Posting has been low because I’m taking care of an ailing cat for a friend who has to be away.
Anyway, I was eating dinner with another acquaintance yesterday when I mentioned one line from the atrocious blog I linked to over the weekend.
“How was California lost?” it asked plaintively. Keep in mind, this is from someone who puts a picture of Ronald Reagan at the top while peddling a T-shirt with the somewhat baffling Tea Party-esque motto: “This Abdication Nation will not stand!”
So my friend almost fell off the chair laughing when I quoted this line to him:
Was it the communism and socialism promulgated through Hollywood?
It is momentarily amusing in it’s total lack of clue. Here’s a young guy who has been to the other side of the world — Afghanistan. But geographic travel, even being part of a long war, hasn’t broadened him. He dumbly believes Hollywood was a source of commies.
However, it’s also a pathetic indication of why the US isn’t much of an overachieving country these days unless one counts the executed technical perfection of bombing a feeble enemy’s military.
Next, small items from Bombing Moe. When the A-10 Thunderbolts and Spectre gunships were ordered up for Libya it more-or-less confirmed that we’re in a war aimed at dissecting all of Moe’s military.
These are very close air support assets, used for blowing tanks and artillery out of the way in deserts, hamlets or cities, so the rabble parade of small pick-up trucks with old commie machine guns mounted in the back can pass by and flash the victory sign to western cameras. At those times, of course, when they’re not stopping the parade to jump up and down on one of the blown up remnants of Moe’s army.
QAF Flying Emirs! Odyssey Dawn 2011! We stayed out of the way and helped fence the oil!
Spam funny of the day: More fake neighborly comment on politics and national debt by the bot-person trying to get an ad pointing to a service that facilitates offshoring and tax-avoidance in Panama published.
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living …
When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Not fully committed. Ya think?
I’ve never commented on other posts at SITREP on Globalsecurity but a post today takes the piece of cake.
It’s in the slot for Derek Reveron, a professor at the Naval War College. At SITREP he generally contributes a variety of pep talks on Afghanistan.
The post, is by someone named Gary Good, recommended by Reveron, professor. Good is a soldier who regularly deploys to Afghanistan and the piece is here.
It’s on Afghanistan, too, and leads to the author’s blog. One sentence jumps out.
And not in a good way:
We are here because me must Make Might Right.
Anyway, after reading it I was curious about the contributor’s blog. It’s here, called GoodWrites, where the fellow calls himself “The Writer.”
It’s understandably disappointing.
Wha’ happen’d to California, it asks. Was it the stinky hippies? And all the illegal immigrants cheating up the representation? And what about that 2010 census and all the Democrats?
Was it the drugs and free love in the by-gone 60s?
Was it the change in the law that required the Census to attempt to count illegal immigrants and then apportion Congressional seats based on both citizens AND illegal immigrants?
Was it the communism and socialism promulgated through Hollywood?
What was it that killed this wonderful, beautiful state?
Actually, there was no change in law requiring the census to count illegal immigrants. Census-takers, and the census, did not ask whether a human being living in a residence was a citizen or not. It was not part of the mission. And there was no category on the census form for
legal or illegal status.
But it has always been the census’ mission to make the best full accounting of everyone living in the United States, something census workers patiently explained many times to all those polled.
Anyway, I think the appropriate response to this is: We are here because me must Make Might Right.
Moving along to Bombing Moe. Readers now know when referring to an armored column, rebel, in Libya, we always mean a line of pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back speeding along Libya’s coastal highway. And whenever the US has blown up one of Moe’s tanks, the rebel armored column will stop, all the men will dismount, run over to the tank, climb on top of it and jump up and down, often shooting their guns in the air.
These are the future leaders of Libya. Or at least the new jailers and militia.
Qatar, which has conducted at least one sortie over Libya, is the only Arab country known to have actively joined with the international force.
DD has made a running joke of Qatar. It’s presence has slipped in and out of the Odyssey Dawn order-of-battle since last week. One day Qatar is going to join, the next day gone.
So a good bet is that the “one sortie” was Qatar’s transport plane flying to Souda AFB in Greece.
So what about Qatar? It’s just the kind of “ally” you’d want to show other Arab nations are supporting the US in this Libyan fight — a very wealthy oil country run by the usual scumbags who import indentured labor to work for them.
Qatar is a destination country for men and women from South and Southeast Asia who migrate willingly, but are subsequently trafficked into involuntary servitude as domestic workers and laborers, and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation; the most common offence was forcing workers to accept worse contract terms than those under which they were recruited; other conditions include bonded labor, withholding of pay, restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse.
According to the Trafficking in Persons Report by the US State Department, men and women who are lured into Qatar by promises of high wages are often forced into underpaid labor.
I think this calls for T-shirts. Perhaps with a flag of the country, or the image of the American-made transport plane Qatar flies. Along with the motto:
QAF Flying Emirs! Odyssey Dawn 2011! We stayed out of the way!
However, it’s only fair to mention most of the military action, other than ours, has been token in Odyssey Dawn.
“British Tornado GR4 Aircraft, on a mission over Libya yesterday afternoon in support of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 took part in a co-ordinated missile strike against units of Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan Military.
