Le icu wo--bill moyer's describes it perfectly

I can't imagine a more exuberant gathering today except possibly at the K Street branch of the Masters of the Universe where they are celebrating their coup at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

the Neo-Feudal Lords of Capital have staked their claim to the world. They threaten nations with mightly powers and create illusory realities that only the avatars of Visnu and Shiva could have imagined in the past. They demonstrate their utter and complete disdain for law, for compassion, for caring of the planet, for acknowledging that there actually exists any other than themselves. And we, the rest of the earth are at their mercy.

i leave today, and shall return to posting in a couple of months. This blog is officially on summer vacation. Yes, now sing the song.

Signa si christo-fasciste loqueris

A bit more from Chris Hedges:

I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”..(i had audited two classes at the div school in the spring of 1970 when i stayed at the Place Commune on Mass Ave in Roxbury. One of the classes was Raimundo Panikar's seminar on discovering the mystical roots of Hinduism, Christianity, and Buddhism; the other was Adams ethics course. I remember at that time, now 35 years ago, that the good professor was uttering the same warnings, particularly in regard to the cadre that surrounded Nixon mostly from California, who were also part of the Reagan team.)

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance...(well the part of the Pledge that talks about their good and skip all of the Constitution as well as 99% of the Declaration of Human Rights and Independence.)

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

So my question is: Where is the music that is going to kill fascism this time around? Where are the Woody Guthrie's and Utah Phillips and Pete Seegers? Where are the serious anarcho-punk metal bands that are going to thrash this brand of fascist horror away from us? We are at grave risk right now, and if you aren't getting angry, then i will never be able to trust you.

Loyachin hwo? Ínipuza he? Nih' wa he? Wanitukha lugo he?

From Chris Hedges Soldiers of the Christ II:

MacDonald leaves little doubt that the convention is meant to serve as a rallying cry for a new and particularly militant movement in Christian politics, one that is sometimes mistaken for another outbreak of mere revivalism. In fact, this movement is a curious hybrid of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, conservative Catholics, Charismatics, and other evangelicals, all of whom are at war doctrinally but who nonetheless share a belief that America is destined to become a Christian nation, led by Christian men who are in turn directed by God. For someone like me, who grew up in the church and was keenly aware of the rigid lines imposed by warring sects and denominations, the new alliances are startling. I notice uniformed officers from the Salvation Army at the convention, something that would have been unthinkable in the past. Lately, the leaders of the movement have even begun to reach out to the Mormons.

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security. Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.

The traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham’s mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the Dominionists, who now control most of America’s major evangelical organizations, from the NRB to the Southern Baptist Convention, and may already claim dominion over the Christian media outlets. But Christians who challenge Dominionists, even if they are fundamentalist or conservative or born-again, tend to be ruthlessly thrust aside.

Now is it just me or are we seeing more and more of us on the left trying to convey this same message? William Fisher writes about it; Doris Colmes writes about it; Mark Drolette writes about it; and on and on and so far forth. Why? Because it is palpable and perceptible and realizable in whatever form we can make manifest in the world around us. There are a great many things to fear in this world, but neo-feudal christo-fascism controlled by the Lords of Capital will be the most significant threat to the well being of planet earth since the three great extinctions and last super asteroid. A constituency of faithful believers rallied through their common religious calling, will destroy the earth to save themselves for their god. What they will never realize is that they won't destroy the earth. They will simply destroy the mass of humanity and most of the earth's infrastructure as well as themselves, in order that a few extremely powerful and wealthy individuals can live on this planet without worrying about competition for the resources necessary to satisfy their maximum pleasures. Can anyone of the faithful really believe that Dobson or Haggard or Bush or DeLay will welcome them into their private highly guarded super-protected well stocked enclave when the chaos ensues? No, they will lock themselves away in their sealed bunkers and let it all play out counting on the billions of deaths to restock the less than productive soils and provide nutrients and resources for the microbes of decay to cleanse the refuse of the planet. Then they will exit their burbclaves and venture forth into a their brave new world.

well by gaully gee whiz--who'da thunk it

<>Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has expressed concern over China's military buildup, saying it could threaten the security balance in Asia. Mr. Rumsfeld spoke at a meeting of Asian and Western defense ministers in Singapore. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a gathering of defense ministers from 21 nations that China now has the third-largest military budget in the world and the largest in Asia. And he said China appears to be expanding its missile forces, allowing them to target many parts of the world. "Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder why this growing investment, why these continuing large and expensive arms purchases, why this continuing robust deployment?" he said.

