and the libertarians and other conservatives, it is the only way to transcend the well placed obstacles that have been deliberately put in our way and all coming together separately to whatever little piece that we each can, according to our abilities slow down this onrushing juggernaut.

First again I want to thank you for your timely and great replies. They is alot of really great data here. So how does blogging and the PB take steps to educate? To reclaim the American identity? It seems to me that one of the things you feel most passionate about is the idea (false idea?) that Kos and other sites like that put forward of a decentralized grassroots, when in fact it is an overly centralized leadership process that has been co-opted by the mainstream system.

 EE: Exactly, Kos is a fraud, a charlatan and an opportunist but it is unfair in singling him out alone. He is however the biggest and therefore deserving most of the criticism precisely because he is a con artist but he is far from the only one who has now put personal ambitions before what is moral, right and good for America. There is a problem with the “A list” blogs being co-opted by the Democratic party in anticipation of future favors or of consulting gigs for the founders. I don’t think that you can go to any of these blogs and not notice that sort of cheerleading, I commend Maryscott O’Connor of My Left Wing for yesterday drawing a line in the sand on this by stating that here blog was definitely NOT a Democratic party blog when posters were using the dreaded “TROLL” pejorative against non-lockstep posters. I mean some of these people would shill for Osama Bin Laden if he were running as a Democrat and that’s not hyperbole. The system always seeks to assimilate what were once vocal critics and organizers.

The real passion, the ideas and the desire to be outspoken on issues rather than on just putting party loyalty before country is with the bloggers who are pretty much shunned by the “A list” blogs because they are loose cannons that could be a threat to the electoral hopes of the new group of pigs who will feed at the Washington trough. I mentioned that I had a regular gig over at Taylor Marsh’s blog who while wearing her Democratic party status on her sleeve is at least honest about it. Well I started posting there with a special “Late Night” edition where I was given the freedom to do my profanity laced rants but right before the 2006 election I was reigned in because somebody in the establishment didn’t dig my criticism of Rahm Emanuel as a shit eyed little bagman, John Kerry as a foofy haired elitist doofus who ran up the flag in Ohio before all the black votes were counted and Harry Reid as a neutered little runt in charge of Hillary’s Temple of Eunuchs in the Senate. It was my bringing up of the voter fraud thing rather than the amount of “fucks” in my postings that really put a bug up the establishment’s asses so I was told to cut the profanity. Now I still continued to post but when I started bringing up issues rather than just dishing out vitriol against Republicans I started to get suggestions of what not to write on, Iran-Contra was ancient history, the DLC stuff was boring, stop taking so many shots at the Christian fascists etc. So rather than be free to write what I wanted I felt pushed to be some sort of attack dog, which I do enjoy at times but I want to choose the target and when to hit it.

There apparently was this secretive group called Townhouse that really dictates what is said in the PB with the more well known blogs and Maryscott O’Connor states this in the Mother Jones piece that I referenced earlier which I excerpt here:

“It’s fucking Skull and Bones, man,” she said. “The very secretive, behind-closed-doors nature of it is anathema to everything that blogging is supposed to be about: accountability. We are supposed to be showing the way, not skulking around behind closed doors, coming up with strategies. Those are the people who we’re trying to fight. I know about ‘the real world’ and all that shit. But we’re the idealists, aren’t we?”

So you see this idea of the blogosphere as a decentralized grass roots system only applies to those who have not been identified by the political machine as having clout and influence and those people are then turned into the gatekeepers. There are a lot of good writers and activists out there though who while they toil in relative obscurity are the ones really putting forth the great ideas and doing the best work but since the entire political system is rotten to the core once that line is crossed and the criticism is no longer confined to the Republican party then the blogger becomes toxic to the “A list” that curries favor with the Howard Kurtz’s of the world. They are really not outsiders at all but actually seeking a seat at the table and will be willing to pander to the worst elements of the mainstream media and the political and corporate establishments to get it.

Those of us who are nuisances to the establishment have to just keep laying it on the line and continuing to put out the real stuff, we have this wonderful window of opportunity with an internet that has yet to be censored entirely although they are seriously trying to suppress this threat with bullshit like net neutrality, trying to blame it for homegrown terrorism and the most insidious threat of all using the menace of child pornography which is a very real, immoral and disgusting thing as an excuse for further snooping and censorship. We all have to just keep pouring it on and getting every dirty bit of information possible on the crimes of the oligarchy and their political whores out there so that everyone can see it and as I recommend – back everything up to cd, dvd or other format so that if the day does come when the information crackdown occurs the information can be disseminated through more primitive methods. Just pour it on and keep pouring it on, my hope is that at some point there will be one event or incident that is so completely out of line that it will ignite a chain reaction but it is imperative to get the information out there first so that people are aware of the truly horrible and amoral nature of this rogue government, the blood barters who start wars and then profit from arming both sides and the looters in their Wall Street ivory towers who suck the blood from our bodies for the almighty profits. The truth to these bastards is what sunlight is to a vampire and only when it is fully exposed will there be an opportunity to drive a stake through it’s black heart.

As for your last comment about cross-pollination (interestly my wife is a staunch libertarian/Ron Paul supporter, where I myself have libertarian streaks, but fall more in line with socialist/progressive ideals), how do you build those coalitions? Both philosophically (making others realize the common causes), and mechanically (what tools do you use to reach out? what tools can blogs use? cross posting? comments sections? advertisers?)

EE: I have had Ron Paul on my radar for quite awhile now because he is a guy that really just speaks the truth and damn the consequences. The movement that coalesced around him has been phenomenal in that it transcends the traditional paradigm and these people are hungry for change. Hell, down here in the Tampa Bay area there is a very strong Ron Paul network and his are the ONLY signs that you really see and there are meetup groups that will actually go out and gather for small rallies to wave signs at passing cars at a given time. This to me is an indication that Americans are hungry, no make that starving for the truth and someone who stands up against the system.

You know the very ironic and hilarious thing is that that indignant fascist shit head Rudy Giuliani went after Paul so savagely in that now infamous FOX debate in South Carolina over 9/11 and Paul not only stood his ground but then offered the American Il Duce a reading list the next day….this alone transformed Paul from nobody into a national item of curiosity….of course the establishment couldn’t have that and eventually took him down with the old trustworthy “ANTI SEMITIC NAZI” slur that is so often used and abused to quash anyone that doesn’t parrot the official line of militarism and never ending war that makes a lot of people very, very rich. Ron Paul had to be cut off at the knees and that is what happened with that New Republic piece, the national media interest in him just dropped off completely after that and Dennis Kucinich was taken down with that ridiculous question from beltway toady Tim Russert about UFO’s during one of those ludicrous dog and pony show ‘debates’.

Paul really hooked me when I heard this remarkable speech that he gave on the neocons and he named names, singling out in specific Michael Ledeen who is a very dangerous ideologue and has a fondness for fascism that does not belong anywhere in the American power structure and yet he is a man of great influence. Paul also mentioned Rupert Murdoch, Irving Kristol and Richard Perle’s manifesto prepared for Israeli extremist Benjamin Netenyahu called “A Clean Break” that stresses regional domination in the Middle East. This the single most devastating critique of the neocons and their insanity and it was given in 2003! It was absolutely stunning in it’s accuracy and never did I ever hear a peep about any of this by the phonies like John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or anybody in the mainstream media, you just have to check this out in order to get a real grasp of what I refer to. I did a post entitled “A Sham Democracy and it’s Pocket Media Kingmakers” what excerpted a good deal of that particular speech and you can just go to the post itself rather than me make this answer overly long due to excerpting the most relevant parts.

As for my personal ideology I would have to say that I am probably much in line with your “libertarian streaks, but fall more in line with socialist/progressive ideals” but I also have a lot of anarchism in me as well. As for how to best get these ideas cross pollinated I really don’t have an answer yet, it is a fairly new thought to me and I am really trying to get my mind wrapped around the whole thing as of yet. Focus is really the word and with the alarming rise of police brutality and violence towards civilians being the first really visible manifestation of the authoritarianism that risen post 9/11 that is something that should have wide appeal. The method would at first be cross posting to more libertarian and rational conservative blogs or to progressive blogs that have a tolerance for diversity. Rob Kall of Op Ed News runs a pretty good place where a wide variety of ideas are not only allowed but encouraged and it is an up and comer in the PB. We need to make common cause but it will never happen with the “A list” bloggers because they have a vested interest in keeping the system as it is in all of it’s my team vs. your team, black and white, good and evil simplicity because it benefits them personally. This is definitely an area where I would be very interested in finding some like minded bloggers and activists who really get it and throwing around some ideas on how to expand into an actual movement.

Do you think its important for your message, or to the blogosphere as a whole that readers identify with you? Do you have any tactics you use to help readers get a feel for who you are?

EE: Obviously if I am going to start getting more attention to the ideas themselves I am going to have to change my style somewhat to get away from bombastic rants and obscenity laced tirades to appeal to a broader audience. The trick is being noticed though because there are a lot of bloggers out there and sometimes in order to be read and develop some sort of a following you have to get attention and being controversial is a certain way to do that, unfortunately it also alienates some people. Now some people have really been able to master this particular schtick like for instance The Rude Pundit who is right up there with the worst when it comes to profanity and vulgarity. I have been at times compared to him but really the more that I come to think about it it is really just kind of limiting the appeal. Mind you it is fun and I really do talk like that being an ex-sailor but it is a mixed bag and kind of self defeating in the end I guess.

