News From A Parallel World

During the height of the Cold War, the United States was facing a powerful nation whose agenda differed markedly from our own. The Soviet Union was a problem for America because it was in competition with us for control over the world’s resources and because it had a bunch of nuclear weapons.

It was a dispute over economics and not ideology, although it was always described that way by both sides. The rest of the world lined up or didn’t line up and got beaten or not beaten by one or the other super power and sometimes each in turn.

America’s ‘defense’ budget in those days was designed in some measure for actual defense. With the Soviets almost as paranoid as the U.S., there was always the chance that some trigger-happy general would start a chain of events from which no escape would be available. We nearly came to nuclear war over Cuba, for God’s sake.

America’s defense budget in those days was enormous, taking up a large part of the nation’s resources. Lyndon Johnson famously claimed that we could have both guns and butter, but it turned out that we could afford only the guns.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned us. The confluence of the military and corporate worlds was ‘new in the American experience’, he said. And we ‘must guard against the unwarranted influence, sought or unsought, of the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties.’ Well, it's too bloody late now, isn't it?

Very rich, very powerful people did not want the Cold War to end. Too much money was being made. Bankers, arms manufacturers, professional soldiers, spies, they weren’t going to let that happen. But even killing Kennedy (and his brother) did not guarantee that the hayride would continue. There was suddenly the rapid, astonishing collapse of the Soviet empire. Gorbachev screwed everyone.

Without a Cold War, not only were munitions profits severely limited but all of the other elements of a Cold War society were at risk. For years, America’s leaders floundered. Invasions of places such as Grenada could generate only so much cash, while enthusiasm for war in general was dangerously waning.

Then came ‘terrorism.’ What a boon to commerce! An ‘enemy’ without a country offered an unlimited opportunity. War without end, amen. The ‘enemy’ could be anywhere, strike anywhere. Consequently, even without any nation on earth posing a real threat to America, we could pretend that we were constantly under siege.

9-11, as we know, was a gift to the nation’s rulers, whether directly manufactured or simply instigated. The Patriot Act could be dusted off and rammed through Congress without it even being read, so scared were the pols.

And now we have permanent war against an ‘enemy’ which in large part doesn’t exist. We have invented it and now we are stoking it. If ten years ago there were relatively few people on the planet anxious to harm the U.S., our foreign policy has since created millions more. And if there is only a handful of crazies interested in bombing something or other, our FBI and other state spy organizations will lure people into it, as recent arrests of several hapless morons demonstrates.

Memorial Day. Everyone is being urged to ‘remember our troops’ or ‘honor those who have sacrificed.’ Even, I’m told, the otherwise sane Rachel Maddow is climbing aboard the flag-wrapped train to oblivion.

I got an e-mail from Senator Barbara Boxer purporting to celebrate the ‘sacrifice’ our dead military have made for ‘our freedom.’

She used to be worth something, Boxer. Being from her old community, Marin County, and having sloshed around in politics myself in those days, I knew her pretty well. She organized against the Viet Nam war once, before she developed the kind of self-importance which confuses one’s moral clarity.

I wrote back, of course, although I know full well my letter went into the bin of unread letters in Washington. They want our money and our votes, but they do not otherwise want to hear from us. They are sophisticated. They know better than we do. Boxer has long since figured the calculus which rationalizes fakery and lying and the occasional despicable act. That’s politics: if I don’t sell out, how am I going to get re-elected so that I can do such great work?

In Boxer’s case, it’s hard to know why she’s still on her knobby knees to the God of the military. She’s not running for re-election or for anything else. She doesn’t have to please anyone now or raise all that Hollywood money so that she can keep Israel safe. Probably it’s become habit. When one leaves one’s moral character by the side of the road, it can be difficult to recall where one left it.

I’m angry today, not much change, I grant. All those flags flying in support of a bloated empire which stands for nothing and brings terror to the lives of ordinary people. But there’s something else.

While the pols debate budgetary matters –– while allocating millions, even billions, for stupid, wasteful projects designed to fatten the bank accounts of people already puffed to the exploding point by greed –– there are real people out here in the real world who are being ruined in capitalism’s corrupt endgame.

From today’s ‘Dear Abby’ column:

“Dear Abby: I’d like to relate an act of kindness I witnessed. An elderly woman came to my grocery checkout line with 10 items, including strawberries and shortcakes. She told me they were a little treat for herself. She said she didn’t have much on her late husband’s pension.

