Octafish
Octafish's Journal
So, I can complain. Big deal. The government knows where I live, my politics, and who I talk to.
They can track my cell phone and online communication.
They can spy on me without a warrant.
They can search my home and person without a warrant.
They can seize my property and use it for their own purposes without due process.
They can use the powers of the state to harass me at work and at home.
They can ruin me financially through trivial criminal and civil action.
They can imprison me on false charges, like was done to Gov. Don Siegelman and Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.
They can even, should I be classified an Enemy, have me vaporized by drone or stuffed into cement shoes by gangsters, without a warrant.
How is that not a Police State?
"Friendly Fascism" is how Bertrand Gross put it in 1980. The professor served FDR and the New Deal Democrats and is remembered today for his work to reduce poverty. Among his accomplishments, he helped author the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Later he taught at CUNY and Wayne State University in Detroit, where he founded the Center for Urban Studies.
Friendly Fascism
The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross
South End Press, 1980, paper
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html
INTRO EXCERPT...
Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."
The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...
These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".
A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.
But events soon began to change perceptions.
The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis crept out of the woodwork. An immoral minority of demagogues took to the airwaves. "Let me tell you something about the character of God," orated Jim Robison at a televised meeting personally endorsed by candidate Ronald Reagan. "If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who may not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom interests of the ethical and the godly." To protect Western oil companies, candidate Jimmy Carter proclaimed presidential willingness to send American troops into the Persian Gulf. Rosalyn Carter went further by telling an lowa campaign audience: "Jimmy is not afraid to declare war." Carter then proved himself unafraid to expand unemployment, presumably as an inflation cure, thereby reneging on his party's past full employment declarations.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/RiseFall_Friend_Fascism_FF.html
The good professor painted an accurate picture of what was to come.
James Madison
EXCERPT...
Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.
A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.
p177
Although American hegemony can scarcely return in its Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson form, this does not necessarily signify the end of the American Century. Nor does communist and socialist advance on some fronts mark American and capitalist retreat on all fronts. There are unmistakable tendencies toward a rather thoroughgoing reconstruction of the entire "Free World." Robert Osgood sees a transitional period of "limited readjustment" and "retrenchment without disengagement," after which America could establish a "more enduring rationale of global influence." Looking at foreign policy under the Nixon administration, Robert W. Tucker sees no intention to "dismantle the empire" but rather a continued commitment to the view that "America must still remain the principal guarantor of a global order now openly and without equivocation identified with the status quo." He describes America as a "settled imperial power shorn of much of the former exuberance." George Liska looks forward to a future in which Americans, having become more mature in the handling of global affairs, will at last be the leaders of a true empire.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Specter_FriendlyFascism_FF.html
Regarding today's Police State:
The Criminal Police State can now:
Avoid punishment for murder
Lay Seige to American cities
Use FBI for terrorist attacks
Spy on all US citizens
Spy on and intimidate citizens
Brand anyone a terrorist
Ignore the Bill of Rights entirely
Illegally imprison American citizens
Assassinate Americans: 1 2
Loot taxpayer money for fat-cats
A capitalist cabal has seized political and economic power over the nation and now steals all elections by selecting candidates for both parties
In a free society:
Police agencies respond only to evidence of planned and actual criminal activity.
Police officers keep the peace; they do not investigate citizens and activities unless there is some reason to investigate.
Police do not investigate citizens' attitudes toward the central government, only their action.
Citizen dissent is lawful and police agencies do not investigate citizens' attitudes toward the criminal justice apparatus.
Those conditions no longer exist in the United States!
SOURCE: http://www.hermes-press.com/police_state.htm
So, that's why I think we're in a Police State. Otherwise, the candidate who promised to end wars for empire, stop domestic spying, prosecute Banksters, deliver universal health care, raise taxes on the rich and a whole lot would have done them after assuming office. Instead, it's been six years of more of the same old same sold cough.
It's the unseen bullwhip of today's master race, er, masters of the universe...
Their Profit is Our LossThe Dark Heart of the Libor Scandal
by MARK VORPAHL
CounterPunch, August 07, 2012
Though, for most, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor) interest rate fixing scandal appears to be distant and far too complex to understand, its potential consequences may be as economically devastating as a world war.
The Libor is used to set payments on $800 trillion worth of financial instruments. It sets the prices that people and corporations pay for loans and receive for savings. Given that the fraud impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans, the Libor scandal will likely leave a long list of previous financial scandals that contributed to the Great Recession look like child’s play.
It also pulls back the curtain on the mechanisms behind the world economy, its anti-social priorities, its willingness to gamble away the future of billions of people, and the government’s collusion in these operations. The Libor scandal reveals that the “invisible hand” Adam Smith spoke of in explaining how a capitalist economy regulates itself has been transformed into the trained hand of a swindler.
