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Is Telling Lies A Democratic Right?
Is Telling Lies A Democratic Right?
While I’m on the Greece topic again today, I can’t help but pointing out some of the changes in tone I’ve noticed in the press recently, shifting towards outright oftentimes vicious if not ridiculous antagonism vs Greece. Remember, there is an agenda, there are pre-cooked narratives galore, and these people are not your friends.
I won’t be able to cover all the things I would like to right now, let’s start with just the one. And I’m warning you: it might get philosophical.
This is from Marc Champion for Bloomberg yesterday:
Tsipras Isn’t on the Side of Democracy
Recently, I asked whether the Greek government actually wants to strike a deal on its debt, or if its increasingly erratic approach to negotiationsmight reflect a determination to ensure that Greeks blame their creditors, not their government, for a coming meltdown. [..] Here’s what Tsipras saidin a statement about the abortive talks and current bailout:
“One can only suspect political motives behind the fact that the institutions insist on further pension cuts, despite five years of pillaging via the memoranda. The Greek government has been negotiating with a specific plan and documented proposals. We will wait patiently till the institutions adhere to realism.
Those who consider our sincere wish for a solution as well as our efforts to bridge the gap as a sign of weakness, should have in mind the following: We are not only carrying a historical past underlined with struggles. We are carrying our people’s dignity as well as the aspirations of all Europeans. We cannot ignore this responsibility. It is not a matter of ideological stubbornness. It has to do with democracy.”
Tsipras’s proposition that he’s championing the hope of downtrodden masses across Europe is nonsense. Germans may be wrong and unfair to prefer losing the loans they made Greece to taking a haircut, but they have a democratic right to believe they’re correct.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Democracy on Hold: President of European Parliament Suspends Vote on Secretive U.S.-EU Trade Pact as Tide Turns Against It
Democracy on Hold: President of European Parliament Suspends Vote on Secretive U.S.-EU Trade Pact as Tide Turns Against It
Today was supposed to be a historic day — the day when hundreds of MEPs, representing hundreds of millions of European citizens, were to finally get their say on the hugely contentious EU-US trade bill commonly known as TTIP. Granted, the result would not have been binding, but a no-vote would have represented a resounding slap in the face of the European Commission.
Things began fairly auspiciously when, early on Tuesday, The Guardian reported that dissension was growing in the ranks as MEPs threatened to block the trade deal unless it guaranteed states’ rights to regulate over climate, health, and social laws. Now news is emerging that the President of the Parliament, Martin Schulz, has decided to postpone the vote altogether amidst fears that a majority of MEPs might reject the bill.
Here’s more from the Spanish news site El Diario.
The differences between the European People’s Party (EPP) and the social democratic bloc on the issue of arbitration and especially the internal division among the socialists have led to the withdrawal of the report, although the official justification given by the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz has been the huge number of amendments (over 200) proposed by the Committee on International Trade (INTA).
“In view of the more than 200 amendments and requests for separate vote, President Schulz has decided, using the Rule 175 and after consulting the chairman of the Committee on International Trade (INTA), to postpone the vote”. In fact, more than half of the amendments came from committee members fiercely opposed to the treaty (the European United Left and the Greens) and Schulz’s last-minute decision was to head off the “danger” that the TTIP would be defeated on Wednesday, according to parliamentary sources…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Empire Was Temporarily Defeated In Macedonia
The Empire Was Temporarily Defeated In Macedonia
Global Research has made available an English translation of Andrew Korybko’s interview with the Macedonian NetPress. Washington’s color revolution for Macedonia has failed for now. Korybko describes how Washington-funded NGOs are used as Fifth Columns to destabilize and to overthrow governments in order to bring countries under Washington’s control. Korybko also explains that Washington’s activity in the Balkans is directed at preventing the Russian natural gas pipeline that would supply Europe with energy. Washington is determined to prevent economic relationships between Europe and Russia that could result in a lessening of Washington’s hold on Europe. With Albania and Bulgaria already in Washington’s pocket, with Washington operative Zoran Zaev creating problems for Macedonia, and with Greece itself possibly vulnerable to a color revolution, Macedonia can expect to experience continuous destabilization attempts by Washington.