“The Tornado aircraft launched a number of guided Brimstone missiles, destroying three armoured vehicles in Misrata and two further armoured vehicles in Ajdabiya. Brimstone is a high precision, low collateral damage weapon optimised against demanding and mobile targets.
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s another Sarah Palin, only better and getting bigger.
Michele Bachmann shows up 34 seconds in. Wait for the scene where her campaign sign is upside-down in the background. (Incidentally, the stitch Nazi now seems benign compared to what was elected in Michigan and Wisconsin.)
If I were to do it over, I’d remove the Hitler parody from Downfall. The President isn’t hopeless. Instead, I’m convinced he has a plan.
Mr. Obama knows the Republicans don’t have a candidate who can beat him in 2012. He sees the television news channels and all the pundits enthusing over a Bachmann run and knows the GOP is so dominated by telegenically insane people like her it can’t possibly win a presidential election.
So the President doesn’t have to lead or take chances. He can continue to allow the country to go to hell, to ignore Wall Street looting, to allow the jobless to languish and be forgotten. He can decline to get involved in fighting for unions in the heartland. He can even institute cuts to domestic programs that result in more people being put out of work because he’s adopted a “Firings Will Continue Until Unemployment Goes Down” strategy to co-opt Republicans.
Obama can go to community colleges and make empty talk about winning the future, travel to South America to cement more off-shoring and arms deals for what’s left of US manufacturing. And he can start a pointless war which, unless I’m missing something, will peter out as soon as the US military stops most close air support aimed at destroying Moe’s heavy weapons. Which will leave a lot of NATO overflying of two new failed states, one with Moe in his bunker plus oil, one without those two things, maybe like a big version of Djibouti.
It will continue the war boom in the US. There is no political cost to it.
And he’ll still get elected because the Michelle Bachmanns will move the GOP standard for a presidential candidate into ever more fearful and atrocious territory.
However, Mr. Obama’s plan won’t be free for the Democratic Party. By the time the election rolls around, many of us will again be so alienated and depressed by his inaction and expedient policy that the country will be faced with what happened as chronicled above.
The potential exists for the Tea Party to take the Senate and even more of the House away from the Dems when the base, dispirited, stays home or becomes unenthusiastic about holding its collective nose and voting for people simply because one party is ragingly nuts and inhumane, the other not so.
The popular uprisings in Wisconsin and Michigan aren’t guarantees the tide will turn in Dem favor, particularly now that they’ve been moved off most of the news.
The nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work??? (cue the dancing elephant, only tax avoidance lawyers also in the scene wouldn’t look so good — DD) fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.
Meanwhile, General Electric has applied for a license to build a [nuclear] plant that would use lasers to enrich uranium for commercial use, which could provide yet another way to produce weapons-grade material. A coalition led by the American Physical Society, a professional organization of physicists, has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to assess the risk that this technology poses to non-proliferation efforts before it issues a license. The commission, predictably, has been reluctant to do so.
It is critical to find more effective ways to control such dangerous nuclear technologies.
A bigger menace to the American middle class than Moe, Goldman Sachs bankster boss Lloyd Blankfein is still in the clear. And most Americans still have no idea who he is, despite movies like “Inside Job” on the economic collapse and various writings on Goldman at Rolling Stone magazine.
Lloyd Blankfein testified in court yesterday, in the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case and unfortunately it turned out to be less of a big deal than I might have hoped. Blankfein agreed only to testify in exchange for guarantees that they wouldn’t “dredge up any pending investigations” of Goldman’s activities.
I had fantasies of Lloyd being broken on the stand and frantically sobbing out all sorts of hysterical confessions, but I guess it’s not to be.
The New York Daily News reported:
Blankfein took the stand in Manhattan federal court at about 10:30 am to testify for the government in its insider-trading case against Galleon co-founder Rajaratnam, who is accused of pocketing $45 million by getting illegal inside tips about the bank from ex-Goldman director Rajat Gupta, as well as from tipsters at other firms.
More bombs for banksters. We could spare a few from the pile earmarked for Moe, no?
Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein — the gay satirical rock show tune — is here.
On a suggestion from a friend, if I’m to have Google AdSense for Chinese sex slaves on GlobalSecurity territory, than maybe I ought to have some suggestive images of them, real or not, here.
Plus, now that everything has turned to crap and the President is starting another war, the better to distract from the impression that he’d rather not doing anything here, hey!
You can look at naughty Internet pictures until the money runs out and the high speed line is discontinued.
More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed …
So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.
It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon. But unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record …
“[The] next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future …” he continues. “It’s bullshit,” he politely adds, not in those precise words.
It was about this time last year that the 2010 Decennial Census was warming a temporary jobs surge that would last into the beginning of summer.
Google AdSense is the low level nuclear waste of the Internet.
Today, spun out on DD blog reprints at GlobalSecurity.Org, some more really special stuff, including:
1. What looks like an ad for Chinese prostitutes and sex slaves aimed at old white American pervs. It reads: “Feel alone? Meet sweet chinese girl & find your companion in China. Join!”