“When she saw the total, her face fell and she asked me to take the strawberries and shortcakes off. I was sad for her and thought about buying them myself, but had no cash on me and wasn’t sure if it might violate a store policy. She paid for her other items and went outside to rest on a bench before walking home.

“My next customer asked me what had happened, then told me to include the strawberries in her total and asked me to deliver them to the woman outside. I did, explaining to the older woman what my other customer had done. She looked down at the strawberries, tucked them into her bag and began to cry...”

There are still decent people in America, thank God. We’re going to need them more than ever because it’s plain that our government, our politicians and rule-makers and corporate pricks, our wealthy tax-dodgers, limo riders, CEOs and the rest of the scumsucking bastards who run this country don’t give a damn about the rest of us, the ordinary people who, more than ever, could use some help, could use a hand.

We live in a country where, despite our historic wealth, pensioners can’t afford even a small treat for themselves, and meanwhile General Electric Corporation pays no taxes on billions in profit, and creeps are lionized. That’s what’s on my mind this Memorial Day weekend. I’m not feeling very generous toward the Praetorian Guard right now, the initiators of and executioners at Fallujah. I’m sorry some are suckers but that’s not enough.

The woman sitting on the bench to rest before walking home, unable to afford even a small generosity to herself thanks to a country which doesn’t give a damn about the poor, the woman whose heart was rescued for the moment by a decent human being,
that woman is one of many, one of millions in fact.

Our nauseating national orgy of flag-waving does not completely obscure the truth about America, that we worship violence and praise those who wield it, that we spend our resources and those we steal from the rest of the world on pathetic, trivial things, and that ordinary people must be deprived of the simplest pleasures so that Donald Trump can act out his sociopathic fantasies.

As Tom Morello said, poverty is not an accident; there are criminals involved. That’s what’s on my mind, this Memorial Day weekend, and I’m tired of this shit.

If I urge you to build a bomb and use it to blow up the Chrysler Building, I am guilty of several felonies, even if you screw up construction and the bomb turns out to be as dangerous as a cuckoo clock. It’s called conspiracy and it’s serious.

On the other hand, if I do this while employed by the DEA, the FBI, NSA, or the Department of Fatherland Security, I get a bonus and a raise. Pretty neat, huh?

Inciting to riot: same thing. If I invite you to come to Chicago to disrupt the NATO summit by causing chaos in the street, I can get nailed. Just ask Rennie Davis or Tom Hayden. If, on the other hand, I do it as a police agent, I’m free and clear. All I have to do is testify at your trial –– if you even get a trial in the Age of Obama –– and take a couple of weeks off for some sun in Miami.

Another bulletin out of Washington on the exposure of a terrorist plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner with a nonmetallic bomb which can ‘easily pass through airport security’ according to the usual unnamed sources.

The plot was created by the CIA, which used a pretend terrorist to lure suspected real terrorists into handing him one of those special explosives supposedly being developed by al Qaeda, an organization which itself was once created by the CIA. Ever get the feeling that the CIA is playing both ends against the middle? Me, too.

It’s an old police practice, using agents provocateur to sucker someone into criminal behavior who might otherwise not have done it. That’s not what happened this time, according to American ‘authorities,’ although American ‘authorities’ have been known to make up shit.

The government claims that the nonmetallic bomb “bears the forensic signature of feared al Qaeda bomb maker and top CIA target, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri...” While the CIA couldn’t locate al-Asiri, it did use intelligence gained by its double agent to locate Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, said to have been a “top al Qaeda operative in Yemen” –– another country where U.S. troops are fighting without a declaration of war, or even any discussion –– and Quso was thereupon targeted and killed a couple of weeks ago by a CIA drone.

Quso’s assassination was justified because he was “wanted for his alleged involvement in the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000. The FBI had offered a $5 million bounty for his capture,” according to an article on the national wire. No mention of how much the FBI would pay for the pieces of Quso’s body which may have been recoverable.

Of course, the USS Cole bombing was a nasty bit of work. My only reservation about the most recent missile killing is based on two nagging doubts. One, much of the rest of the world believes, whether true or not, that the Cole was hit by our own ally, Israel, to justify escalation of a war against muslims, and two, the U.S. has named so many people as having been part of the attack on the Cole one begins to wonder whether the conspirators met in Yankee Stadium.

The new type of bomb, since it could arguably evade airport security devices, might lead to further and more intrusive searches of passengers. The feds are not saying. Obama’s ‘counter terrorism adviser’, John Brennan, said that there were no immediate plans to change such security. I note, however, the recent Supreme Court decision which authorizes strip searches of people who have committed no crime. A little K-Y Jelly and those security folks gonna have a real good time.