It is testimony to Washington’s control over Europe that European politicians support
Washington’s intent to deprive Europe of an energy source even when there is no available alternative. To please Washington, Europeans will even shoot themselves in the head.
Here is the interview: http://www.globalresearch.ca/macedonia-patriots-defeat-the-color-revolution/5453214 Most Americans are uninterested in Macedonia. Nevertheless, Americans should find of interest this depiction of Washington’s subversion of other countries, always, of course, hidden behind the cloak of “bringing freedom and democracy.”
Democracy Or Oligarchy – You Decide
Democracy Or Oligarchy – You Decide
In the interests of clarifying what it is that America has become, we offer this…
So which one sounds more accurate?
How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP
How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP
As I reported on Wednesday, a deal was worked out in the U.S. Senate on the early afternoon of May 13th to “Fast-Track” through to approval U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed trade deals, TPP with Asia, and TTIP with Europe. (It should have been reported on the nightly TV news programs, but most of them ignored it then, and reported the news only the next day when the Senators made it official.)
TPP and TTIP have been represented in America’s press as ‘trade’ deals, but instead they’re actually about sovereignty. They’re about America and the other participating countries handing their democratic sovereignty — on regulation of the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, and finance — over to panels, all of whose members will be selected by the large international corporations that for years have been working with U.S. President Obama’s Trade Representative to draft these “trade” treaties.
If some corporation “C” under these ‘trade deals’ then brings a case to one of those panels and says that country “X” has any regulations regarding the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, or finance, that are stricter than the ones that are set forth in TPP and TTIP, then country X will be assessed to pay a fine to corporation C, for “unfair trade practices” against that corporation.
In other words: these corporate panels will constitute a new international government, with the power to fine countries for exceeding the regulations that are set forth in these international ‘trade’ treaties.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Elections: What Are They Good For?
Elections: What Are They Good For?
Before the 1960 Presidential Election, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian who would become John Kennedy’s court intellectual, published a short book called Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?
His answer was that it made a big difference because Nixon was a feckless scoundrel while JFK was God’s gift to America and the world. Even at the time, it was far from obvious that he was more than half right.
With the primary season now just a little more than half a year away, a similar question arises about two contenders for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency: Jim Webb and Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else who runs against Hillary Clinton from the left). Webb has not yet declared his candidacy; Sanders has. Warren has maintained consistently that she is not running so, at this point, she need not be taken into account.
Schlesinger’s book would have been a bestseller even had the Kennedy forces not actively promoted it; the question it posed was on every voter’s mind.
Webb and Sanders are on hardly anyone’s mind. Few people know who Sanders is; fewer still know anything about Webb.
Also, at this point, the smart money has it that the question is moot because the chances of stopping the Clinton juggernaut are nil.
Nevertheless, there is no timelier question in American electoral politics today.
With few exceptions, people, especially “progressive” people, don’t realize this –first, because they don’t have a sound purchase on what elections these days are good for; and, second, because most of them have never taken the full measure of the harm that the Clintons have done to progressive causes, and therefore don’t appreciate what is at stake in getting that wretched family out of public life.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why Not Tell Greece How To Run A Democracy?
Why Not Tell Greece How To Run A Democracy?
I know I’ve talked about this before, but it just keeps coming and it keeps being crzay.Bloomberg ‘reports’ that the ‘German Finance Ministry’, let me get this right, “is supporting the idea of a vote by Greek citizens to either accept the economic reforms being sought by creditors to receive a payout from the country’s bailout program or ultimately opt to leave the euro.” And that’s it.
They ‘report’ this as if it has some sort of actual value, as if it’s a real thing. Whereas in reality, it has the exact same value as Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis suggesting a referendum in Germany. Or Washington, for that matter. Something that Bloomberg wouldn’t even dream of ‘reporting’ in any kind of serious way, though the political value would be identical.