For example I caught a tremendous amount of heat last week over a post that I did on Hillary Clinton that had the sub headline “All Cunt, No Cattle” which is obviously a play on her smear against Barack Obama of being “All Hat, No Cattle” during a speech in Texas. I also in a mean spirited and taunting way referred to Clinton as rapidly becoming nothing more than “The Joan of Arc of the dry pussy demographic” which was a cheap shot (althought I have said far,far worse things about Republicans) but it was just a continuation of a pushing of boundaries over a series of anti-Clinton posts that I have done recently. Now that was a nasty thing to say but it was really a great line that just came to me and I hated to waste it even if it pissed off a lot of people for the wrong reasons.

Hillary Clinton does deserve nothing but contempt though not only for her sense of entitlement but also for her total lack of a stand on anything that even remotely resembled American principles when the constitution was being shredded and the bodies were being piled up. I have absolutely no respect for her and the tactics that she is using to this day are not only insidious but are only going to result in further polarization and a splitting of the Democratic party which will really be a good thing in the end though. Clinton however is very apparently willing to roll out the B-52’s and send them on a mission to totally destroy anything that stands in her way, not that I use the word cunt as a pejorative as a habit but this sort of vengeful, maniacal and really completely unhinged national tantrum certainly qualifies for language of the most vile and contemptuous that we have available with the big caveat that it is used not in a misogynist context but a context of personality. I mean this sort of vendetta really is shameful and ultimately dangerous to America and if you pay attention it is getting worse with each news cycle, we just have to move beyond this bullshit war on terror frame that we have been beaten over the head with since 9/11.

I also caught holy hell for daring to suggest that the sainted John McCain was more of a war criminal than a war hero for his dropping of bombs on civilians, I really don’t see what is more cowardly than that and while I abhor war as the lucrative atrocity that it is I can at least have some respect for a soldier who kills for his country and actually has to see the carnage. This is just all a part of the nasty polarization right now and it is not only a Democrat v. Republican thing but it is taking place within the parties themselves which shows that there is a battle for the nation’s soul going on. Now I just love this quote by Charles Bukowski “If you are losing your soul and know it it means that you still have a soul to use” (and I hope that I got that right but I don’t happen to have it in front of me) but this is really a good thing isn’t it?

But I digress…

While being outrageous is enough to get noticed if you really want to be taken seriously you can’t be saying things like fuck, cunt or cocksucker and expect to appeal to the audience that is intellectual enough to really get it. I see myself starting to get away from some of that stuff in the future and doing a lot more issue oriented stuff, I have forums that are available to me with a good potential audience and when I really write straight stuff it could be pretty damned good and in the past has been good. I have a lot of knowledge that I gather from disparate sources and need to synthesize it for a larger audience and start working towards those greater purposes that will as I predict be the next phase of all of this blogging stuff that will be crossover appeal. I am right now going through a period of being conflicted and trying to reconcile ideologies to work towards what is a greater purpose.

I hope that answers it, sorry about the language but if it’s in the posts themselves it is on record, all that I can do is give you my perspective. The blogs are one of the last vestiges of free speech and I can’t hardly blame people for pushing the envelope at extending the boundaries, with the exception of obvious hate speech that is.

To Be Continued…

God Damn America? Amen!

Death squad victims sacrificed for the glory of our God kissed empire

The latest wave of the ‘kitchen sink’ smear campaign being conducted by both the Clintons and the fascist Republican party against insurgent presidential candidate Barack Obama continues to push the storyline that he is some sort of anti-American brown skinned devil out to infiltrate and conquer this rotten carcass of a once great republic from within. The latest tit for tat bellying up to the Texas Hold Em table to throw down out the racial trump card of the brown menace calls into question the hellfire and brimstone sermons of the former leader of Mr. Obama’s church the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (although the silence of condemnation of the far more virulent radical cleric John Hagee is still deafening outside of a segment last week on Bill Moyers Journal that scared the living shit out of me.) but such is life on the sheep ranch. Obama of course was forced to disassociate himself from Wright but what the fuck while McCain still practically performs fellatio by proxy on Hagee but when it all comes down to it it’s always all about the Jews isn’t it? We certainly don’t want to offend the watchdogs of empire who are duped under false pretenses to be a forward operating base for western interests in oil rich lands but let’s leave that for another time.

Reverend Wright’s pronouncement that “God Damn America” is that wonderful little bumper sticker slogan that is going to go over so well with the ignorant and indolent pet lemmings who cling to the big lie of their sham democracy that serves as a facade for the empire and will be the rallying cry for the coming pitched battle against the hated liberal America haters who want to destroy us for our sanctified and glorious way of life.

Wright’s sermons were scrutinized by oppo researchers in order to extract those comments that were the most inflammatory to the clueless dopes who are used to getting their news (at least when it doesn’t involve celebrities and tabloid sleaze) in small sound byte snippets lacking any sort of context and packaged for the most emotionally charged impact. This is one of the ones that was invoked against Obama because it dared to defile that holiest day in American history September 11th 2001:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye,” Wright says. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back in our own front yards.”

Right the fuck on, just keep preaching brother! Nothing stings quite so much as the truth to a land full of ignorant simpletons with their heads filled with Pollyanna, Horatio Alger and John Wayne as the basis for their perceptions of those things which even the average moron in any other country is able to conceptualize without much difficulty.

Preach it Brother Wright! I am fucking down with it all and if there is anything that I find that can be criticized it is that he doesn’t go nearly far enough. 9/11 if you believe the official story (and I have my doubts) is put quite simply blowback which according to the official definition is “an unforeseen and unwanted effect, result, or set of repercussions”. Chalmers Johnson wrote of his in his book of the same title and only in a land of naïve simpering fools could the concept that our meddling and plundering abroad be without consequence. Ron Paul also caught holy hell for saying basically the same thing before he was taken down by an organized smear campaign painting him as (what else?) an anti-Semitic neo Nazi although nothing quite approaches the broiling outrage of Ward Churchill’s now infamous essay Some People Push Back.

The always eager to please mockingbird Howard Kurtz whose Media Notes column in the Washington Post is always used to throw out right-wing talking points signaled what is to come when on Friday he noted:

The Ferraro flap is about to be overtaken by another racially charged controversy. Fox News has obtained video of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying some pretty inflammatory things. Wright actually suggests that the government created the HIV virus. Plus:

“Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary would never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a [N-word] . . .

“Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.”

And in a column, Wright wrote: “White America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01.” White America?

An Obama spokesman put out a statement decrying such personal attacks, but that may not be enough. Wright is not just the pastor of Obama’s church but a family friend who presided over the senator’s wedding.

You know that the establishment is trying to push a storyline when Mr. Kurtz is used as a mouthpiece, he after all played an integral part in the concerted and cowardly taking down of journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News over his Dark Alliance series on the embarassing CIA-Contra connections to the crack cocaine epidemic and Howie can always be counted on to be a reliable house propagandist at what has now become the mighty Wurlitzer of the Washington elite and runs only slightly center left of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s shitrag Washington Times.

The Reverend Wright smearing is just the latest piece of evidence in the case being built by the oligarchy, the militarists and the looters to tear down Obama who is a fly in the ointment of the win-win scenario that had already been set up with a McCain-Clinton head to head matchup in November. The whisper campaign about the Muslim thing, the refusal to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem, pledge of allegiance or whatever Stalinist bullshit the propagandists are talking about, the pandering to the Cold Warriors by saying that he would negotiate with Cuba (can’t we fucking EVER get over that Bay of Pigs thing?), the Louis Farrakhan connection, the manipulated comments by Michelle Obama over her outrageous lack of pride in this monstrous empire, the veiled accusations of anti-Semitism and all the rest of the saturation bombing that will ultimately culminate in either another rigged election or god forbid, an actual taking out of Obama if all else fails.

Think that is extreme? The American sheeple have very short memories in TV nation and the last four leaders with true crossover appeal and the ability to unite against the malevolent forces born out of the ashes of World War II to seize control of this country all were snuffed in the Sixties. While modern technology along with the slow and intentional dumbing down of the populace make it far easier to perform hits through a complicit and corrupt media the rise of the internet is allowing too many to escape the wide net cast to catch the fish and suckers and more traditional although messier and less sophisticated methods may have to be used if the sliming fails and the superdelegates can’t be bought off. Personally I think that an invocation of martial law and a calling off of the elections is no longer feasible, too many people are on to the game now and it would more likely than not set off a full scale revolution which given the inability of our fine military and hordes of mercenary ‘contractors’ to get control of Iraq would be doomed to fail if attempted domestically.