Osama bin Laden is apparently dead. If you believe the U.S. government, he was shot through the eye while defending himself with a channel-changer and his body was dumped into the ocean in accordance with what we think his last wishes probably were. Most of the navy SEALS who participated in this daring operation inexplicably died shortly afterwards in an aviation mishap in Afghanistan. Guess they didn’t have time to write their memoirs, but I wonder if any of them left notes.

Through various drone attacks –– the missiles which oddly missed funeral processions and other gatherings of civilians and actually got a few guys with guns and maleficent intentions –– we have supposedly knocked off most of the leadership, yet this ghostlike organization carries on. According to the U.S. government, a weakness and instability in the Yemeni government has given al Qaeda a chance to grow. In some areas, it is said, al Qaeda is able to act as a de facto government.

Ever cross your mind that this is all a terrific, well-sponsored television reality show? America’s got an ‘enemy’ which is almost faceless, meaning we can shoot anybody and draw the face on afterwards. Because this ‘enemy’ knows no national boundaries, there can be no declaration of war and even no rules of war. That means we can attack anyone, anywhere, and do whatever we want to them. Pretty cool! Even Kissinger never dreamed of this.

The ‘enemy’ can also never be defeated. That’s the best news of all for the armaments industry, the spy apparatus, the military, and the makers of prosthetic devices and coffins, an unending hay ride of cash built on the never-diminishing fears of a public still traumatized by the convenience of 9-11. It will by definition never be over. The sponsors are clamoring for a piece of the action. The show is guaranteed renewal forever, or until the empire finally collapses of its own rot, the imposition of grinding poverty, and the police state necessary for its temporary survival.

The government last week announced the arrest of several people on terrorism charges relating to the NATO conference in Chicago. I haven’t read the charges but I have a couple of comments anyhow. First, anybody who plots genuine terror acts in America is too stupid to be walking around loose, since any such plots are bound to be infiltrated by cops and you’d have to be a moron not to know it. Second, the government would like very much to gain public acceptance for further destruction of our constitutional rights, and so-called ‘terrorist’ activities play right into its hands. Third, with the NDAA and other bipartisan totalitarian legislation, those actions which a healthy democracy needs for its very survival –– freedom of speech and of assembly –– are being redefined as giving aid to a ‘terrorism’ which is nearly invisible.

The only thing which can save this country from real terrorists, foreign and domestic, is adherence to and respect for the Bill of Rights. Too bad the government doesn’t understand this. Unless it does.

A decade ago when I was under the impression that I might actually make a difference as a member of the local high school district board of trustees, I had the displeasure of meeting a lawyer for Wells Fargo, a newly-elected cretin who I suspect had a problem with his remarkably small hands and feet and other appendages he thankfully didn’t share with the rest of us.

When the banks nearly blew up the country, I thought of this guy. I hoped he’d be indicted or, at least, disbarred, but so far no luck with that. Sometimes justice is elusive.

I thought of the fucker again this morning when I read the story in the Guardian, the tale of a bank and two of its many victims. Wells Fargo again. This time, they murdered someone.

The coroner will say it was suicide because Norman Rousseau shot himself in the head, but it was Wells Fargo which loaded the gun.

This American success story begins in 1997, when Norman met Oriane at a country and western bar. Love at first sight, says Oriane. They loved music and dancing and, as it happens, each other. They saved their money and bought a house. The mortgage was held by Wachovia.

In October, 2007, a Wachovia loan officer approached the couple with a proposal that they refinance. Property values were increasing, he said, and they could lower their monthly payments. It sounded like a good idea.

In May of 2009, however, they received a letter from the bank telling them that they had missed the April payment. It was not true. The Rousseaus in fact had a receipt from a bank teller –– they were making payments in person –– which they faxed to the bank. The bank ignored it.

The Rousseaus hired a lawyer to review the situation, including the refinancing loan, and found many irregularities, including an overestimate of their income made not by them but by the bank’s loan officer.

So, you might think, the bank had made an error and would gracefully back off. The Rousseaus had made the April payment and were current; they kept faxing copies of the April receipt. But that is not what happened. Wachovia collections agents were phoning them as often as eight times a day. They began to receive letters threatening foreclosure. Eventually, one bank employee talked them into applying for a loan modification.

It didn’t seem to matter what the truth was. Every time the couple tried to speak with someone at the bank they got a different person. No one they spoke with seemed to have access to their file. Most of the time, they didn’t even have last names. And the bank would not correct its records. More information was required, the bank kept saying, even though the requested documents had already been sent multiple times.