SNIP...
Barclays Bank is just the tip of the iceberg. In several countries, 20 big banks are under investigation, including such behemoths as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, RBS and UBS.
Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Chairman Ben Bernanke have had to defend the Fed’s response when it first became aware of the fraud in 2008. While Geithner said he was “aggressive” in expressing his concerns, this on-going scandal did not come to light until four years later.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/07/the-dark-heart-of-the-libor-scandal/
Who Rules the World? How a Concentration of Wealth and Political Power Undermines Democracy
Mr. Dangl makes an important observation: The people who got the United States into the present situation are the same people who benefit from the situation being what it is. Time to rethink strategy, including who rules -- runs -- the Democratic Party, and the rest of Washington. Personally, I side with Democracy.
Baron DeRothschild and Sen. Prescott Bush enjoy a moment and an official photograph together, ca. 1954.
How a Concentration of Wealth and Political Power Undermines Democracy
Who Rules the World?
by BENJAMIN DANGL
CounterPunch, Nov. 20, 2014
EXCERPT...
Just as most of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a few people, according to a recent article in the academic journal Climatic Change, two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions were produced by just 90 companies, with Chevron, Exxon and BP leading the list as the biggest polluters. Half of these emissions were from the past 25 years.
“There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” Richard Heede, the author of the journal article, told the Guardian. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”
Confronting climate change requires a systemic transformation of how our economies are run and who runs them. Part of this radical change will involve disempowering the global 1% and the disaster-producing industries they profit from.
Across the US, we are living in a dream state; crisis is the new normal. In the face of global catastrophe, the leading political parties of the country typically offer more business as usual, meaning more corporate power to fuel democracy, more capitalism to fight inequality, more war to fight for peace, and more pollution to fight climate change.
We cannot depend on the 1% of the world to lead us away from disaster – they caused our global crises in the first place, continue to profit from them, and cannot bring about solutions from the top-down. It has to be the people’s movements leading the way from below, deconstructing capitalism and building a better world from the bottom-up.
SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/20/who-rules-the-world/
Today's Helpful Hint for Democracy: Wealth from the top seldom does more than trickle down.
For proof look at what happened to the average person before the Depression and after Ronald Reagan. From FDR through LBJ's Great Society, life got better and the Middle Class grew in size and power. The rest of the time, it's pretty much a steady state of the Rich getting Richer and the Poor getting Poorer -- which is where the Middle Class is going.
Whatever happened to that Universal health protection thing?
In the Congress of 1945?
I do know what happened in 1961. Ronald Reagan called President Kennedy a SOCIALIST for proposing universal health care.
Operation COFFEECUP - How Reagan Worked to Stop Universal Health Coverage in 1961
In December 1961, the AMA pulled out all the stops to prevent President John F. Kennedy from proposing universal health coverage. For their effort, they recruited a TV-personality.
Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don't, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day . . . we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
Sounds familiar to Tea Party crapola of today. Ironic: Corporate McPravda avoids mentioning how one has-been B-movie actor took part in the organized opposition to Medicare in the early 1960s. Here's the story, thanks to Mr. Scott E. Starr:
The Campaign Against Medicare
Monday, March 22, 2010
By Scott E. Starr
EXCERPT...
In order to maintain the illusion of spontaneity, the AMA did not announce the existence of Operation Coffeecup or publicize the Reagan recording. The record was to be used, campaign organizers cautioned, only in the groups meeting under the controlled conditions of the informal coffees. Under no circumstances, recipients of the record were warned, were they to permit commercial broadcast of the recording.
Operation Coffeecup was kept deliberately low-key and internal to the AMA, its Woman’s Auxiliary, and the trusted friends and neighbors of the Auxiliary women. Reagan’s efforts against Medicare were revealed, however, in a scoop by Drew Pearson in his Washington Merry-Go-Round column of June 17th. Pearson titled his item on Reagan, “Star vs. JFK,” and he told his readers:
Ronald Reagan of Hollywood has pitted his mellifluous voice against President Kennedy in the battle for medical aid for the elderly. As a result it looks as if the old folks would lose out. He has caused such a deluge of mail to swamp Congress that Congressmen want to postpone action on the medical bill until 1962. What they don’t know, of course, is that Ron Reagan is behind the mail; also that the American Medical Association is paying for it.