But I digress…

Rather than buy into the demagoguery and media spin swirling around this latest foul example of the sinister past and present associates of Mr. Obama those who are in the know should see this latest act of desperation as exactly what it is – an opportunity! Let’s face it, this is an information war, a guerilla war for capturing the hearts and minds of enough Americans who can still be unplugged from the Matrix before they have become addicts to the blue pill and the use of the Reverend Wright’s sermons should be pounced on to launch a salvo while the deflector shields have been temporarily disabled. Any truly savvy activist or patriot would catch a ride on the big wave of toxic sewage to get out there and not so much defend the Reverend’s right to free speech but to but his comments in context. Let’s face it, the man speaks many truths and if there is such a thing as God then may he/she/it render an appropriate judgment on the actions of this filthy empire of blood and murder and when the cumulative actions are weighed then damnation is will be in order for there to be justice.

The main thing that I am really trying to get at here is that everything that we as citizens are told about this country and our history is one giant fucking lie and the only thing that differentiates us from any other imperial power is that at least they are honest about what they are. The naïve, flag swaddled fools awash in their television and cinema fantasies of an always just and righteous nation making the world safe for ‘democracy’ will just never be able to get past the gigantic mindfuck that is the truth and that America’s actions in colonizing the planet, stealing resources and propping up corrupt despots results in blowback. Just look at our former boy Charles Taylor of Liberia whose trial is a glimpse into the darkest recesses of human cruelty and barbarity. I excerpt this statement from a story about the account of a witness at Taylor’s war crimes trial about how he condoned cannibalism as a regular practice:

Prodded under cross-examination by defense lawyer Courtenay Griffith, Marzah gave a sometimes-graphic description of cannibalism that altered between the ritual taking of vengeance and the practical need for food.

He repeatedly said nothing was done without Taylor’s instructions, and that anyone who violated Taylor’s orders would be executed.

“Did Charles Taylor order you to eat people?” Griffith asked.

“Yes, to set an example for the people to be afraid,” Marzah replied.

He appeared unfazed by Griffith’s blunt queries, and responded in matter-of-fact tones to such questions as “How do you prepare a human being for the pot?”

Marzah then described the splitting, cleaning, decapitating and cooking of the corpse with salt and pepper. “We throw your head away,” he said.

With friends like that you have to wonder just what gave the evil criminals who concoct our foreign policy such a hard on for a rank amateur punk like Saddam Hussein. Taylor would order his ‘fighters’ to split the bellies of pregnant women with machetes and disembowel victims so as to string their intestines out just to prove a fucking point or send a message. The despotic pig Taylor is also a good buddy of Republican Pat Robertson, the notorious big time televangelist and self-proclaimed man of God who didn’t let any of that fine ‘Christian’ butchery get in the way of their lucrative business deals.

They (being everybody who isn’t white and Christian) definitely fucking hate us but they fucking hate us for a reason, unfortunately anything resembling rational thought or reason is not something that can be expected from a nation of simpletons indoctrinated from their earliest stages of cognition to pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the star spangled banner and worship Rambo and John Wayne as heroes. Jingoism and the seeds of raw nationalism are planted early and intentionally when the tabula rasa’s of the youth are still largely empty and awaiting the blood dripping quill to inscribe the great myths of God, country, capitalism and patriotism that will always be embedded in the subconscious. This is why the burning of the flag elicits such strong emotions while very few would give a rat’s ass about the desecration of the Bill of Rights. And we are taught to hate, and to dehumanize and to justify savagery against the brown skinned people whose lives are in the words of the iconic conservative Thomas Hobbes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. How dare anybody question the great myth of our great American exceptionalism and moral purity when it comes to dispensing with the savages?

Setting aside our current descent into a lawless, immoral, poverty ridden torture state as well as the grotesque crimes against humanity being perpetrated on the Iraqi people it is important to understand the root of evil that is the Central Intelligence Agency that was put together by the American capitalist elite in the aftermath of World War II to act as a Gestapo for Wall Street and business interests not confined to the spheres of legality. I would like to make reference to a great piece that my good buddy from Texas Len Hart, a damned fine American posted at his blog The Existentialist Cowboy that summarizes this much better than I could ever hope to do in a well documented story How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America that is a must read for everyone who really is serious about going at the existing order.

I also want to reference a great film on the atrocities committed by the CIA and the corrupt dictators that it installs through violence and maintains with repression by American trained paramilitary death squads in Latin America. I refer to The War On Democracy by Australian investigative journalist John Pilger and the video is available at Information Clearinghouse, an audio adaptation is also available at the wonderful archive site for the weekly radio program Unwelcome Guests. The War On Democracy is as damning an indictment of this blood drenched, murderous empire in all of it’s resplendent foulness and it is essential that as many people as possible see this film, that is how important that it is.

Here is a short list of countries where CIA backed coups and installed blood soaked puppets over democratically elected governments, some countries saw multiple CIA supported overthrows:

Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba (the Bay of Pigs failed) Zaire, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Cambodia, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama.

This is the short list because there is non only a history of but ongoing interference in every country that has become a target to be strip mined and saddled with IMF debt that is nothing more than state sanctioned extortion. For further leaning I also recommend two books by John Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hitman and The Secret History of the American Empire.

Along with the coups came assassinations (far too many to list here) and the Nazi style tactics of torture, murder and repression taught at the School of the Americas. I specifically can say “Nazi” because the CIA mated itself with some of the most repugnant and evil elements of this historically monstrous regime after WW II under the auspices of fighting Communism and in doing so drew heavily on the experience of the myriad of war criminals like Reinhard Gehlen among others. Our current torture state, you see, was built using Nazi DNA so all of those little seemingly coincidental similarities between post 9/11 Amerika and Weimar era Germany are not really just serendipitous happenstance after all. I would strongly suggest than people take a look at the Nazi connections to the powerful and wealthy here in Der Heimat including of course George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush whose money laundering operation for Hitler was closed down under the Trading With The Enemy Act back in 1942. Of course there is just so much that I don’t want to get into it today and will address it at some time in the future.

Also regarding the American conquest of Latin America it has now become pretty common knowledge that the demonic little gnome Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of fascist economics provided blueprints for many hostile takeovers including the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is an excellent resource for more detailed information on this scientific savagery that is in the process of being implemented right here in The Homeland. In reference to General Pinochet, a hero to many on Republican right I will close with the last poem by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara that was smuggled out of the stadium where his hands were smashed, he was tortured and then murdered in the name of American imperialism that provided a live test environment for the policies of the demon Friedman. His songs of protest made him a hero and therefore a target, the thugs trained at the School of The Americas love examples. The murders and torture of Jara and thousands of others were subsidized on the American taxpayer’s dime.

There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?

Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives’ faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?

The blood of our President, our compañero,
will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!
How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment …

Yes, Reverend Wright was absolutely fucking correct God Damn America!

Amen!

God Damn America? Amen!

Death squad victims sacrificed for the glory of our God kissed empire

The latest wave of the ‘kitchen sink’ smear campaign being conducted by both the Clintons and the fascist Republican party against insurgent presidential candidate Barack Obama continues to push the storyline that he is some sort of anti-American brown skinned devil out to infiltrate and conquer this rotten carcass of a once great republic from within. The latest tit for tat bellying up to the Texas Hold Em table to throw down out the racial trump card of the brown menace calls into question the hellfire and brimstone sermons of the former leader of Mr. Obama’s church the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (although the silence of condemnation of the far more virulent radical cleric John Hagee is still deafening outside of a segment last week on Bill Moyers Journal that scared the living shit out of me.) but such is life on the sheep ranch. Obama of course was forced to disassociate himself from Wright but what the fuck while McCain still practically performs fellatio by proxy on Hagee but when it all comes down to it it’s always all about the Jews isn’t it? We certainly don’t want to offend the watchdogs of empire who are duped under false pretenses to be a forward operating base for western interests in oil rich lands but let’s leave that for another time.

Reverend Wright’s pronouncement that “God Damn America” is that wonderful little bumper sticker slogan that is going to go over so well with the ignorant and indolent pet lemmings who cling to the big lie of their sham democracy that serves as a facade for the empire and will be the rallying cry for the coming pitched battle against the hated liberal America haters who want to destroy us for our sanctified and glorious way of life.

Wright’s sermons were scrutinized by oppo researchers in order to extract those comments that were the most inflammatory to the clueless dopes who are used to getting their news (at least when it doesn’t involve celebrities and tabloid sleaze) in small sound byte snippets lacking any sort of context and packaged for the most emotionally charged impact. This is one of the ones that was invoked against Obama because it dared to defile that holiest day in American history September 11th 2001:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye,” Wright says. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back in our own front yards.”

Right the fuck on! Nothing stings quite so much as the truth to a land full of ignorant simpletons with their heads filled with Pollyanna, Horatio Alger and John Wayne as the basis for their perceptions of those things which even the average moron in any other country is able to conceptualize without much difficulty.

Preach it Brother Wright! I am fucking down with it all and if there is anything that I find that can be criticized it is that he doesn’t go nearly far enough. 9/11 if you believe the official story (and I have my doubts) is put quite simply blowback which according to the official definition is “an unforeseen and unwanted effect, result, or set of repercussions”. Chalmers Johnson wrote of his in his book of the same title and only in a land of naïve simpering fools could the concept that our meddling and plundering abroad be without consequence. Ron Paul also caught holy hell for saying basically the same thing before he was taken down by an organized smear campaign painting him as (what else?) an anti-Semitic neo Nazi although nothing quite approaches the broiling outrage of Ward Churchill’s now infamous essay Some People Push Back.