The Rousseaus continued to make their payments. In September, however, the bank refused to accept payment in person. By December, it refused to accept checks by mail, saying their loan modification request was still under review.

In May of 2010, Wachovia told the Rousseaus they were not eligible for a modification and demanded the sum of $17,000.00, which included payments the bank had earlier refused as well as the April, 2009, payment actually made. A new lawyer got the couple a reinstatement arrangement, however on November 17, 2010, they were notified that they now owed in excess of $26,000.00, including $4,000.00 in late fees.

They were told they had two days in which to pay. Incredibly, by trying to drain their retirement savings, they nearly made it, but they were stopped due to the limits imposed on cash withdrawals.

On November 22, 2010, Wells Fargo acquired title to their house.

Throughout all of 2011, the Rousseaus fought to recover their home. In July, they obtained an injunction enabling them to hang on if they made payments of $1,800.00, but by now they were in deep trouble. Norman had lost his job and their savings had been wiped out. The legal fees and penalties had overtaken them. In December, 2011, they couldn’t manage the payment.

Wells Fargo took them to court and got a lockout date of May 15, 2012.

On May 12, in a last-ditch attempt to keep a roof over their heads, Norman bought an old motor home, but the engine wouldn’t work and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

On the morning of May 13, twelve days ago, Norman Rousseau finally gave up. He shot himself. Oriane was in the kitchen when she heard the sound.

Wells Fargo says it’s not to blame. “We tried repeatedly to find affordable options for the family,” a bank public relations whore told the media. The bank is continuing the foreclosure process against Oriane, although it temporarily suspended proceedings. I guess May 15th was a little too close. Oriane is staying in a motel, thanks to charity funds. She has no place to go.

I don’t know what it will take for someone in this country to finally go after these bastards. I don’t know what it will take to get us off our game-show-sucking asses. I don’t know what it will take to send these ugly, despicable excuses for human beings straight to hell, but I hope we find out.

I’ve been ignoring Mitt Romney. I suppose I shouldn’t be doing that since he stands a fair chance of becoming the next President of this collapsing republic, but he’s such an asshole that it’s painful to watch.

The guy has a number of nasty habits, including referring to people he doesn’t like as “my friend.” To Romney, ‘friend’ has a different meaning than it does to you and me. It’s used in a condescending way. To Romney, “my friend” is the same thing as “you insignificant piece of shit.”

Dear Mitt: we can tell.

One thing about people like Romney. They really do believe they’re smarter than everybody else. They base this on the size of their bank accounts. Seriously. In their world, God confers cash upon those most deserving.

Of course, there are other ways of looking at it. One is, if you want to know what God really thinks about money take a long look at those He/She gives it to.

I’ve known people like that. They carry around a malignant sense of entitlement. It’s a mental illness, and ordinarily I’d have more compassion, but this type of sickness is one which wrecks the lives of others.

Romney is a poster boy for the worst of capitalism and the arguments for his election suffer from the same ignorance. They conflate private financial success with the ability to create public good, profit with sound public policy. In other words, these people are among the most stupid on planet earth.

Doesn’t stop them from grabbing whatever’s within their reach, though.

Let’s face it, the worst of capitalism is as bad as it gets because the worst of capitalism is fascism, the abandonment of the pretense that there’s a wall between government and hard cash. That’s what the FEMA internment camps are for, in case people object.

Nobody talks much about Romney’s dad, George Romney, who was Governor of Michigan and a legitimate candidate for President in 1968. What did George in was his willingness to tell the truth. He told the nation that on a fact-finding trip to Viet Nam, the military had ‘brainwashed’ him. Then he took a tour of the Haight-Ashbury to find out firsthand what was happening. That was the end of George. After going to all the trouble of shooting the Kennedys and King, the country’s owners were not going to let anyone else near the presidency who might not be easily-controlled.

That sort of thing would never happen to Mitt. He’s sold every square inch of his reptilian hide, his heart, his liver, his balls, and his ass. Goldman Sachs may have rented Obama but they got a 99-year lease on Romney. Such is politics in America, 2012. Strange you can count on.

I certainly could prove to be wrong, but I think Romney’s going to win. Obama’s served his purpose, knocking over several countries, establishing police state surveillance procedures and authority for the government to kill anyone it wants to. The Democratic Party is ruined and stands for nothing. His job is done. I figure Romney is a better fit with the world’s bankers, even if Barack runs more easily with the CIA. It’s a matter of priorities, and that’s a conversation you and I are not part of.

