“Hang The Robes” and Other Ruminations

As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.

-Jeremy Bentham

An ominous trend is beginning to creep into the so-called progressive blogosphere, it is the now common censorship of more radical expression that at one time was acceptable in many areas yet has become taboo in the era of Obama. The recent swarm attack against Dennis Kucinich by phony liberal organizations like MoveOn.org for his holdout on the insurance industry windfall that is your new national healthcare ‘reform’ bill was evidence of the purge of heretics from the Rahm Emanuel corporate co-opted ‘left’. I am certain that everyone reading anything that I do has been subjected to some form of censorship, banning, troll-rating or comment hiding at what are cynically foisted off as free speech oriented liberal/progressive or for that matter inclusive independent blogs for being critical of our God chosen very special friends in Israel, that goes with the territory. It is pretty commonly understood that the genocidal Zionists have for years recruited operatives to blogswarm, bully and tar as anti-Semitic those who dare to shine the light on human rights abuses, war crimes and atrocities that should have the Israeli leaders in the dock at the Hague, that is just something that has to be dealt with when blogging. As my old southern buddy Mikey used to say “if you’re going to play in NASCAR you should expect to get more than a few dings” but the siege has often resulted in the even more chilling self-censorship in the fear that ANY conversation regarding Israel and the Palestinians is verboten. Take for example a place called Docudharma where I have occasionally posted, to venture into calling out Zionist aggression in any way, shape or form will nearly instantaneously have one ostracized. I single DD out because I have witnessed it there, it was a spinoff from Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga’s (who is as left wing as Stalin) Daily Kos which is notorious for the policing of cynics, skeptics, doubters and above all else – critics of Israel.

But I digress…

The creeping menace of liberal/progressive blog censorship has hit me again this week, I only bring this up because it was over at OpEd News, a forum that I have been a regular at for years, have contributed articles to and have commented on many. It was always an open forum albeit since it gets a good deal of exposure there needed to be a bit of discretion used in using certain terms which is an understandable tradeoff for the exposure that an article could get due to the crossover appeal of OEN – my series on Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government as well as some things that I did on 9/11 received attention elsewhere due to OEN.

This week though, I ran afoul of the censors for a comment that I had posted on a Rob Kall article entitled: Will Supreme Court Kill the Obama Health Care Reform Plan? which addressed the possibility that the fascist John Roberts and his Federalist Society and Opus Dei cronies would in activist fashion overturn Obamacare in much the way that they inistalled George W. Bush in the White House by oveturning a Gore victory in 2000. I posted a sardonic reply suggesting a bumper sticker slogan of “Hang The Robes” which turned into an extended flame war with a traveler who in his third reply or so admitted to being a Birther. The thing was ultimately flagged and deleted by one of OEN’s Daily Kos styled ‘editiors’ in charge of selecting what to flush down the memory hole. I certainly wasn’t advocating the murder of federal judges, just their impeachment but a scumbagger got his star-spangled panties in a bunch and enough of them cried when confronted with someone who didn’t roll over for their brownshirt bullying. I would have posted the entire thread but it’s been disappeared so I have to settle with the my final response:

So What Will You Scumbaggers Do Now?

After all of your embarrassing and disgusting rabble rousing you still went down in defeat to a bill that is horrible across the board and a giveaway to the parasitical insurance industry. Thanks to you schmucks we are ALL screwed but the big money boys are laughing all the way to the bank on your easily exploited gullibility AGAIN!

That is what you get for allowing yourselves to be used as human penis extensions for hard core Republican swine like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey.

My advice to you is to forget about the Birther fantasies and get a life along with the rest of your moonbat buddies.

Now the whole thing was pretty mild, certainly not the high octane Encho rants that have been launched elswhere but the fascist bullies and the jelly-spined OEN editors succeeded in getting the comment and all subsequent comments removed. Again, this is but one example of what is going on right now and it’s alarming because it is occurring in forums where free speech had at one time been sanctified….and this isn’t the only time of late that I have been stomped on by administrators who decided that towing the line, not offending those who lack the intestinal fortitude to realize that we are at war, a cold civil war that could turn hot at any moment given the Republican Gladio droogs of the teabagger movement – which is becoming violent in a similar way that the Sturmabteilung did all those years ago. Maybe this is just a personal bug up my ass, it sure bothers me though because now is the time when we must become more vocal, more angry, more passionate in denouncing the fascist takeover of America.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

P.S.: I would like to post this from principled conservative Paul Craig Roberts, himself a regular contributor at OEN and a longtime critic who from this G.B.C.W. article looks to be hanging it up, it’s a shame when truthtellers like this become so revulsed that they simply withdraw and let us hope that he will reconsider.

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.