The always eager to please mockingbird Howard Kurtz whose Media Notes column in the Washington Post is always used to throw out right-wing talking points signaled what is to come when on Friday he noted:

The Ferraro flap is about to be overtaken by another racially charged controversy. Fox News has obtained video of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying some pretty inflammatory things. Wright actually suggests that the government created the HIV virus. Plus:

“Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary would never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a [N-word] . . .

“Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.”

And in a column, Wright wrote: “White America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01.” White America?

An Obama spokesman put out a statement decrying such personal attacks, but that may not be enough. Wright is not just the pastor of Obama’s church but a family friend who presided over the senator’s wedding.

You know that the establishment is trying to push a storyline when Mr. Kurtz is used as a mouthpiece, he after all played an integral part in the concerted and cowardly taking down of journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News over his Dark Alliance series on the embarassing CIA-Contra connections to the crack cocaine epidemic and Howie can always be counted on to be a reliable house propagandist at what has now become the mighty Wurlitzer of the Washington elite and runs only slightly center left of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s shitrag Washington Times.

The Reverend Wright smearing is just the latest piece of evidence in the case being built by the oligarchy, the militarists and the looters to tear down Obama who is a fly in the ointment of the win-win scenario that had already been set up with a McCain-Clinton head to head matchup in November. The whisper campaign about the Muslim thing, the refusal to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem, pledge of allegiance or whatever Stalinist bullshit the propagandists are talking about, the pandering to the Cold Warriors by saying that he would negotiate with Cuba (can’t we fucking EVER get over that Bay of Pigs thing?), the Louis Farrakhan connection, the manipulated comments by Michelle Obama over her outrageous lack of pride in this monstrous empire, the veiled accusations of anti-Semitism and all the rest of the saturation bombing that will ultimately culminate in either another rigged election or god forbid, an actual taking out of Obama if all else fails.

Think that is extreme? The American sheeple have very short memories in TV nation and the last four leaders with true crossover appeal and the ability to unite against the malevolent forces born out of the ashes of World War II to seize control of this country all were snuffed in the Sixties. While modern technology along with the slow and intentional dumbing down of the populace make it far easier to perform hits through a complicit and corrupt media the rise of the internet is allowing too many to escape the wide net cast to catch the fish and suckers and more traditional although messier and less sophisticated methods may have to be used if the sliming fails and the superdelegates can’t be bought off. Personally I think that an invocation of martial law and a calling off of the elections is no longer feasible, too many people are on to the game now and it would more likely than not set off a full scale revolution which given the inability of our fine military and hordes of mercenary ‘contractors’ to get control of Iraq would be doomed to fail if attempted domestically.

But I digress…

Rather than buy into the demagoguery and media spin swirling around this latest foul example of the sinister past and present associates of Mr. Obama those who are in the know should see this latest act of desperation as exactly what it is – an opportunity! Let’s face it, this is an information war, a guerilla war for capturing the hearts and minds of enough Americans who can still be unplugged from the Matrix before they have become addicts to the blue pill and the use of the Reverend Wright’s sermons should be pounced on to launch a salvo while the deflector shields have been temporarily disabled. Any truly savvy activist or patriot would catch a ride on the big wave of toxic sewage to get out there and not so much defend the Reverend’s right to free speech but to but his comments in context. Let’s face it, the man speaks many truths and if there is such a thing as God then may he/she/it render an appropriate judgment on the actions of this filthy empire of blood and murder and when the cumulative actions are weighed then damnation is will be in order for there to be justice.

The main thing that I am really trying to get at here is that everything that we as citizens are told about this country and our history is one giant fucking lie and the only thing that differentiates us from any other imperial power is that at least they are honest about what they are. The naïve, flag swaddled fools awash in their television and cinema fantasies of an always just and righteous nation making the world safe for ‘democracy’ will just never be able to get past the gigantic mindfuck that is the truth and that America’s actions in colonizing the planet, stealing resources and propping up corrupt despots results in blowback. Just look at our former boy Charles Taylor of Liberia whose trial is a glimpse into the darkest recesses of human cruelty and barbarity. I excerpt this statement from a story about the account of a witness at Taylor’s war crimes trial about how he condoned cannibalism as a regular practice:

Prodded under cross-examination by defense lawyer Courtenay Griffith, Marzah gave a sometimes-graphic description of cannibalism that altered between the ritual taking of vengeance and the practical need for food.

He repeatedly said nothing was done without Taylor’s instructions, and that anyone who violated Taylor’s orders would be executed.

“Did Charles Taylor order you to eat people?” Griffith asked.

“Yes, to set an example for the people to be afraid,” Marzah replied.

He appeared unfazed by Griffith’s blunt queries, and responded in matter-of-fact tones to such questions as “How do you prepare a human being for the pot?”

Marzah then described the splitting, cleaning, decapitating and cooking of the corpse with salt and pepper. “We throw your head away,” he said.

With friends like that you have to wonder just what gave the evil criminals who concoct our foreign policy such a hard on for a rank amateur punk like Saddam Hussein. Taylor would order his ‘fighters’ to split the bellies of pregnant women with machetes and disembowel victims so as to string their intestines out just to prove a fucking point or send a message. The despotic pig Taylor is also a good buddy of Republican Pat Robertson, the notorious big time televangelist and self-proclaimed man of God who didn’t let any of that fine ‘Christian’ butchery get in the way of their lucrative business deals.

They (being everybody who isn’t white and Christian) definitely fucking hate us but they fucking hate us for a reason, unfortunately anything resembling rational thought or reason is not something that can be expected from a nation of simpletons indoctrinated from their earliest stages of cognition to pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the star spangled banner and worship Rambo and John Wayne as heroes. Jingoism and the seeds of raw nationalism are planted early and intentionally when the tabula rasa’s of the youth are still largely empty and awaiting the blood dripping quill to inscribe the great myths of God, country, capitalism and patriotism that will always be embedded in the subconscious. This is why the burning of the flag elicits such strong emotions while very few would give a rat’s ass about the desecration of the Bill of Rights. And we are taught to hate, and to dehumanize and to justify savagery against the brown skinned people whose lives are in the words of the iconic conservative Thomas Hobbes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. How dare anybody question the great myth of our great American exceptionalism and moral purity when it comes to dispensing with the savages?

Setting aside our current descent into a lawless, immoral, poverty ridden torture state as well as the grotesque crimes against humanity being perpetrated on the Iraqi people it is important to understand the root of evil that is the Central Intelligence Agency that was put together by the American capitalist elite in the aftermath of World War II to act as a Gestapo for Wall Street and business interests not confined to the spheres of legality. I would like to make reference to a great piece that my good buddy from Texas Len Hart, a damned fine American posted at his blog The Existentialist Cowboy that summarizes this much better than I could ever hope to do in a well documented story How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America that is a must read for everyone who really is serious about going at the existing order.

I also want to reference a great film on the atrocities committed by the CIA and the corrupt dictators that it installs through violence and maintains with repression by American trained paramilitary death squads in Latin America. I refer to The War On Democracy by Australian investigative journalist John Pilger and the video is available at Information Clearinghouse, an audio adaptation is also available at the wonderful archive site for the weekly radio program Unwelcome Guests. The War On Democracy is as damning an indictment of this blood drenched, murderous empire in all of it’s resplendent foulness and it is essential that as many people as possible see this film, that is how important that it is.

Here is a short list of countries where CIA backed coups and installed blood soaked puppets over democratically elected governments, some countries saw multiple CIA supported overthrows:

Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba (the Bay of Pigs failed) Zaire, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Cambodia, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama.

This is the short list because there is non only a history of but ongoing interference in every country that has become a target to be strip mined and saddled with IMF debt that is nothing more than state sanctioned extortion. For further leaning I also recommend two books by John Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hitman and The Secret History of the American Empire.

Along with the coups came assassinations (far too many to list here) and the Nazi style tactics of torture, murder and repression taught at the School of the Americas. I specifically can say “Nazi” because the CIA mated itself with some of the most repugnant and evil elements of this historically monstrous regime after WW II under the auspices of fighting Communism and in doing so drew heavily on the experience of the myriad of war criminals like Reinhard Gehlen among others. Our current torture state, you see, was built using Nazi DNA so all of those little seemingly coincidental similarities between post 9/11 Amerika and Weimar era Germany are not really just serendipitous happenstance after all. I would strongly suggest than people take a look at the Nazi connections to the powerful and wealthy here in Der Heimat including of course George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush whose money laundering operation for Hitler was closed down under the Trading With The Enemy Act back in 1942. Of course there is just so much that I don’t want to get into it today and will address it at some time in the future.

