Veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry writes on the plans to manipulate and otherwise intimidate the American media into parroting Reagan administration propaganda (or manage perception) on the Iran-Contra operation. Very important today as most of the dirty deeds of the Bush administration had their genesis in Reagan’s regime and their illicit dealings in Central and South America. Mr. Parry runs the outstanding must read site Consortium News and we would encourage very strongly that everyone who is able to go ahead and donate to his efforts to get some of the best and most credible, in-depth reporting on the internet out there so that the truth can be told. There is also an outstanding interview with Parry on this with Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton that can be found here for download.
Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 30, 2008
As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.
To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.
That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.
Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.
The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.
“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.
“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt – to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”
However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.
So did some of the administration’s collaborators, such as South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon and Australian press mogul Rupert Murdoch, two far-right media barons who poured billions of dollars into pro-Republican news outlets that continue to influence Washington’s political debates to this day.
Before every presidential election, Moon’s Washington Times plants derogatory – and often false – stories about Democratic contenders, discrediting them and damaging their chances of winning the White House.
For instance, in 1988, the Times published a bogus account suggesting that the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment. In 2000, Moon’s newspaper pushed the theme that Al Gore suffered from clinical delusions. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
As for Murdoch, his giant News Corp. expanded into American cable TV with the founding of Fox News in 1996. Since then, the right-wing network has proved highly effective in promoting attack lines against Democrats or anyone else who challenges the Republican power structure.
As President George W. Bush herded the nation toward war with Iraq in 2002-03, Fox News acted like his sheep dogs making sure public opinion didn’t stray too far off. The “Fox effect” was so powerful that it convinced other networks to load up with pro-war military analysts and to silence voices that questioned the invasion. [See Neck Deep.]
Seeds of Propaganda
The seeds of this private/public collaboration can be found in the 84-page draft Iran-Contra chapter, entitled “Launching the Private Network.” [There appear to have been several versions of this “lost chapter.” This one I found in congressional files.]
The chapter traces the origins of the propaganda network to President Reagan’s “National Security Decision Directive 77” in January 1983 as his administration sought to promote its foreign policy, especially its desire to oust Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, then-National Security Advisor William Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark wrote.
As administration officials began reaching out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim at not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras.
At the time, the contras were earning a gruesome reputation as human rights violators and terrorists. To change this negative perception of the contras, the Reagan administration created a full-blown, clandestine propaganda operation.
“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and governmental action,” the draft chapter said.
Heading this operation was a veteran CIA officer named Walter Raymond Jr., who was recruited by another CIA officer, Donald Gregg, before Gregg shifted from his job as chief of the NSC’s Intelligence Directorate to become national security adviser to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
[The draft chapter doesn’t use Raymond’s name in its opening pages, apparently because some of the information came from classified depositions. However, Raymond’s name is used later in the chapter and the earlier citations match Raymond’s role.]
According to the draft report, the CIA officer recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a “specialist in propaganda and disinformation.”
“The CIA official [Raymond] discussed the transfer with [CIA Director William] Casey and NSC Advisor William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC as Gregg’s successor [in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities,” the chapter said.
“In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and abroad.”
Raymond “helped to set up an elaborate system of inter-agency committees,” the draft chapter said, adding:
“In the Spring of 1983, the network began to turn its attention toward beefing up the Administration’s capacity to promote American support for the Democratic Resistance in Nicaragua [the contras] and the fledgling democracy in El Salvador.
“This effort resulted in the creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Department of State (S/LPD), headed by Otto Reich,” a right-wing Cuban exile from Miami.
Though Secretary of State George Shultz wanted the office under his control, President Reagan insisted that Reich “report directly to the NSC,” where Raymond oversaw the operations as a special assistant to the President and the NSC’s director of international communications, the chapter said.
“At least for several months after he assumed this position, Raymond also worked on intelligence matters at the NSC, including drafting a Presidential Finding for Covert Action in Nicaragua in mid-September” 1983, the chapter said.
In other words, although Raymond was shifted to the NSC staff in part to evade prohibitions on the CIA influencing U.S. public opinion, his intelligence and propaganda duties overlapped for a time as he was retiring from the spy agency.
Key Player
Despite Raymond’s formal separation from the CIA, he acted toward the U.S. public much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign country. He was the go-to guy to keep the operation on track.
“Reich relied heavily on Raymond to secure personnel transfers from other government agencies to beef up the limited resources made available to S/LPD by the Department of State,” the chapter said.