Apparently there is some kind of consensus in the international press – Bloomberg was by no means the only ‘news service’ that ‘reported’ this – that Germany has obtained the right to meddle in the internal politics of other eurozone member nations. And let’s get this one thing very clear: it has not.
No more than the Greek government has somehow acquired the right to even vent its opinions on German domestic issues. It is a no-go area for all European Union countries. More than that, it’s no-go for all nations in the world, and certainly in cases where governments have been democratically elected.
So why do Bloomberg and Reuters and all the others disregard such simple principles? All I can think is they entirely lost track of reality, and they live in a world where reality is what they say it is.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How to Change the World Overnight
How to Change the World Overnight
Making a Difference
Mark Twain said:
If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.
In other words, if the government is not trying to stop something, it must not be very important.
On the flip side of the coin, the great historian Howard Zinn noted:
Protest always looks futile at the time it takes place, but protest mounts up.
If they thought protest is futile they wouldn’t send the police out every time there’s a demonstration. [Examples of what Zinn is talking about here, here, andhere.]
You set up a picket line somewhere of 7 people, and 12 policemen show up. They must worry about protests. Because they know that small protests lead to large ones.
We noted in 2009:
As MSNBC news correspondent Jonathan Capehart tells Dylan Ratigan, the main problem is that people aren’t making enough noise. Capehart says that the people not only have to “burn up the phone lines to Congress”, but also to hit the streets and protest in D.C.
Even though most politicians are totally corrupt, if many millions of Americans poured into the streets of D.C., a critical mass would be reached, and the politicians would start changing things in a hurry.
As [liberal] PhD economist Dean Baker points out:
The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the townhall meetings, dominated by people opposed to health care reform, have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform….
A big turnout … can make a real difference.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
To Those Who Believe in Voting
To Those Who Believe in Voting
One morning years ago, as I entered the classroom for a course I taught on U.S. history, I found the students engaged in a discussion of elections. One of them, whom I knew to be a supporter of “progressive” causes and who had previously complained about student apathy, asked me in a despairing tone, “Why don’t people vote?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “To me, the more interesting question is, Why do they?”
Why do people vote? The individual voter does not choose the winner of the election; she chooses which lever to pull or which box to check on a piece of paper. Yet some people get angry at me and call me a shirker when I tell them I don’t vote. If you don’t vote, they tell me, you have no right to complain.
Why not, I ask. Where is that written?
Some point out that in the past people died for the right to vote.
That is true, I respond, but beside the point: people also died for the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies, but no one calls abortion a public duty.
Clearly, something is operating here besides logic.
The only explanation I can come up with is that people vote for the same reason they cheer or do the wave at an athletic competition—it makes them feel part of a community. Now, I respect the desire for community. In the good old Hew Hess of Hay, “citizens” choose people to represent them. To vote is to participate in a community ritual. It begins in grade school, when children elect who among them will get to clean the blackboards.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Britain: A Functioning Democracy It’s Not
Britain: A Functioning Democracy It’s Not
We at the Automatic Earth always try to steer clear of elections as much as possible, because there are no functioning democracies left in the west -no more than there are functioning markets-, and no journalists reporting on them either. Interesting question, by the way: how can a journalist report on a democracy that isn’t there? And where in that setting does news turn to mere opinion, and where does opinion then become news ?
Still, of course we caught some bits of the UK elections along the way regardless. The decisive moment for us must have been when Jeremy Paxman interviewed David Cameron at the BBC, and asked him if he knew how many foodbanks had been added in Britain since he took office 5 years ago.
Cameron, well duh obviously, had no idea, and instead of answering the question he started a flowery discourse praising the many volunteers who work in the foodbanks he didn’t know existed. Paxman cut him short and said there were 66 when Cameron came to power, and 421 now. Apparently in Britain, volunteers are needed to take care of the needy, they’re not going to pay people to do that. You would think that takes care of Cameron’s candidacy, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
At least Paxman seemed to try, but interviews like his should take place on the eve of an election, not 6 weeks before them like this one. That leaves far too much time for spin doctors to repair damage done by their candidate’s ignorance and gullibility. It’s crazy enough that party leaders can refuse to discuss each other, let alone the public, in public. Then again, that too would only be significant if there would be an actual democracy in Britain.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Sucking Spoilt Milk From A Bloated Dead Sow
Sucking Spoilt Milk From A Bloated Dead Sow
With US GDP growth ‘officially’ back where it belongs, in the Arctic zone close to freezing on the surface but much worse in real life, for reasons both Albert Edwards and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (not exactly a pair of Siamese twins) remarked this week; that is, excluding the “biggest inventory build in history, the economy contracted sharply”, it’s time for everyone to at long last change the angle from which they view the world, if not the color of their glasses.