Sort of reminds me of the great George Carlin talking about how it really works. “It’s a big club,” he said, “and you’re not in it.” You’re not in it, my friend.

In June, 2009, the Honduran generals kidnapped the elected President and seized power. In the sort of doublethink the U.S, media is now world famous for, this coup d’etat was depicted as somehow democratic.

The Associated Press, admittedly a piece of shit, described the deposed President, Zelaya, as “a leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez,” and said that he had “refused to cancel an unpopular referendum that some saw as an attempt by him to stay in power beyond the one-term limit.”

In the U.S., you have the choice of being uninformed or misinformed. If you do not watch television ‘news’ or read ordinary newspapers such as the New York Times, you may be uninformed; but if you watch these programs or read these rags, you will likely be misinformed.

It’s not just the viewers of F*X News who are badly wrong about national and world events –– as ‘liberals’ like to crow –– it’s everybody. Ignorance is so widespread it’s as though everybody made a conscious decision in favor of it.

The fact of things in Honduras at that time, nearly three years ago, was this:

President Zelaya had about six months remaining in his term; he had no interest in staying in office beyond it. The constitutional amendment he was hoping to bring before the voters would have eliminated the special privileges held by foreigners, principally bankers and U.S.-based corporations, to own land and businesses in Honduras. Those special privileges had been written into the original Honduran constitution by people who had ‘helped’ the country draft it, it’s friends from the U.S.

It was not exactly an ‘unpopular’ referendum, as the AP asserted. If it had been, then nobody would’ve been scared enough to pull off a coup. It simply would have failed. That’s how democracy works, although I concede that in the U.S. such a concept is hard to follow.

And who were the “some” who “saw” the referendum as an attempt by Zelaya to stay in power? Why, the public relations hacks hired by the generals shortly before the coup, that’s who. These were the boys who were “seeing” things

One was Lanny Davis, an old friend of Hillary Clinton’s, who served as her husband’s White House legal counsel, then transitioned to a big time private lobbying gig where he pulls in enormous fees. His partner, also a long-time Clinton buddy, was Bennett Ratcliff.

The referendum was to go before the Honduran voters on the day Zelaya was ousted by troops who sprayed his home with bullets. It wasn’t even binding, merely advisory, asking voters whether they wanted to see a binding referendum on the November ballot. The generals, and their corporate sponsors, weren’t going to let that happen. When they appeared before the world’s media to announce the takeover, they were flanked by Davis and Ratcliff.

That, evidently, was a powerful message for Barack Obama. Since his own Secretary of State was up to her nipples in league with these creeps, actually stopping the takeover would’ve been difficult. Yet he might have done it. He had the power to freeze the U.S. assets and bank accounts of coup leaders and impose trade sanctions –– about 70% of Honduran exports go to the U.S. –– but he didn’t use it. If he had, it would've worked; the OAS was on record condemning the takeover and so was the U.N.

But apart from a pro forma denunciation, Obama didn’t do a thing. The coup stood. Zelaya was lucky he wasn’t killed, although perhaps the generals realized that would’ve been something of a problem for their public relations department.

Several Honduran activists were promptly killed by the new government, which closed down the radio and television stations and arrested journalists. Why not? The leader of the coup, General Romeo Vasquez, was a graduate of the School of the Americas, the infamous CIA training ground for death squads and torturers.

I write about this not only as a reminder of America’s policies toward the rest of the hemisphere but as an overture for consideration of the latest news.

According to the AP, where stories are clearly written by military and corporate flacks who hope to one day grow up to be Lanny Davis, there are “Conflicting accounts of DEA-backed raid in jungle.”

One account is that of the fascist government, installed with the help of the United States; the other is that of the villagers who experienced first-hand the benevolence of America’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Guess which one I believe.

The AP dispatch leads with this:

“Bullets flew as U.S. helicopters swooped toward a river boat. Honduran national police rappelled to the ground and locals scattered after loading close to 1,000 pounds of cocaine.”

According to the AP, the pre-dawn raid began when U.S. drug agents and Honduran cops tracked an airplane loaded with coke as it entered the country. That’s the account of National Police Chief Ricardo Ramirez del Cid. Ramirez said his officers were in the DEA copters when they came under fire from the boat. Naturally, they fired back.

Local officials, including Mayor Lucio Vaquedano of the coastal town of Ahuas, said that four people, including two pregnant women, were killed. They were diving for lobster, according to the villagers and had nothing to do with drug trafficking.