“Personnel made available to the new office included intelligence specialists from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army. On one occasion, five intelligence experts from the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were assigned to work with Reich’s fast-growing operation. …
“White House documents also indicate that CIA Director Casey had more than a passing interest in the Central American public diplomacy campaign.”
The chapter cited an Aug. 9, 1983, memo written by Raymond describing Casey’s participation in a meeting with public relations specialists to brainstorm how “to sell a ‘new product’ – Central America – by generating interest across-the-spectrum.”
In an Aug. 29, 1983, memo, Raymond recounted a call from Casey pushing his P.R. ideas. Alarmed at a CIA director participating so brazenly in domestic propaganda, Raymond wrote that “I philosophized a bit with Bill Casey (in an effort to get him out of the loop)” but with little success.
The chapter added: “Casey’s involvement in the public diplomacy effort apparently continued throughout the period under investigation by the Committees,” including a 1985 role in pressuring Congress to renew contra aid and a 1986 hand in further shielding S/LPD from the oversight of Secretary Shultz.
A Raymond-authored memo to Casey in August 1986 described the shift of S/LPD – then run by neoconservative theorist Bob Kagan who had replaced Reich – to the control of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which was headed by Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, another prominent neoconservative.
Another important figure in the pro-contra propaganda was NSC staffer Oliver North, who spent a great deal of his time on the Nicaraguan public diplomacy operation even though he is better known for arranging secret arms shipments to the contras and to Iran’s radical Islamic government, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.
The draft chapter cited a March 10, 1985, memo from North describing his assistance to CIA Director Casey in timing disclosures of pro-contra news “aimed at securing Congressional approval for renewed support to the Nicaraguan Resistance Forces.”
North’s Operatives
The Iran-Contra “lost” chapter depicts a sometimes Byzantine network of contract and private operatives who handled details of the domestic propaganda while concealing the hand of the White House and the CIA.
“Richard R. Miller, former head of public affairs at AID, and Francis D. Gomez, former public affairs specialist at the State Department and USIA, were hired by S/LPD through sole-source, no-bid contracts to carry out a variety of activities on behalf of the Reagan administration policies in Central America,” the chapter said.
“Supported by the State Department and White House, Miller and Gomez became the outside managers of [North operative] Spitz Channel’s fundraising and lobbying activities.
“They also served as the managers of Central American political figures, defectors, Nicaraguan opposition leaders and Sandinista atrocity victims who were made available to the press, the Congress and private groups, to tell the story of the Contra cause.”
Miller and Gomez facilitated transfers of money to Swiss and offshore banks at North’s direction, as they “became the key link between the State Department and the Reagan White House with the private groups and individuals engaged in a myriad of endeavors aimed at influencing the Congress, the media and public opinion,” the chapter said.
In its conclusion, the draft chapter read:
“The State Department was used to run a prohibited, domestic, covert propaganda operation. Established despite resistance from the Secretary of State, and reporting directly to the NSC, the [S/LPD] attempted to mask many of its activities from the Congress and the American people.”
However, the American people never got to read a detailed explanation of this finding nor see the evidence. In October 1987, as the congressional Iran-Contra committees wrote their final report, Republicans protested the inclusion of this explosive information.
Though the Democrats held the majority, the GOP had leverage because Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, the House chairman, wanted some bipartisanship in the final report, especially since senior Republicans, including Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyoming, were preparing a strongly worded minority report.
Hamilton and the Democrats hoped that three moderate Republicans – William Cohen of Maine, Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Paul Trible of Virginia – would break ranks and sign the majority report. However, the Republicans objected to the draft chapter about Ronald Reagan’s covert propaganda campaign.
As part of a compromise, some elements of the draft chapter were included in the Executive Summary but without much detail and shorn of the tough conclusions. Nevertheless, Cohen protested even that.
“I question the inordinate attention devoted in the Executive Summary to the Office of Public Diplomacy and its activities in support of the Administration’s polices,” Cohen wrote in his additional views. “The prominence given to it in the Executive Summary is far more generous than just.”
Long-Term Consequences
However, the failure of the Iran-Contra report to fully explain the danger of CIA-style propaganda intruding into the U.S. political process would have profound future consequences. Indeed, the evidence suggests that today’s powerful right-wing media gained momentum as part of the Casey-Raymond operations of the early 1980s.
According to one Raymond-authored memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, then-U.S. Information Agency director Charles Wick “via Murdock [sic] may be able to draw down added funds” to support pro-Reagan initiatives.
Raymond’s reference to Rupert Murdoch possibly drawing down “added funds” suggests that the right-wing media mogul was already part of the covert propaganda operation.
In line with its clandestine nature, Raymond also suggested routing the “funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political center.”
Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, publisher of the Washington Times, also showed up in the Iran-Contra operations, using his newspaper to raise contra funds and assigning his CAUSA political group to organize support for the contras.
In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, both Murdoch and Moon have continued to pour billions of dollars into media outlets that have influenced the course of U.S. history, often through the planting of propaganda and disinformation much like a CIA covert action might do in a hostile foreign country.
Further, to soften up the Washington press corps, Reich’s S/LPD targeted U.S. journalists who reported information that undermined the pro-contra propaganda. Reich sent his teams out to lobby news executives to remove or punish out-of-step reporters – with a disturbing degree of success. [For more, see Parry’s Lost History.]
Some U.S. officials implicated in the Iran-Contra propaganda operations are still around, bringing the lessons of the 1980s into the new century.
For instance, Elliott Abrams. Though convicted of misleading Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush – Abrams is now deputy adviser to George W. Bush’s NSC, where he directs U.S.-Middle East policy.
Bob Kagan remains another prominent neocon theorist in Washington, writing op-eds for the Washington Post. Oliver North was given a news show on Fox.
Otto Reich now is advising Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Latin American affairs. Lee Hamilton is a senior national security adviser to Democratic candidate Barack Obama.
Enduring Skills
Beyond these individuals, the manipulative techniques that were refined in the 1980s – especially the skill of exaggerating foreign threats – have proved durable, bringing large segments of the American population into line behind the Iraq War in 2002-03.
Only now – with more than 4,100 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead – are many of these Americans realizing that were manipulated by clever propaganda, that their perceptions had been managed.
For instance, the New York Times recently pried loose some 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents revealing how the Bush administration had manipulated the public debate on the Iraq War by planting friendly retired military officers on TV news shows.
Retired Green Beret Robert S. Bevelacqua, a former analyst on Murdoch’s Fox News, said the Pentagon treated the retired military officers as puppets: “It was them saying, ‘we need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’” [NYT, April 20, 2008, or see Consortiumnews.com’s “US News Media’s Latest Disgrace.”]
Bush’s former White House press secretary Scott McClellan described similar use of propaganda tactics to justify the Iraq War in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.
From his insider vantage point, McClellan cited the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” – and he called the Washington press corps “complicit enablers.”
None of this would have been so surprising – indeed Americans might have been forewarned and forearmed – if Lee Hamilton and other Democrats on the Iran-Contra committees had held firm and published the scandal’s “lost chapter” two decades ago
Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far. 
Posted by Donn Marten 
Bahoowah 
Year Of The Rat
April 2, 2008Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save Us!”…and I’ll look down, and whisper, “No”.:
-From the journal of Rorschach
The day when our shared journey has led us to that proverbial fork in the road has come and the choice that we all make will shape the collective destinies of millions including the children and grandchildren of people who read this. The masses of asses, the haters, the dumbed down, the sheeple and the television addicted drone inhabitants of this rotting empire of avarice and dumbness seek a savior to lead the world’s largest lemming colony to deliverance. They long for a modern day Moses to part the seas of slime, a Jesus to offer salvation and a miracle worker to heal the sores of the lepers and the festering open wounds of the casualties of the war on sanity.
That they are largely inflicted wounds though and it is far too late for any sort of a chance at reconciliation, healing or deliverance, this bitch is going and it is going to go big time, there really is no other way. Well let me clue you in on a little something, miracles are for suckers, rubes and fools of which there is no shortage in this wasted land, this empire of avarice where modern day pharaohs cavort, fornicating in piles of money in the temple of greed. There are no saviors, there is no hope, Superman is not going to fly in to save the day and in what is really the cruelest little joke of all every aspect our lives have been built on lies constructed to control, exploit and manipulate us like cattle to be fed on as vampires and then shipped off to the slaughterhouse when we have served our purpose. Just as the desperate and agonized pleas to the almighty went ignored in the Nazi death camps, in firebombed Japanese cities, in the Cambodian killing fields and in the torture cells of Latin America there will in the end be no salvation, there will only be suffering.
That much my friends is assured, our past inactions have dug the graves for our hopes, our aspirations and have already sold our unborn grandchildren as slaves to pay for those wonderful plasma screen televisions, those vacations and those McMansions that were oh so great until the day that the bill came due and the hidden charges were exacted. The only thing that is now imminent is that each current day will be better than the next one and each next day will be better than the next one after that. The future is darkness, slavery, torture and murder for the deal with the devil was long ago sealed with a slimy dripping French kiss and now the repo men are prowling our foreclosure ridden national neighborhoods to round up the souls.