Also regarding the American conquest of Latin America it has now become pretty common knowledge that the demonic little gnome Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of fascist economics provided blueprints for many hostile takeovers including the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is an excellent resource for more detailed information on this scientific savagery that is in the process of being implemented right here in The Homeland. In reference to General Pinochet, a hero to many on Republican right I will close with the last poem by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara that was smuggled out of the stadium where his hands were smashed, he was tortured and then murdered in the name of American imperialism that provided a live test environment for the policies of the demon Friedman. His songs of protest made him a hero and therefore a target, the thugs trained at the School of The Americas love examples. The murders and torture of Jara and thousands of others were subsidized on the American taxpayer’s dime.

There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?

Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives’ faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?

The blood of our President, our compañero,
will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!
How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment …

Yes, Reverend Wright was absolutely fucking correct God Damn America!

Amen!

Clinton’s Mandingo

Know Your Place…Boy!

In the latest fusillade of degradation and swill coming out of Camp Clinton the nation’s foremost fucked-up couple has been pushing for Barack Obama to fall into line and accept a slot as the Queen’s running mate. This is all about the white woman on top though because let’s face it the Clintons are the plantation masters and an Obama Vice Presidency would be more the norm of attending state funerals and serving mint juleps to the gentry than exercising any of the raw power that Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams and the neocons have amassed in the office that their parallel government uses as a nexus of evil. It is so condescending, insulting and such a slap in the face that it conjures up memories of the Dixiecrats who would spend their spare time toasting marshmallow over a burning cross and dressing like a bunch of fancy prancing faggots in cheap sheets dancing around drunk on ethanol grade pure moonshine hooch somewhere in a wooded area of peckerwood nation. It all just really conjures up memories of shit like Mandingo or some other rotten relic of the good ole boys down south of the Mason-Dixon line and their longtime traditions and debased social mores in the native habitat of the species chicken fried motherfucker americanus.

Mandingo was a shocking novel of southern repression, slavery, adultery, corruption, baby killing (a favorite of modern day Republicans if such babies are of a dark hued skin), torture (ditto) and of course enough raw bi-racial sex to virtually assure that it was universally scorned as some sort of taboo smashing stuff to be sold from under store counters where ‘decent folk’ didn’t have to see it, kind of like Naked Lunch. Anyway, Mandingo was made into one of those blaxploitation flicks that were so popular during the 70’s on the grindhouse circuit. It was a Dino DeLaurentis epic starring Perry King, Susan George (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) and boxer Ken Norton who was the prize buck engaging in steamy, nasty fucking with the blonde wench while hubby was out doing the nasty with the black girls. It was a real nasty piece of work that put a king sized burr up the asses of many in the deep south who were deeply offended at the all too accurate depiction of their lifestyles – it was like poor old Ned Beatty getting bent over that log and made to squeal like a pig while being bent over a lot and cornholed by Jim Bob and Jethro in the Georgia woods and it set back the image of our inbred southern cousins as much as that famous photo of Sheriff Lawrence Rainey stuffing his fat face with Red Man during the trial of the murdered civil rights workers that the movie Mississippi Burning was based on . I will never forget how viciously my grandmother fought to prevent my bad influence uncle from taking me to the drive in to see this thing, she went to the wall on this one to protect my innocence and purity and of course got played because I ended up going to see it anyway after being sworn to secrecy not to tell the truth that we didn’t go bowling that night after all.

Those were the days weren’t they? The old drive in movies that predated VCR’s, cable television and Ronald Fucking Reagan, back when things in this country were a lot closer to being ‘normal’ than in this sick era of the three second attention span, whopping sized plasma screens, the genius of Blu-ray (so the suckers can ditch their DVD collection and run out and replace it with the newest and more expensive discs much like they did the video tapes), the poisonous allure of the cult of celebrity and a fearful, dumbed down populace who things that Arab terrorists lurk under every bed and that they can one day all be millionaires like Donald Trump. Sigh, I have many fond memories of the good old drive ins from when we popped popcorn in a pan on the stove and mixed it with butter in brown paper grocery bags that were coated with grease and took a cooler full of our own drinks since my dad would never spring for any of the concession stand food especially those little orange shaped sippy things that were advertised before the previews. He would always take us to those great all night Clint Eastwood western marathons where it was The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (still the best western ever in my opinion), Hang ‘Em High, A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More.

Once I was in High School when we had our own cars and began to take girls out to the drive ins to make out and if lucky to round third base for a headfirst dive for home just like in Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” which of course rarely ever happened to most and resulted in many false stories that would paint the dates in a less than flattering manner lest any stature be lost with the boys. I certainly never had any luck getting laid at the drive-in, during my first date I was left with a serious case of blue balls during Saturday Night Fever and the closest that I ever came to actually having sex was with a pleasingly plump date that resulted in an exchange of a three fingered clitoral massage under the steering wheel (my fucking wrist hurt for a week or so) and a dry hand job in the cockpit of a Chevy Sprint during the break between Red Heat and Invasion U.S.A. and that is the closest thing to sex that I had a drive in. Why am I telling you this you ask? Christ fucking knows but the Mandingo thing stirred other memories related to the American institution that is the drive-in theater.

Post High School, my hooligan friends and I typically used the drive ins for partying, loading the car up with pot and alcohol and then parking towards the back out of the range of the scrutiny of more respectable folks who were actually there to watch the movie instead of getting stoned as the bejesus since most of us still lived in the parent’s basements and couldn’t do such things there. The marijuana smoke would roll out the windows in clouds which may have set off some alarms about the dopers in the midst of family moviegoers and that was largely why we parked in the back, besides, it was far easier to get out to take a piss rather than having to schlep a bursting bladder all the way to the concession stands and wait in line at the urinals. This was a setup that worked reasonably well until one of my friends who we called Buzz for the obvious reason that he was constantly stoned fuck up who made Jeff Spicoli look like a valedictorian drunkenly stumbled into a speaker cord and tore out some dude’s window which then resulted in him getting the living shit kicked out of him and all of us having to flee before the cops came and found a carload full of underage drinkers with enough dope and drugs to give even the “mobile narcotics lab” in Hunter S. Thompson’s trunk in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a run for the money. Buzz was something, a true delinquent whose greatest contribution to society was his astonishing record of deliberately running 65 red lights in a row without getting caught by the cops and having his license suspended – he was truly proud of this, a rebel without a clue. Last I ever heard of Buzz he had stolen a car to make a pilgrimage to the 1984 Olympics (minus the Russians) in Los Angeles, drunkenly ran into a fence and spent the duration of the games in the local hoosegow. He may still be there for all I know..

But I Digress…..

The entire deal with floating the suggestion that Obama would potentially be welcomed as the houseboy on the Clinton restoration ticket is yet more of the rank, cowardly and dealt from the bottom of the deck racism that has allowed ‘the monster’ to dupe the elite media into the notion that she is once again the one in control and Obama should be happy to sit in the back of the bus lest he be run over it. The Clinton surrogate’s sleazy innuendos about cocaine use, Jesse Jackson and all of that other happy horseshit screams “NIGGER NIGGER” in the same manner as scrotumface Imus and his “nappy headed ho’s” did and is more of the usual sewage from the consorts of Dick Morris and James Carville (the Democrat whore who sleeps with the Republican whore, God does America love these sordid and fucked up family dramas) that is being belched up through the garbage disposal on that ballyhooed kitchen sink. The Clintons are nothing more than upwardly mobile peckerwood trash now ready to reoccupy Washington like some surreal version of the Clampetts in a sequel destined for smash hit status in Idiot Nation.

It fits in though with the entire covert Muslim storyline too, just like all that bullshit about Tony Rezko that the Clintonites and the right-wingers have been pounding the call in shows with while failing to mention the Clinton connection to Rezko. Of course Mr. Rezko is an Arab which of course offers yet another piece of damning circumstantial evidence in the case that Barrack Obama wants to usurp the entire government to launch the Islamofascist caliphate that is intent at basing it’s operations in the West Wing. The rank hypocrisy is always there too with the Clintons, nothing is mentioned of the close friendship with Denise Rich, the wife of the Jewish arch-criminal Marc Rich that Bubba pardoned (Scooter Libby was his lawyer) and whose ties to a global network of vicious looter capitalist thugs is the stuff of Keyser Soze style legendry. The Clintons are also never held to account for all of that cocaine that Ollie North’s Iran-Contra network flew through Arkansas then they made the governor’s mansion their residence but these things aren’t something that an establishment punditry and press trifles with now that they are once again on track to be queen makers and to maintain their proper places as shills and D.C. cocktail party circuit apologists for the political prostitutes.

The electronic lynching already having commenced is about to kick into high gear and Barack Obama is being fitted for one of those nifty white jackets for the inauguration ball.

Interview With An Iconoclast: Part Two

Recently I agreed to participate in a study being done on the progressive blogosphere and it’s potential for social change, here is part two of this series of questions and answers.

Question: Are you an activist outside of the blog world? Or are the risks tied to being an activist and working in corporate America too great?

Ed Encho: Now I have actually served in the military and I will tell you that it has nothing on oppression and humiliation and the crushing of the human spirit that even comes close to corporate America. I have been burned very badly by the corporate world in the past and am very wary of it as well as and I hate to use this word respectful of the way that it can destroy lives of those who aren’t lining up at the Kool Aid trough behind whatever bullshit H.R. initiative happens to be the flavor of the week. One thing that I have learned during my time in Corporate America is the utter uselessness of anybody who practices the dark arts of Human Resources, a term that is about as dehumanizing as you could possibly imagine for a corporation’s internal intelligence department.