At least one American politician who does not have his head up his ass, Rep. Howard Berman, said “I have consistently expressed deep concerns regarding the danger of pouring U.S. security assistance into a situation where Honduran security forces are involved in serious human rights violations. The problems are getting worse, not better.”

America, of course, has a history of complicity in horrors inside Honduras. During the Reagan presidency, a U.S.-trained death squad, the infamous Battalion 136, tortured and murdered hundreds of political opponents of the U.S.-backed fascist regime. The U.S. embassy pretended not to notice and the U.S. State Department doctored its records to keep the crimes out of possible congressional oversight.

But what interested me especially in the AP bulletin was this ending:

“The United States has assisted with drug operations in Honduras since the 1970s, but activity has increased in the last few years, statistics indicate.”

In other words, after we were able to remove the democratically-elected President and put military officers in charge, we could escalate American military operations, which I suppose was viewed as a priority since most South and Central American countries, such as the “leftist” elected governments in Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and elsewhere, want us to keep our filthy hands off.

It’s not exactly news that the U.S. uses it’s “war on drugs” to militarize much of Latin America and impose its power on their governments. The latest from Honduras lifts the veil just a bit to show us where the next Yemen –– or, perhaps, Libya –– is coming from.

I’ve seen a documentary produced by the Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, a group of 1500 professionals calling for an independent new investigation into the facts surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

It was shown on the local cable channel, Marin 26, which is pretty cool considering that much of America gets to choose among F*X, MSNBC, CNN, and ABC for its ‘news’ and ‘information’ and is thus generally unexposed to reality.

It’s available on the internet, of course. You can check out sites such as Brasscheck, Prison Planet, and Thirdworldtraveler, not to mention YouTube, for what the hooker media won’t show you, but it sure is nice to have access to a community television outlet where facts leak in, if only occasionally.

I’ve written a couple of times before about what we all refer to in the shorthand of 9-11, including a fairly detailed column several months ago (“My Pet Goat and Other Fairy Tales", December 23, 2011), but I hadn’t seen this particular material presented in such a straight, reasoned, professional manner. It was eerie.

To begin with, these people are pros. Engineers and architects tend as a group to be careful and meticulous; they have to be. You screw up building a bridge and you’ve got some serious ‘splaining to do.

The eerie part was how methodical and calm they were. Maybe thirty of these folks were interviewed here, talking about details relating solely to the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7.

Some of it I’d heard before and so have you. The laws of physics, for example, with respect to the conservation of energy. Several pointed out that the buildings’ top floors were in free fall for the equivalent of eight stories, about a hundred feet. Each said this was physically impossible absent the removal of the floors immediately beneath them.

In other words, it couldn’t have happened the way the government claimed. Not possible. It would have required the application of fifty million pounds per second for the members to collapse, which could not happen absent secondary explosions. “Buildings just don’t behave like this,” one said, and he was echoed by a couple of dozen others. These buildings were formed around 40,000 pounds of structural steel. The central core of each was comprised of dozens of steel columns. In order for a building to come down in its own footprint, the central columns, the core, have to be taken out simultaneously.

You cannot melt steel with your pocket lighter. In order for it to actually melt, it has to reach in excess of 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Jet fuel, which is largely kerosene, reaches a peak temperature of about 750 degrees. You could burn a jet under steel beams forever and it would not melt them. A week after 9-11, infrared cameras over the scene recorded temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees.

Molten steel ran for weeks under the debris of the Twin Towers. One fireman described it as resembling a foundry.

And there were chemical traces in the wreckage of something alarming, iron ‘microspheres.’ Their presence could not be explained by the government, but these microspheres, found everywhere in the dust of the WTC, required a heat source hotter than 2700 degrees.

Researchers and international scientists able to evaluate some debris –– the government sanitized the crime scene as quickly as it could but the material was massive and was sprayed in long arcs, another indication to these scientists that explosions had occurred –– found evidence of an advanced form of “highly-energized” thermite deposits. “uniform, symmetrical materials, military grade,” which “shouldn’t be here.”

This ‘nano-thermite’ is produced only at a very few government laboratories, such as Lawrence Livermore in California. The chemistry, insist the engineers, is consistent with no other hypothesis.

Thermite, and its more specific, weapons’ grade cousin, thermate, is a heat accelerant used in explosives. It can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. It can reach 4,500 degrees F in two seconds. Needless to say, it can melt steel; in fact, that’s what it’s used for.

The materials found at the site by international scientists included sulfur, which is an ingredient in thermate.