The soul hunt will provide slim pickings though in this sordid and rotting post 9/11 wasteland for there is little left to be had as far as souls go, they have already been sucked out by the machine. We are a nation of fearful sheep, hateful lemmings, good Germans, TV lobotomized zombies and ‘me firsters’ seeking to consume, consume and then sprint to the vomitories so as to return to consume more. Husks of human beings shuffle about in huge air conditioned shopping malls trying to fill their god shaped holes with cheap sweatshop produced clothing and Chinese made consumer electronics, compact discs and those wonderful new Blu-ray movies that will have the trendy scrambling to replace their hundreds of DVDs with the newer and more expensive versions. As Mencken once said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” and every mall in this country should have that chiseled in stone on the façade an updated spin on “Arbeit macht frei” for the American Heimat. The shuffling, overweight throng a large percentage gibbering into cell phones about trivialities will shamble from chain store to food court to chain store shopping like the good little patriotic monkeys that they are. They will rack up all of this shit on their burgeoning ledgers of debt, purchased with plastic, the magnetic strips recording the usurious borrowing and ensuring that the passage to perdition has been booked. It is our national destiny.
It started with Ronald Reagan, the great plastic president rolled out by the oligarchy to sell the great story of that shining city on the hill, of national rejuvenation, of the grand star spangled restoration. After all, Vietnam and Watergate, stagflation, corrupt and failed institutions and a long overdue inward look at what ails us as a people was so seventies and such a bummer. Hell, it was time to kick ass and be proud to be Americans again and to bomb the living fuck out of anyone who dared to beg to differ. Maybe that is a bit of an inaccuracy though, it really didn’t begin with Reagan but rather metastasized, our character flaws had always been there which can be expected of a nation with the dirty little secret of genocide of the indigenous population although such foul truths were bred out of us or sanitized to the point where it was truly American to cheer for The Duke to put down them injuns, yee fucking hah! Reaganism was just the demarcation point from reality, Hannah Arendt wrote of the tactic of totalitarian regimes slowly constructing an alternate or parallel ‘reality’ which could then slowly be swapped out. The Reagan era was when America’s channels were changed and the seeds were germinating for the bastard birth borne as the end result of avarice, authoritarianism and denial getting down for a good ménage à trios that set us all on the path to 2008 and a nation of the damned. The four horsemen of the apocalypse in Reagan, George W. Bush, John Wayne and the Marlboro Man have already passed through and have cracked the seals to release the poison that has polluted our souls and stamped our ticket with historical infamy.
The time has arrived to make that nasty little choice between freedom or slavery, revolt or submission, liberty or subservience, acceptance or denial and life as a truly free and empowered human being or a half-life as a fearful broken dog condemned to a existence of nothing more than a revenue source for a dying system that demands nothing other than more, more, more. Americans have become drooling simpletons who prostate themselves before their beloved televisions, taking in the illusion sustaining next hit of E Crack, they fear everything, love nothing of true value, wallow in their delusions and proudly wear their willful ignorance as some sort of a badge of honor on their sleeves. We as a people have been largely reduced to cattle waiting to be chipped for the final plug into the control grid, subhuman husks shuffling around in shopping malls to fill that inner void that never seems close with consumer junk purchased with plastic, those marvelously conceived little magnetic strips recording the usurious debts and booking the passage to perdition as well as building records in massive databases that will soon be able to predict the future by examining trends, here comes pre-crime but why bother to worry about it, there is American Idol, ballgames and checks and balances because we are a country of greatness and destiny so help us God.
Too many out there are looking for the quick and easy fix, the happy ending and the one great savior who will make it all right again so that they can go right back to sleep. They gather at the foot of the mount to herald the coming of the messiah, whether it be the scheming queen and her vicious court of ax wielding thugs and high rolling financiers or the black Jesus the Democrats offer nothing more but the same snake oil in a shinier bottle and the lines have been forming for a run on the sales counter. The most naïve and delusional are bopping around on the so-called progressive blogs many of which have already been commandeered by party hacks as unpaid surrogates desperate for change at least but willing to walk straight into hell with their eyes wide open. They have learned nothing after the betrayal of the November 2006 Judas goats and they are being played as dupes once again.