This is so fatalistically disingenuous it begs the question: "who the fuck is he talking to??" Well, actually everyone else in the world knows the answer. He is saying this for the BushCo constituency in the US and for their supporters the amerikan-christo taliban. China knows all too well who threatens here. We have invaded on false pretenses two nations, through which the US can control the flow and price of oil. We expand our total domination in the MIdEast and suggest that China shouldn't think we are a major global threat to their future?? China is the fastest growing fossil fuel energy consumer on the planet. They have four times the population of the US and don't care one iota about the overall costs to anyone else's environment. China is without question a genuine real superpower, more economically stable than the US, with a massively larger military population equipped with automatic small arms. To sufficiently nuke China into some form of total submission would require the complete destruction of the earth; China knows this, and knows that the US is completely vulnerable to economic as well as physical threats.

RiceRummy are posturing to support Taiwan and Japan in hopes of framing the argument in such a way to avoid the US citizens from paying attention to our efforts to militarily control the rest of the Gulf, Sudan's access to African oil, and South America. We aren't fighting cocaine in Colombia people; we are there to invade Venezuela if need be in order to control the 40% of the foreign oil that the US uses. But will you hear any of this after this news cycle. NO, not one shred of it.

Owanke kahinta yo-open the door-ooops

<>At his latest news conference, Bush said he thinks the new Iraqi government "will be up to the task of defeating the insurgents." He harked back to the January elections and said he was "heartened" to learn that there are now "40,000 Iraqi troops" sufficiently well trained to protect Baghdad. (In fact, our own commanders place little credence in that encouraging statistic.) To him, every devastating attack merely serves as further proof that the insurgents are "desperate." Cheney takes the same optimistic approach. He told CNN interviewer Larry King that he perceives "major progress" in Iraq, where "they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." He didn't seem to realize he contradicted that remark when he then predicted the war might conclude before 2009, although his general assessment remained vague. "I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," he said. How that "presence" will serve U.S. interests remains as vague as Cheney's timetable. In the meantime, it is worth noting that administration predictions have proven considerably less reliable than those of the war's opponents.

We have understand something about this sort of rhetoric and the critique. Entwined within both is an underlying thesis that seems to never be stated. We entered Iraq to control the Oil. We need to control the petroleum resources of the region, and that includes Iraq, Saudi, and Iran. We can't take control of Saudi lands until we establish bases in Iraq. These aren't temporary, these are permanent. The Iraqis we are training as part of the future security forces are to protect the physical infrastructure of the resource extraction industries and the supportive energy/water/sewage/trash infrastructure of the bases. We will use our bases to monitor and protect our Embassy and from which to expand our hegemonic control of the regions resources. Once we secure Iraq, and begin the interdiction in Iran, we can focus attention on Saudi Arabia. This will allow the US to expand its domain to include the lower Gulf States of Bahrain, Oman, Dubai, UAE, and so forth. We control the extraction and shipping of all MId East oil, and force China and India to access their access to reserves through us and through Russia.

All of this of course hinges on the ability of Bushco to maintain control of the US government and to increase exponentially the police state here as a necessary means to repress dissent and opposition to this agenda. This will entail increasing the war efforts abroad, fighting illusory terrorist attacks here, and nominally addressing the resistance to the strengthening of the political authorities of the amerikan taliban. Group think and double speak willl need to become the watchwords of the day. Even if you aren't a fundamentalist evangelical you will be forced to choose to pretend to be one, or risk losing all of your civil rights and liberties. Access to various formerly public services will be cutoff to non-believers. Poor camps and slave labor infrastructures will necessarily be created to control the ever increasing population of those who are denied the services. Likewise only the chose will move upward through the hierarchies of power. This would all sound like science fiction except for one tiny ugly fact. It already is happening.

Le Economikiye tokeske eyapi he?

Is Hormone 'Trust In A Bottle?'

June 1, 2005

(Photo: AP / CBS)

(AP) Trust in a bottle? It sounds like a marketer's fantasy, like the fabled fountain of youth or the wild claims of fad diets.

Yet that's what Swiss and American scientists demonstrate in new experiments with a nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin. After a few squirts, human subjects were significantly more trusting and willing to invest money with no ironclad promise of a profit.

The researchers acknowledged their findings could be abused by con artists or even sleazy politicians who might sway an election, provided they could squirt enough voters on their way to the polls.

"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, the senior researcher in the study, which appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."

Carefully read the above, then look at the picture. Can you see the hidden message implications in this one. A pile of dollars, a spray of green that says "Trust Me!" On the same day that the SEC was put under control of the the corporations themselves. Yes indeed, spraying our money with oxytocin, a chemical released in mother's breast milk to create the loving bond of connection between child and mother, will help people overcome their suffering from post autistic economics. The cure for PAE has been a desperate struggle to maintain a failing system with the illusions and magic of semantics, semiotics, and now it looks like chemical molecules. We have to enjoy this to the fullest, for the complete sham that it is.