The towers, and building 7, could not have come down due to fire; no buildings anywhere, including those hit by planes and those where fires burned unchecked for days, have ever come down. Certainly, they couldn’t have dropped at near free-fall and in their own footprints. Building 7, which had not been hit by anything other than flying debris, and where there were two relatively minor fires in the 47 story building, dropped nearly free-fall, something which absent systematic, professional, controlled demolition, could not have happened under the laws of science.

As many critics have mentioned, the official government version was grounded in a report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but the NIST Report claimed that Building 7 fell because column 79 fell, a conclusion scientists roundly consider so flagrantly ridiculous that several publicly express the opinion that NIST had produced a fraudulent document.

Several engineers who work on constructing tall office buildings and the architects who design them mentioned the same thing: that the building, at each floor, was built to withstand “three to five times” the weight of the entire building above it. In order for the steel support columns to have failed, the connections among them had to fail at the rate of 4,000 connections per second.

In other words, never.

It was pretty sobering watching and listening to these people. They were not ranting. They had credentials. Many had international reputations. They did not hedge.

Several pointed to the obvious explosions which sent debris hundreds of yards laterally –– at speeds estimated at up to a hundred miles per hour –– as the buildings came down; this, too, would not be possible absent extremely powerful explosions.

Several noted that in each case, there was at first a slight ‘bowing’ in the center at the top of the building, showing the core columns as being taken out together. Yet, outwardly, the upper fifteen floors of the North Tower were in free fall before any damage showed in the floors below them. This, the scientists said, was not possible.

“It’s not hitting anything or it would meet resistance,” one said.

Another, a man who had helped design the elevator system in the twin towers and who was familiar with the structure, said that the only way for these buildings to fall in this manner was if the inner columns were all compromised simultaneously, something he flatly said was impossible in any way other than by a controlled demolition.

Over and over they spoke of controlled demolition. These were in some cases people whose jobs involved such work. They had among them brought down some famous buildings. They knew what it took to create these conditions.

NIST’s computer animation purporting to show how the government theory was valid, has the connections failing before the members –– something which simply could not occur in that way, roughly 4,000 a second, absent planted incendiaries and timing devices.

NIST’s model also depicted very large deformations in the sides of the buildings, something which did not occur in any of the three on 9-11. A Freedom of Information Act request for NIST’s parameters has been stonewalled.

Of course, as numerous scientists have said, a building in distress will not behave the way the 9-11 buildings did. Such a building can’t collapse that quickly or in that way; failure of members in overload will show increasing, visible deformation. People would have plenty of time to escape.

The NIST Report failed to acknowledge widespread descriptions, from fire fighters, police, building occupants who survived, and emergency technicians, of numerous explosions inside the towers. Those who escaped the first one, all heard rapid explosions in the basement area in the central core. The second building’s fall was preceded by such explosions heard by hundreds of people. NIST says there is no evidence of explosions. But that’s because it didn’t look for any.

NIST has refused to release 3,700 documents to public examination. Why? What are they afraid of? Government officials say the documents are hidden because “releasing the data could jeopardize public safety.”

The U.S. government has already destroyed much pertinent evidence. As has been the case with other national tragedies blamed on convenient scapegoats, the people are deemed too sensitive or untrustworthy to see the materials on which the fantasyland story is based.

The crime scene, as noted, was sanitized as fast as possible, making independent forensic evaluation quite difficult. The ‘official’ fact-finding outfits brought in by Washington produced what they were supposed to produce, in many cases reports which reached conclusions contrary to their own data.

Where have we seen this before?

For years, I refused to look at the evidence. I’d already gotten into trouble over Dallas and the other murders of the ‘sixties. I didn’t want to find out what I might find out here. The whole thing smelled like Dallas, Memphis, and L.A.

Whenever you’ve got a national calamity which is characterized by government destruction of evidence and sanitation of the crime scene, and an official explanation at odds with the forensic evidence, it’s a pretty bad sign.

At the end of the documentary, the filmmakers interviewed a number of psychologists who work with trauma victims, asking them why so many people do not want to look at the problems attendant to the official version of events. The shrinks described cognitive dissonance, the fact that our ‘world view’ is made vulnerable when our fundamental beliefs are challenged.

We think our country protects us, one said. If that myth is shattered, we will be left all alone. Paradigmatic people are those who refuse to look. They are sure that the world works in the way they see it; anything that doesn’t fit that paradigm is therefore discarded. Hell, it’s resented.