I totally hate the corporate system in all of it’s life sucking vileness so naturally since I do have a mortgage to pay I feel that it is a great risk to write about anything of substance under my real name other than pseudonyms, it is my guess that you will find a lot of this out there with the other people that you survey. The majority of my screeds even the ones that are not expressly critical of the looter capitalist gulag system contain something that could be used as an example of something that I could be hauled into an office and made to face disciplinary procedures for potentially offending anyone. I certainly don’t share my blog postings with coworkers out of a simple matter of survival, I understand that it is a predatory environment in which in order to survive (other than being a completely broken subservient blob of easily controlled protoplasm) that one has to understand the basic laws of the jungle and number one is to maintain a low profile.

The only sort of activism that would really matter in one of these protected by law monstrosities and the bullshit of being an “artificial person” would be to work to organize the employees into a union and that is never going to happen given the multi million dollar union busting cottage industry in modern anti-labor America. Corporations are very authoritarian institutions where free thinking is forbidden and nonconformity is what gets somebody labeled as “weird” and shunned by fellow employees and management. In most corporations, obedience is pretty much browbeaten into an employee from day one and in the larger ones there are reinforcing systems of propaganda that one is constantly subjected to. Obedience and conformity are not only not accepted but management cultivates networks of snitches and spies to ensure that any unity against the toxic corporate environment can be nipped in the bud immediately and any potential bad seeds can be purged from the organism itself.

Anyway, I have been in the belly of the beast for far too long now and if I chose to do so could write exclusively about the corporate gulag system and never be lacking for material. I have had some thoughts of going into a few different corporations under false pretenses like Barbara Ehrenreich did with her great “Nickle and Dimed” but given my current situation that really couldn’t happen unless I was cut loose in some sort of restructuring plot but if and when that happens I very well may do that and start a blog (or maybe a larger organization) about the general fucking over that workers get these days by these unaccountable behemoths. I suppose that I would be more into actual activism if not for the fear of losing my job and therefore my primary source of income. While the particular corporation that I work for is pretty out front that they don’t seek to influence political views I just can’t possibly think that they would dig some of the things that I have written over the years or be too understanding if my picture happens to appear in the local paper in connection with say anti-globalization protests, especially not when they are offshoring jobs by the thousands to keep their stock price up. For the time being it would probably be in my best interests to keep my activities confined to the blogosphere and to continue to do so under a pseudonym because no matter what the shills for the “ownership society” might say about the general health of the economy I read the foreign news and fully understand the instability of the entire financial system so why push my luck right?

I have in the past tried working with some of the local activist groups but there is such a lack of focus on any particular issue that it’s really to me just a waste of time. Take for example our antiwar group, well they end up getting hijacked to start appearing as counter protestors to offset the haters that some radical local church sends out to harass the crowds at our annual gay pride day parade. Now while I really do not feel that any sort of discrimination should be tolerated and brownshirts bearing false Christian messages of hate and persecution are despicable my point is that the antiwar group showing up at the gay pride parade distracts from what they really need to be doing and that is protesting the illegal wars of aggression. And really, you just have to acknowledge that gay rights isn’t exactly something that is widely accepted by large segments of the population who could otherwise be allies. These phony cultural sideshow issues are meant to divide and I feel that it is idiotic for any serious activist group to get sucked into these sort of things but that is what you find out there in the liberal/progressive community that is so different from the right – organization and cohesiveness.

Now if you want to read something that identifies this to some degree and that is extremely worthwhile I would recommend Scott Ritter’s “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” that has some very good suggestions on what the activist community should really be doing rather than wandering right into the traps that have been set for them. I also would recommend “Rules For Radicals” by Saul Alinsky as well as this wonderful 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky that I ran across because some of this stuff that he talks about is hilarious and classic, like the great O’Hare Airport “Shit In” which you will have to read the interview to get the gist of it. Saul Alinsky is a great role model for activists and it is a shame that he is not given more credit in regards to our history but that is the point isn’t it? Just do the revisionist thing to erase the contributions of the entire labor and progressive movements that laid it all on the line so that the ignorant sheep milling about their cubicle stockyards can enjoy their 40 hour work weeks. I don’t have the exact date but Amy Goodman just recently aired an interview with the legendary Studs Terkel where he told a story of how he berated two yuppies for their ignorance on those who fought to ensure that they could be smug and not made to work 80-100 hours a week, it was beautiful. I am sure that the transcript is on the Democracy Now website. Americans are so damned ignorant of history, that is the great shame of our times.

Question: How do you see yourself fitting into the PB movement/netroots? What role do you play?
Ed Encho: What I really would like to start to do would be to work at trying to not only write more pieces that have crossover appeal but to actively work to the best of my ability to bridge the gap between progressives/liberals and libertarians, independents and principled conservatives who are all getting screwed by the same system but have yet to realize that we are really all on the same side. In the beginning of my internet experience I really went after Bush and the Republicans tooth, fang and nail which was justified considering the damage that they were doing to this country with their flag wrapped, cross carrying brand of fascism. Now that is ok but sooner or later you really limit yourself to preaching to the choir and not really changing any minds or bringing in new people to a larger movement. Now with the betrayal of the Democrats after November 2006 I have been bringing a good deal of heat down on them that don’t seem to be quite so funny to some of the people who used to love attacking the right but now there is quite obviously a double standard. Actually I think that anybody who is doing this now and there a lot of people out there who really understand the true foulness of the entire system is much more honest than those who still cling to the traditional paradigm which really exists only to divide us all along lines other than class which is the true issue here especially now that the damage to the mythical American Dream is being realized due to massive exportation of jobs, an economy based only on debt, soulless consumerism and the need to have all of those things on television that never quite fill the emptiness in the souls of consumers (god I hate that word it is so fucking inhuman) whose money is needed to be sucked out to ensure that the system has grist for the mill.

I do want to add that television is in my opinion the worst possible thing for the American mind as well as the best possible tool for the system in that it creates passivity, false sense of reality, the sort of insecurity and lack of self esteem that is essential for the consumer society and the application of control. I am not going to go into this here because I am telling you, some of the research that I have seen into television and mind control (aka advertising) just blows me away, the effects on the mind by the electronic crackpipe right down to the proper flicker patterns that would make a viewer more susceptible to persuasion is analyzed by some very brilliant people who make a hell of lot of money and it is very frightening. Maybe I’ll try to get involved in spreading awareness on that at some point but there really are so many aspects of this society that really need to be exposed for what they are.

I think that as far as PB activism goes the best thing for me to do is to try to teach and create awareness that is able to reach a much wider audience than just progressives. I do see a sort of an unwillingness in a lot of places to take a look at any aspect of say the libertarian point of view because to many of the politically correct liberals and progressives anything short of acceptance of certain ideas at least to the point where a common ground can be found is treated as heresy and elicits very nasty responses. For example I wrote some favorable things about Ron Paul while I personally disagree with much of what he stands for and the intensity of the responses in the form of pure vitriol was pretty amazing, and this was from people who pride themselves on being open minded and like to brag about it. I now realize that whether someone identifies themselves as a liberal or a die hard conservative there are certain areas that are just treated as though those who have a particular belief as the earthly personification of Satan.

Now I haven’t always been like this but have gradually evolved to the point where I just don’t unequivocally hate anymore but that is because I read and listen to views from both the traditional left, right and center, of course I eliminate the obvious party shills like the Rush Limbaugh’s and Randi Rhodes’s of the world along with others like them because they are just like cheerleaders for their team and everyone else can go fuck themselves as far as they are concerned. I make it a habit to read many magazines in addition to the mainstream propaganda rags like Newsweek and Time that are really only parroting and spinning the talking points of the establishment. I also read on a regular bais Harpers, Mother Jones, The Nation, Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative among others and even on occasion The New American which is the official magazine of the fucking John Birch Society for Christ’s sake so you can’t possibly tell me that I am not open to a diverse range of ideas. That being said I do have to say one thing for the JBS in that they have pretty much been much more outspoken and defensive over the erosion of our civil liberties and the lousy trade pacts that have beggared this country than the Democrats have over the course of the last few years. I read all of this and I listen to probably 6-8 hours a day of talk radio including lectures from the far left to the far right and to clue everybody in on a little secret there is a hell of a lot of truth out there on the fringes for both sides because it is where those who dare to call it like it is are marginalized. I just take all of this stuff and kind of synthesize it and then mix it into whatever I happen to feel like writing about which really varies from day to day and is wholly based on how I happen to feel at the time.

So to sum it up I see myself in the future acting more as a bit of a critic of the system itself as well as the wars, the worsening financial situation and the true atrocities in how this society very cleverly uses the American brand name to dupe people into doing things that are against their own self interests and result in a lot of death, sorrow and human misery both here in The Homeland (there is that word again) and abroad in the lands that we spread our murderous form of disaster capitalism and plundering.