Reagan is the handsome TV star for General Electric . . . Just how this background qualifies him as an expert on medical care for the elderly remains a mystery. Nevertheless, thanks to a deal with the AMA, and the acquiescence of General Electric, Ronald may be able to outinfluence the President of the United States with Congress.24
Reagan’s recorded remarks are quite extensive, and reveal a determined and in-depth attack on the principles of Medicare (and Social Security), going well beyond opposition to King-Anderson or any other particular piece of legislation.
My name is Ronald Reagan. I have been asked to talk on the several subjects that have to do with the problems of the day. . .
Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program. . . .
But at the moment I'd like to talk about another way because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. . . . Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.25
And what was this frightful threat that Reagan perceived as “imminent”?
. . . Congressman Forand introduced the Forand Bill. This was the idea that all people of Social Security age should be brought under a program of compulsory health insurance. Now, this would not only be our senior citizens, this would be the dependents and those who are disabled, this would be young people if they are dependents of someone eligible for Social Security. . . .
It should be obvious that Reagan’s description of the Forand bill is a description of any Medicare-type program, not just a specific piece of legislation.26 The idea that people of “Social Security age should be brought under a program of compulsory health insurance,” just is the idea of Medicare.
CONTINUED...
http://geotheology.blogspot.com /
As they "own and operate" the airwaves,
The Republicans have ever since made out that FDR, Truman, JFK and all Liberal Democrats are "Socialists." Now that they largely own and operate almost all of what's on the airwaves, they're free to lie that what they mean is Liberal Democrats really are "Communists."
KRB19 for TRUTH
There should be 1,000 Recs for this outstanding history. Seeing how Agent Mike might actually one day come calling for the Big Round-Up, I can understand why it doesn't.
How would a patriot act?
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
It is an honor to know you, hifiguy. Thank you for that outstanding history. Every sentence you wrote can be sourced, online.
And Now the Richest .01 Percent
by Robert Reich
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The richest Americans hold more of the nation’s wealth than they have in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As you might expect, personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury penthouses.
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been growing faster than their spending on anything else. It’s been growing even faster than their wealth.
According to new research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation’s total wealth. That’s a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash.
We’re talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to that of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the top .01 percent was 220 times richer than the average American. By 2012, he or she was 1,120 times richer.
CONTINUED, despite promises to the contrary...
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/11/18/and-now-richest-01-percent
Media Lie
An example of dishonesty in the truth biz comes from a commercial that aired yesterday on NBC's Sunday Night Football, telling viewers that NBC's "State of Affairs" is "the critics' favorite new drama":
See how they use a nice quote from the "critic" at E! Online to make sure the point is hammered ho-, er, uh, reinforced visually.
What is missing from the screen and audio track, what NBC doesn't tell you, is that NBC is owned by Comcast and that Comcast also owns E!
Thus, no duh. Without question "State of Affairs" is "the critic's favorite new drama" at E! They get paid by the same company what made the new drama.
That little omission represents a major deceit. They lead viewers to believe the critic is a person without ties to NBC and Comcast and their television show. A critic with ties is a biased critic and that is no critic.
Just one example of how Media Lie. It's all business as usual for the Media Monopoly, the six global players that pretty much create almost all of what We the People see, hear and read every dumb day. That undemocratic reality also is omitted from what passes for news and information these days.
So, the next time the Corporate Media are at work on your and your family's minds, remember that the bosses of the few corporations think We are too dumb to notice when they do their Thing.
PS: Sorry about the image quality -- it's a phone camera capture.
PPS: "State of Affairs" has a great tagline: "All the President's men are nothing compared to her."
''Like a Duck in a Noose'' seemed to stop a murderous rampage in 2004.
"You have indicated that you want us to do and say certain things. You've asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.' We understand that hearing us say this is important to you," Moose said late Wednesday at a televised news briefing, called so authorities could release information on two people sought for questioning in the 13 sniper shootings.
SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/10/24/duck-in-noose-reference-explained/
Pete Brewton: The Mafia, CIA & George Bush
One figure represents the overlap of several worlds: Organized Crime. Secret Government. Unconstitutional Political Action.
Pete Brewton's book, “The Mafia, CIA & George Bush,” is a must-own for those interested in the workings of the Bush Organized Crime Family. Written by a former Houston Post reporter, the book documents, literally, the way the Mafia, the CIA and those connected and related to George Poppy Bush -- and to the late Lloyd Bentsen -- looted more than 1,000 of the nation’s Savings and Loans institutions — and pretty much got away with it, scot-free.
BFEE seems to protect American Roilillty -- those connected to Big Money and the extraction industries like Big Oil -- while using the rest of We the People as mopes to dupe and fodder for cannon. Poppy's son, George W Bush, may have unwittingly revealed the crime family motto when he uttered at a press conference: "Money trumps peace."
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