The Democrats have played everyone for suckers, having shanked organized labor in the back, set up a sham system of super delegates to prevent anyone who would dare advocate for a return to the New Deal ideals rather than the chosen agenda of globalism, neoliberalism and perpetual war for perpetual peace. Those who would dare to stand for a strong middle class, American manufacturing might and a quiet patriotism not based on flag sucking and Duke Nukem foreign policy would never be allowed anywhere near the White House. The ideal new Democrat was Bill Clinton who took a chainsaw to social programs, backed sanctions that starved hundreds of thousands (at least) of Iraqi children, used the military against his own citizens at Waco, sold out the American worker with NAFTA, bombed the shit out of Bosnia, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, deregulated the communications industry and still found the time to slowly suck on cigars that he had inserted into Monica Lewinsky’s cooze in the White House. A real fucking Renaissance man indeed.
But a well kept and corrupt illusion of a political system is the intent of course, always has been and always will be. I quote from William Jefferson Clinton’s mentor Professor Carroll Quigley:
So there you have it, the feeble minded deniers with their standard knee jerk flinging of pejoratives like “tin foil hatter” and “misogynist” and “anti Semite” are only acting as guardians for this foul system while they bask in the glow of its malignancy for whatever personal reasons that they may have. Be they Republicans their hatreds are sanctioned and their fears of the brown people and the queers are assuaged by the great protectors of all that is good with Amerika and they will be goddamned thrilled to bust the skulls, torture and intern in concentration camps any who dare to disagree. They bathe themselves in the homilies of Rush Limbaugh and a myriad of radical clerics who defend the warfare state as though they were lepers frolicking through the fountains at Lourdes and they find comfort in their shared revulsion of all who are different. The Democrats also do their part in defending the big lie of democracy in that they are as equally devoid of substance and lacking of anything resembling true American ideals as their more bellicose cohorts. The Democrats have gone from FDR and Harry Truman’s party that championed the working classes and valued human dignity to today’s empty vessel that has long ago sold their souls to the company store.
JFK got his head blown off for daring to step out of line and to buck the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” and LBJ was a flawed man, instituting sweeping social reforms while leading this country into the charnel house that was Vietnam which to this day dominates our political discourse although with much subtlety. The Democrats are able to get away with this simply because they pander to a loose coalition of identity based groups, many of which hold views that are deeply offensive to many Americans whose ass backwardness overcomes the fact that they are often good hearted and well intentioned people who are easily manipulated by political charlatans. A good description of today’s jackass party was given in Situation FUBAR from libertarian Lew Rockwell’s website:
Certainly my friends nothing that you have seen here and throughout the blogosphere recently does anything but reinforce that theory. Meanwhile the wars go on and Iraqi
violence is up again.
The only certainty is that there will be more fear, war and oppression and quite possibly a system already strained to the breaking point will fracture completely. The global financial system is on the ropes due to the greed of the rapacious looters of Wall Street who are in the process of being bailed out by a Federal Reserve that is largely responsible for a large share of this nation’s fiscal woes and a propaganda campaign that is every bit the equivalent of the dog and pony show of General Petraeus’s “SURGE” is now being rolled out by Goldman Sachs lackey Henry Paulson to restore faith in our house of cards stock markets and get the suckers buying again. From all indications it is working with a massive rise of 400+ points in yesterday’s Dow Jones Industrial Average but don’t be fooled, the system is clogged with trillions of dollars in bad mortgage backed paper and the housing market is nowhere near bottom yet. Food prices are soaring largely due to the cash cow and political winner in the heartland great big pie in the sky that is ETHANOL which will contribute more to global starvation and a further erosion of household spending, this craze is like just another of those Ralph Kramden get rich quick schemes that always blows up but the candidates are milking it for all that they can get as they whore themselves across the plains and dine at feasts sponsored by Cargill and other agribusiness giants. We still have millions of uninsured, a decaying infrastructure, a mass exodus of American jobs and the roads built by American tax dollars are being leased to foreign corporations who can set their prices on tolls. And there is more of course but the cheap political games go on so why the fuck bother to go into a litany of all that has so obviously gone bad.
And all that far too many people on the current political left can talk about is who is being insufficiently politically correct, ideologically pure or whose minister happens to preach fire and brimstone against the sins of America. Hell, this is so self-destructive and fucked up and desperate that before long all of us rebels and naysayers may even start being denounced as anti-Americans and Al Qaeda operatives by those who are proud to declare themselves members of Team Democrat whose only desire other than to win that bag of baubles and jewels made of paste of political bragging rights is to keep the system that enables their ignorance and disingenuousness in place.
The sad and ugly truth is that none of the electoral politics matter anymore, it is our national destiny to be crucified upon a cross of ignorance for our own sins. For this there will be no absolution.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows that the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight is fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows that the boat is sinking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybodys got this broken feeling
Like their momma or there dog just died
Everybodys hands are in their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
-Leonard Cohen
By Ed Encho