Question: You stated “I have in the past tried working with some of the local activist groups but there is such a lack of focus on any particular issue that it’s really to me just a waste of time. Take for example our antiwar group, well they end up getting hijacked to start appearing as counter protestors to offset the haters that some radical local church sends out to harass the crowds at our annual gay pride day parade. Now while I really do not feel that any sort of discrimination should be tolerated and brownshirts bearing false Christian messages of hate and persecution are despicable my point is that the antiwar group showing up at the gay pride parade distracts from what they really need to be doing and that is protesting the illegal wars of aggression. And really, you just have to acknowledge that gay rights isn’t exactly something that is widely accepted by large segments of the population who could otherwise be allies. These phony cultural sideshow issues are meant to divide and I feel that it is idiotic for any serious activist group to get sucked into these sort of things but that is what you find out there in the liberal/progressive community that is so different from the right – organization and cohesiveness.”
Do you feel that the PB has this focus? Or is it just broad enough that it can spread itself out to many of these issues?
Ed Encho: It is big and can address many issues simultaneously but it is not to this point yet organized enough to hone in on the one or two major issues of great importance, dare I say existential importance with a laser like precision and bring enough heat on a consistent basis to push for change. The thing with liberals and progressives is that by nature they are really more open and free thinking so of course they largely all have their own issues which while important are really meaningless unless the creeping fascism can be stopped. If we are unable to restore the civil liberties that have been stolen away from us during the Bush years then nothing else really matters. The organization and focus of the right (at least in areas not in the blogosphere) is what is going to be needed to undo the damage that has already been done let alone stop the slide into the abyss.

Right now you can legally be disappeared and held in a secret prison indefinitely without anybody even knowing what happened to you, you have no right of habeas corpus, you can be tortured and then you can be labeled as a ‘terrorist’ under some vague definition that is deliberately that way in order for a wide net to be cast for dissidents and critics of the state. Now you also have this incredibly anti-American piece of legislation that was initiated by Rep. Jane Harman who is somebody who has shall I say questionable priorities and associations called H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 passed overwhelmingly last year which really makes every one who dissents potential terrorists subject to those wonderful things that were legitimized at Gitmo. The Senate version (S.1955) is in front of none other than Joe Lieberman’s committee so what do you think is going to happen there? This legislation also sets up a committee to determine what sort of literature would be considered to be ‘terrorist propaganda’. This is very scary stuff and it really proves that the entire phony war on terror is total bullshit, it is a war against the American people. At the same time you have Michael Chertoff out there saying that regular household chemicals can be used by potential ‘terrorists’ to produce IED’s.

What do you have under your sink? What is in your bookcase?

So what I am trying to get at is that there are far bigger fish to fry than electoral politics, divisive social issues and the myriad of minutiae that passes for discourse. We are in very serious trouble right now because this entire infrastructure for a police state is being slowly erected right in front of use bit by bit, it’s like the saying that “if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water the frog will immediately jump out but if you put that same frog in a pot of warm water and very incrementally increase the temperature the frog will sit there until it cooks to death” that frog is us. The damage to this country undertaken by this rogue administration, it’s neocon policy makers and the with the totally feckless acquiescence of the Democratic party is nothing short of stunning. Every day you will see more and more police brutality over minor infractions, it’s like the role model for law enforcement is Jack Bauer. You also have this huge paramilitary force of mercenaries for hire called Blackwater that is unaccountable to anybody and has already been used on our domestic streets in New Orleans. You also have the recent tweaks to Continuity of Government consolidating all power in the executive office in the event that a declaration of martial law becomes necessary, the legalization of spying, the essential voiding of the Posse Comitatus (that prohibits the use of the military against civilians that has been in effect since right after the Civil War) in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the construction of detention facilities by Halliburton subsidiary KBR for undefined “special programs” and any other number of very serious steps to construct a fascist system of control. Naomi Wolf wrote a good piece on this Fascist America In 10 Easy Steps that I would recommend.

So no, I don’t feel that the PB has much focus on things that are imperative for our very survival as a free society and I am not even getting into the wars and the economy in my response to this question. The only way that this all can be stopped if it can be or at least slowed down is to draw in libertarians, paleocons and other concerned Americans into a unified movement. All of the rest of it just isn’t going to matter unless the police state infrastructure can be dismantled (at best) or brought under some very tough laws that once again restore our Constitutional protections.

To Be Continued…

Interview With An Iconoclast: Part Two

Recently I agreed to participate in a study being done on the progressive blogosphere and it’s potential for social change, here is part two of this series of questions and answers.

Question: Are you an activist outside of the blog world? Or are the risks tied to being an activist and working in corporate America too great?

Ed Encho: Now I have actually served in the military and I will tell you that it has nothing on oppression and humiliation and the crushing of the human spirit that even comes close to corporate America. I have been burned very badly by the corporate world in the past and am very wary of it as well as and I hate to use this word respectful of the way that it can destroy lives of those who aren’t lining up at the Kool Aid trough behind whatever bullshit H.R. initiative happens to be the flavor of the week. One thing that I have learned during my time in Corporate America is the utter uselessness of anybody who practices the dark arts of Human Resources, a term that is about as dehumanizing as you could possibly imagine for a corporation’s internal intelligence department.

I totally hate the corporate system in all of it’s life sucking vileness so naturally since I do have a mortgage to pay I feel that it is a great risk to write about anything of substance under my real name other than pseudonyms, it is my guess that you will find a lot of this out there with the other people that you survey. The majority of my screeds even the ones that are not expressly critical of the looter capitalist gulag system contain something that could be used as an example of something that I could be hauled into an office and made to face disciplinary procedures for potentially offending anyone. I certainly don’t share my blog postings with coworkers out of a simple matter of survival, I understand that it is a predatory environment in which in order to survive (other than being a completely broken subservient blob of easily controlled protoplasm) that one has to understand the basic laws of the jungle and number one is to maintain a low profile.

The only sort of activism that would really matter in one of these protected by law monstrosities and the bullshit of being an “artificial person” would be to work to organize the employees into a union and that is never going to happen given the multi million dollar union busting cottage industry in modern anti-labor America. Corporations are very authoritarian institutions where free thinking is forbidden and nonconformity is what gets somebody labeled as “weird” and shunned by fellow employees and management. In most corporations, obedience is pretty much browbeaten into an employee from day one and in the larger ones there are reinforcing systems of propaganda that one is constantly subjected to. Obedience and conformity are not only not accepted but management cultivates networks of snitches and spies to ensure that any unity against the toxic corporate environment can be nipped in the bud immediately and any potential bad seeds can be purged from the organism itself.

Anyway, I have been in the belly of the beast for far too long now and if I chose to do so could write exclusively about the corporate gulag system and never be lacking for material. I have had some thoughts of going into a few different corporations under false pretenses like Barbara Ehrenreich did with her great “Nickle and Dimed” but given my current situation that really couldn’t happen unless I was cut loose in some sort of restructuring plot but if and when that happens I very well may do that and start a blog (or maybe a larger organization) about the general fucking over that workers get these days by these unaccountable behemoths. I suppose that I would be more into actual activism if not for the fear of losing my job and therefore my primary source of income. While the particular corporation that I work for is pretty out front that they don’t seek to influence political views I just can’t possibly think that they would dig some of the things that I have written over the years or be too understanding if my picture happens to appear in the local paper in connection with say anti-globalization protests, especially not when they are offshoring jobs by the thousands to keep their stock price up. For the time being it would probably be in my best interests to keep my activities confined to the blogosphere and to continue to do so under a pseudonym because no matter what the shills for the “ownership society” might say about the general health of the economy I read the foreign news and fully understand the instability of the entire financial system so why push my luck right?

I have in the past tried working with some of the local activist groups but there is such a lack of focus on any particular issue that it’s really to me just a waste of time. Take for example our antiwar group, well they end up getting hijacked to start appearing as counter protestors to offset the haters that some radical local church sends out to harass the crowds at our annual gay pride day parade. Now while I really do not feel that any sort of discrimination should be tolerated and brownshirts bearing false Christian messages of hate and persecution are despicable my point is that the antiwar group showing up at the gay pride parade distracts from what they really need to be doing and that is protesting the illegal wars of aggression. And really, you just have to acknowledge that gay rights isn’t exactly something that is widely accepted by large segments of the population who could otherwise be allies. These phony cultural sideshow issues are meant to divide and I feel that it is idiotic for any serious activist group to get sucked into these sort of things but that is what you find out there in the liberal/progressive community that is so different from the right – organization and cohesiveness.

Now if you want to read something that identifies this to some degree and that is extremely worthwhile I would recommend Scott Ritter’s “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement” that has some very good suggestions on what the activist community should really be doing rather than wandering right into the traps that have been set for them. I also would recommend “Rules For Radicals” by Saul Alinsky as well as this wonderful 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky that I ran across because some of this stuff that he talks about is hilarious and classic, like the great O’Hare Airport “Shit In” which you will have to read the interview to get the gist of it. Saul Alinsky is a great role model for activists and it is a shame that he is not given more credit in regards to our history but that is the point isn’t it? Just do the revisionist thing to erase the contributions of the entire labor and progressive movements that laid it all on the line so that the ignorant sheep milling about their cubicle stockyards can enjoy their 40 hour work weeks. I don’t have the exact date but Amy Goodman just recently aired an interview with the legendary Studs Terkel where he told a story of how he berated two yuppies for their ignorance on those who fought to ensure that they could be smug and not made to work 80-100 hours a week, it was beautiful. I am sure that the transcript is on the Democracy Now website. Americans are so damned ignorant of history, that is the great shame of our times.