2. An ad for on-line degrees from here. That’s impressive, particularly the pitch aimed at suckering US military men. (Actually, Google AdSense spins out a lot of on-line degree ‘opportunities.’ One has quite the pick of diploma millinery.)
3. Explosion proof ammo boxes, presumably aimed at the crypto neo-Nazi extreme right survivalist kook who’s hoarding weapons, explosives and gold for the time when the US collapses. Or for crashing the next MLK Day parade.
Google AdSense: Making money off promotion of tearing the middle class down, extremism, what looks like criminal activity and vulture economics, one micropayment at a time.
It will have occurred to many that the constant peddling of US-made weapons to the Middle East oil producers willing to be American toadies in the pursuit of the war on terror has been just like tossing bags of crap at many fans. In Egypt, US-made tanks and tear gas were in the streets. The M1’s didn’t fire on the populace, fortunately. That was good, right?
In the case of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, it’s the case of US armed militaries — one acting as a mercenary force — putting down the revolts aimed at getting rid of their rotten leaders. The potential also exists for the notoriously bad Saudi Arabian military to fly US-made jets in any proposed no-fly zone thought to be needed for Libya.
According to the US State Department, the Obama administration proposed $88 million dollars worth of arms to Bahrain.
Astonishingly, Singapore, the well-known wart off the Malay peninsula,
received a 5.5 billion dollar sale. One supposes the arms, mostly F-15s, are thought needed to fend off invasions from Borneo or a sally from the port of Darwin in northern Australia. (No, no! They need a top rank air force to save world shipping in the Strait of Malacca from pirates!)
Look, if we don’t sell to these rotten countries arms, someone else will just get the business, was the message I received loud and clear. Which seems like no message at all except an opportunistic one rationalized with the excuse that if the sales are ours at least we can track them.
“Other defense experts cautioned that other countries would quickly move to replace the U.S. in any arms sales stopped for human rights concerns … ” read the newspaper.
Matthew Schroeder, an employee of the Federation of American Scientists, told the newspaper, “If you cut off arms sales, a client would go straight to U.S. competitors like Russia or China.”
That would obviously be so bad. To force them to buy tanks and stuff from Russia and China. It would make the balance of trade even more atrocious than it already is. Bummer.
The arms manufacturers, as I’ve written, enjoy the benefits of private sector socialism in this business. The US middle class, unless it’s actually employed in this protected industry, gets screwed twice.
First, it underwrites the business of US weapons-makers while it’s jobs are taken to the garbage dump and sent to China.
Second, we reap the bad publicity when it’s American-made stuff seen putting down those looking for a bit of democracy.
There’s a moral and logical argument to be made for letting Singapore, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates buy the gear for their token militaries from other nations. Part of it has to do with re-instituting an element of fairness to the American system.
More ads for Glenn Becks’ “Broke” through peddling by a crypto neo-Nazi far right political website.
An ad for a trailer about the “end of America” here which is aimed at getting people to buy advice from an investment consultant seen on Alex Jones’ conspiracy Internet radio show.
And — my favorite — right next to one of my Economic Treason pieces, an ad for offshoring manufacturing to your own custom maquiladora in the Mexican Baja because California wages are too high.
Google AdSense:
Making money off promotion of tearing the middle class down, chaos, perfidy and vulture economics, one micropayment at a time.
Select posts from here are syndicated at GlobalSecurity.Org’s SITREP here.
Originally, as part of that, the idea was to give the blog contributors Adsense. The term “revenue sharing” was used.
In practice, “revenue sharing” with anything Google means Google gets all the share.
That’s because AdSense, as a model, makes no sense for individual writers. Even if they plaster it all over their pages.
The ads are always woefully inappropriate. The algorithm that chooses them is dumber than dirt. And the click throughput is marginal to non-existent.
Now, if you exist everywhere all over the globe, as Google does, it works. For everyone else, it’s just giving Google free space.
I wouldn’t have actually looked at this closely — in the back of my mind the little voice always said it was a scheme of trash — if the Adsense things hadn’t suddenly stopped running on the SITREP posts.
This was because Google halts them if it decides you need to update your tax information.
When I looked at the problem on my Google dashboard, this is what I discovered.
Google doesn’t pay until a $100 threshold is reached. However, long before that milestone, it will summarily badger you to keep updating your settings with verifications of phone numbers, personal identification numbers and additional tax filing information.
Anyway, in 18 months of SITREP contributions, AdSense had earned me a big $15.00.
Readers will be amused to be informed there’s obviously no click through to an endless procession of brain dead ads for “military challenge coins,” dubious degrees in intelligence from seemingly non-existent schools said to be somewhere in Fairfax County, Virginia and power supplies and water containers shopped to gold-hoarding extreme right survivalists and assorted white supremacist kooks who believe hyperinflation and the end of all things are nigh.
At the rate AdSense was making money for me, it’d be a mere seven years before Google cut my first check. Laughable and worthless don’t even begin to encompass it.
Today’s raft of AdSense rubbish — go check here: An ad for AdSense (!), a blandishment that Glenn Beck is “broke” from one of the more popular neo-Nazi extreme right political websites, and come-ons for military-style emergency radios and flexible water tanks.