But ‘everyone’ will resist, refuse and refute that change, leaving precious few people with an accurate picture of the – economic – world. Still, for you it’s beneficial to acknowledge that very little of what you read holds much, if any, truth or value. This is true when it comes to politics, geopolitics and economics. That is, the US is not a democracy, it is not the supreme leader of the world, and the American economy is not in recovery.
Declining business investment, a record inventory build and extreme borrowing to hold share prices above water through buybacks, it all together paints a picture of a very unhealthy if not outright dying economy, and certainly not one in which anything at all is recovering. But how are you supposed to know?
The entire financial media should change its angle of view, away from the recovery meme (or myth), but the media won’t because the absurd one-dimensional focus on that perpetuated myth is the only thing that makes the present mess somewhat bearable, palatable and, more importantly, marketable, to the general public.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The End Is Near, Part 1: The “War On Cash”
The End Is Near, Part 1: The “War On Cash”
As the saying goes, you can know a person by the quality of his or her enemies. This is also true of societies, where moral evolution can be traced by simply listing the things on which they declare war. Not so long ago, for instance, the world’s good guys — the US, Europe’s democracies and a few others — fought existential battles against fascism and communism. Then they went after poverty and discrimination. They were, at least in terms of their ideals, on the side of personal freedom and opportunity and against institutionalized control.
But then came the war on drugs, in which the US imprisoned millions of non-violent people guilty only of voluntary transaction. Not long after that we declared war on “terror,” using the enemies created by our own incompetent foreign policy as an excuse for a vast expansion of surveillance and police militarization.
And now, seemingly out of nowhere, comes a new enemy: cash. Around the world, governments and banks are making it harder to save and transact with paper and coin. The ultimate goal seems to be the elimination of private tools of commerce, in favor of transparent (to governments and banks) plastic, checks and online payment systems. The following excerpts are from longer articles that should be read in their entirety:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Portrait of the American Oligarchy – The Very Troubling Income and Wealth Trends Since 1989
Portrait of the American Oligarchy – The Very Troubling Income and Wealth Trends Since 1989
One of the primary purposes of Liberty Blitzkrieg is to dispel the myth that America is politically a democracy and economically a free market, and prove that it is in fact a centrally planned oligarchy. If the people were well aware of this and fine with it, that’s one thing, but my contention is that the vast majority of the public is merely buying into the myth. This is why the population is so passive and easily controlled. They simply don’t understand what is happening to them. The proverbial frog slowing boiling to death.
Whenever I note that real median incomes in America haven’t increased for decades, many people have a hard time believing it. Nevertheless, as John Adams famously proclaimed: “facts are stubborn things.” Indeed they are, and an article published today by Bloomberg View provides some disturbingly stubborn facts that must be admitted to and faced. We learn that:
If you worry about the declining fortunes of the U.S. middle class, take heed: It might be worse than you realized.
Tracking the middle class can be difficult, because the group is hard to define. Typically, researchers look at households with incomes or net worth in the middle of the entire population. This approach, though, might provide a falsely rosy picture.
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — William Emmons and Bryan Noeth — sought to address this shortcoming by focusing on households’ demographic characteristics, rather than income or wealth. Specifically, they looked at families whose breadwinner was at least 40 years old and had achieved a level of education that would typically allow a middle-class standard of living. Whites and Asians needed exactly a high-school diploma to qualify. For blacks and Hispanics, it took a two-year or four-year college degree — a stark recognition of persistent racial inequality.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