Question: How do you see yourself fitting into the PB movement/netroots? What role do you play?

Ed Encho: What I really would like to start to do would be to work at trying to not only write more pieces that have crossover appeal but to actively work to the best of my ability to bridge the gap between progressives/liberals and libertarians, independents and principled conservatives who are all getting screwed by the same system but have yet to realize that we are really all on the same side. In the beginning of my internet experience I really went after Bush and the Republicans tooth, fang and nail which was justified considering the damage that they were doing to this country with their flag wrapped, cross carrying brand of fascism. Now that is ok but sooner or later you really limit yourself to preaching to the choir and not really changing any minds or bringing in new people to a larger movement. Now with the betrayal of the Democrats after November 2006 I have been bringing a good deal of heat down on them that don’t seem to be quite so funny to some of the people who used to love attacking the right but now there is quite obviously a double standard. Actually I think that anybody who is doing this now and there a lot of people out there who really understand the true foulness of the entire system is much more honest than those who still cling to the traditional paradigm which really exists only to divide us all along lines other than class which is the true issue here especially now that the damage to the mythical American Dream is being realized due to massive exportation of jobs, an economy based only on debt, soulless consumerism and the need to have all of those things on television that never quite fill the emptiness in the souls of consumers (god I hate that word it is so fucking inhuman) whose money is needed to be sucked out to ensure that the system has grist for the mill.

I do want to add that television is in my opinion the worst possible thing for the American mind as well as the best possible tool for the system in that it creates passivity, false sense of reality, the sort of insecurity and lack of self esteem that is essential for the consumer society and the application of control. I am not going to go into this here because I am telling you, some of the research that I have seen into television and mind control (aka advertising) just blows me away, the effects on the mind by the electronic crackpipe right down to the proper flicker patterns that would make a viewer more susceptible to persuasion is analyzed by some very brilliant people who make a hell of lot of money and it is very frightening. Maybe I’ll try to get involved in spreading awareness on that at some point but there really are so many aspects of this society that really need to be exposed for what they are.

I think that as far as PB activism goes the best thing for me to do is to try to teach and create awareness that is able to reach a much wider audience than just progressives. I do see a sort of an unwillingness in a lot of places to take a look at any aspect of say the libertarian point of view because to many of the politically correct liberals and progressives anything short of acceptance of certain ideas at least to the point where a common ground can be found is treated as heresy and elicits very nasty responses. For example I wrote some favorable things about Ron Paul while I personally disagree with much of what he stands for and the intensity of the responses in the form of pure vitriol was pretty amazing, and this was from people who pride themselves on being open minded and like to brag about it. I now realize that whether someone identifies themselves as a liberal or a die hard conservative there are certain areas that are just treated as though those who have a particular belief as the earthly personification of Satan.

Now I haven’t always been like this but have gradually evolved to the point where I just don’t unequivocally hate anymore but that is because I read and listen to views from both the traditional left, right and center, of course I eliminate the obvious party shills like the Rush Limbaugh’s and Randi Rhodes’s of the world along with others like them because they are just like cheerleaders for their team and everyone else can go fuck themselves as far as they are concerned. I make it a habit to read many magazines in addition to the mainstream propaganda rags like Newsweek and Time that are really only parroting and spinning the talking points of the establishment. I also read on a regular bais Harpers, Mother Jones, The Nation, Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative among others and even on occasion The New American which is the official magazine of the fucking John Birch Society for Christ’s sake so you can’t possibly tell me that I am not open to a diverse range of ideas. That being said I do have to say one thing for the JBS in that they have pretty much been much more outspoken and defensive over the erosion of our civil liberties and the lousy trade pacts that have beggared this country than the Democrats have over the course of the last few years. I read all of this and I listen to probably 6-8 hours a day of talk radio including lectures from the far left to the far right and to clue everybody in on a little secret there is a hell of a lot of truth out there on the fringes for both sides because it is where those who dare to call it like it is are marginalized. I just take all of this stuff and kind of synthesize it and then mix it into whatever I happen to feel like writing about which really varies from day to day and is wholly based on how I happen to feel at the time.

So to sum it up I see myself in the future acting more as a bit of a critic of the system itself as well as the wars, the worsening financial situation and the true atrocities in how this society very cleverly uses the American brand name to dupe people into doing things that are against their own self interests and result in a lot of death, sorrow and human misery both here in The Homeland (there is that word again) and abroad in the lands that we spread our murderous form of disaster capitalism and plundering.

Question: You stated “I have in the past tried working with some of the local activist groups but there is such a lack of focus on any particular issue that it’s really to me just a waste of time. Take for example our antiwar group, well they end up getting hijacked to start appearing as counter protestors to offset the haters that some radical local church sends out to harass the crowds at our annual gay pride day parade. Now while I really do not feel that any sort of discrimination should be tolerated and brownshirts bearing false Christian messages of hate and persecution are despicable my point is that the antiwar group showing up at the gay pride parade distracts from what they really need to be doing and that is protesting the illegal wars of aggression. And really, you just have to acknowledge that gay rights isn’t exactly something that is widely accepted by large segments of the population who could otherwise be allies. These phony cultural sideshow issues are meant to divide and I feel that it is idiotic for any serious activist group to get sucked into these sort of things but that is what you find out there in the liberal/progressive community that is so different from the right – organization and cohesiveness.”

Do you feel that the PB has this focus? Or is it just broad enough that it can spread itself out to many of these issues?

Ed Encho: It is big and can address many issues simultaneously but it is not to this point yet organized enough to hone in on the one or two major issues of great importance, dare I say existential importance with a laser like precision and bring enough heat on a consistent basis to push for change. The thing with liberals and progressives is that by nature they are really more open and free thinking so of course they largely all have their own issues which while important are really meaningless unless the creeping fascism can be stopped. If we are unable to restore the civil liberties that have been stolen away from us during the Bush years then nothing else really matters. The organization and focus of the right (at least in areas not in the blogosphere) is what is going to be needed to undo the damage that has already been done let alone stop the slide into the abyss.

Right now you can legally be disappeared and held in a secret prison indefinitely without anybody even knowing what happened to you, you have no right of habeas corpus, you can be tortured and then you can be labeled as a ‘terrorist’ under some vague definition that is deliberately that way in order for a wide net to be cast for dissidents and critics of the state. Now you also have this incredibly anti-American piece of legislation that was initiated by Rep. Jane Harman who is somebody who has shall I say questionable priorities and associations called H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 passed overwhelmingly last year which really makes every one who dissents potential terrorists subject to those wonderful things that were legitimized at Gitmo. The Senate version (S.1955) is in front of none other than Joe Lieberman’s committee so what do you think is going to happen there? This legislation also sets up a committee to determine what sort of literature would be considered to be ‘terrorist propaganda’. This is very scary stuff and it really proves that the entire phony war on terror is total bullshit, it is a war against the American people. At the same time you have Michael Chertoff out there saying that regular household chemicals can be used by potential ‘terrorists’ to produce IED’s.

What do you have under your sink? What is in your bookcase?

So what I am trying to get at is that there are far bigger fish to fry than electoral politics, divisive social issues and the myriad of minutiae that passes for discourse. We are in very serious trouble right now because this entire infrastructure for a police state is being slowly erected right in front of use bit by bit, it’s like the saying that “if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water the frog will immediately jump out but if you put that same frog in a pot of warm water and very incrementally increase the temperature the frog will sit there until it cooks to death” that frog is us. The damage to this country undertaken by this rogue administration, it’s neocon policy makers and the with the totally feckless acquiescence of the Democratic party is nothing short of stunning. Every day you will see more and more police brutality over minor infractions, it’s like the role model for law enforcement is Jack Bauer. You also have this huge paramilitary force of mercenaries for hire called Blackwater that is unaccountable to anybody and has already been used on our domestic streets in New Orleans. You also have the recent tweaks to Continuity of Government consolidating all power in the executive office in the event that a declaration of martial law becomes necessary, the legalization of spying, the essential voiding of the Posse Comitatus (that prohibits the use of the military against civilians that has been in effect since right after the Civil War) in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the construction of detention facilities by Halliburton subsidiary KBR for undefined “special programs” and any other number of very serious steps to construct a fascist system of control. Naomi Wolf wrote a good piece on this Fascist America In 10 Easy Steps that I would recommend.

So no, I don’t feel that the PB has much focus on things that are imperative for our very survival as a free society and I am not even getting into the wars and the economy in my response to this question. The only way that this all can be stopped if it can be or at least slowed down is to draw in libertarians, paleocons and other concerned Americans into a unified movement. All of the rest of it just isn’t going to matter unless the police state infrastructure can be dismantled (at best) or brought under some very tough laws that once again restore our Constitutional protections.

To Be Continued…