We’re also estopped from seeing ourselves honestly due to pride. The bizarre proposition of American ‘exceptionalism’ is not just a crazy, nationalistic notion propounded by the right wing but a sense we have internalized as a country. We’re better than those Germans who let their country go fascist; we’re better than those Russians who let Stalin imprison them and murder them. We think we are different, but we’re not. And in thinking we’re different, in our refusal to face the truth about ourselves or even accept its relevance, we’re falling into the same traps.

If the buildings came down the way our government says they did, how did more than seven hundred bone fragments wind up on the roof of a nearby bank building?

Several of the engineers who have experience in demolition took pains to explain that a controlled demolition, such as those that brought down the three buildings, required considerable planning and deft execution.

We know how it was done with respect to the twin towers: three weeks before 9-11, occupants were notified by the Port Authority that the buildings would be closed for maintenance over the weekend, for upgrades in communications systems and for painting, and that all alarm systems were to be turned off, and the front doors left open.

But what about Building 7?

Building 7 housed the Secret Service, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and operations headquarters for other secret police. It was reported afterwards that thousands of documents concerning Wall Street improprieties and an ongoing criminal investigation which involved, among other things, the looting of California by Enron, were lost.

It’s dangerous to tell the truth, but it’s even more dangerous to cling to a lie. This country will not be able to survive, will never be able to heal, unless its people are willing to face what our government has done and what we have become.

In order to guarantee your safety and protect your freedom, your government , the government of constitutional scholar Barack Obama, has found it necessary to suspend the constitution.

You will now be subject to searches of your person and possessions at any time, not only on attempting to board airplanes but at bus terminals. train stations, on public roads in your own vehicle, and just plain walking down the street. Leave your home, your ass is theirs.

Several weeks ago, the gestapo, in coordinated exercises with local and state law enforcement, boarded buses in downtown Houston and searched passengers. Over the course of two days, fourteen arrests were made, twelve of them African-Americans. Three instances of drug possession; two outstanding warrants. No terrorists.

When she announced the invasive TSA airport operations three years ago, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, responded to objections from constitutional nit-pickers by saying, if you don’t want to be groped or x-rayed, you can choose another form of transportation.

I’m not making this up.

Now that the TSA goon squad has been expanded and drug-sniffing dogs have been added to the arsenal, now that DHS thugs and other federal agents have embarked on a wider program involving all forms of transportation, including a ‘pilot’ operation in Tennessee where motorists are randomly stopped and searched, Napolitano may be expected to release an amended statement. If you don’t want to be searched, you can stay home.

Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who to put it kindly has only a passing familiarity with the laws of the land, announced the new program by saying that TSA agents would board buses to perform searches, watch for “suspicious activity” and interrogate passengers in order to “curb crime and terrorism.”

There’s a lot of this mindless, dangerous crap going on in America these days. Idiots in Congress falling for the fear and terror brainwashing and jumping aboard the Nazi express. Screw the Constitution, they say, we’re under attack.

One Reuters photograph depicts a TSA cop ‘running her hands over the head of a traveler.' The young woman whose hair is being inspected is holding her arms out to each side. According to the accompanying article, passengers on buses run by the Houston METRO system will now be subject to “random questioning and searches from ‘counter-terrorism experts’ hired by the TSA.”

The Houston program, called BusSafe, is being implemented as ‘necessary to enhance safety’ for bus riders, according to the Congresswoman’s doublethink press release. Presumably our safety will be enhanced even more when the government plants listening devices in our mandatory ID cards and stations ‘counter-terrorism experts’ inside our homes.

Want to hear something really eerie? Try this from the press release:

Authorities will “ride buses, perform random bag checks and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior.”

Sound good? Well, I hope so, because the Houston operation is only a pilot project. The federal government will be expanding it to urban areas across the country. It’s coming to your town. As one bureaucratic thug with TSA explained to the L.A. Times, “We’re not the Airport Security Administration. We take that transportation part seriously.”

In 2011, TSA conducted more than 9,000 unannounced ‘security checkpoints’ at transportation hubs around the country. With the extension of these measures to onboard agents, both uniformed and plainclothed, that number is rapidly rising. We are becoming a police state and nobody with any power is objecting much. The corporate media doesn’t mention the story. If you haven’t already figured out that CNN and its brethren don’t broadcast the news, ask yourself whether they’d cover the opening of Auschwitz.

The only major political figure who wants to stop these searches is Ron Paul, and he’s been so marginalized now that it hardly matters.

Note the wording of the Houston press notice: security officers will “address latent criminal activity or behavior.”

I don’t want to seem impolite, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Latent? That means activity and behavior which hasn’t happened yet but which the “expert” in “counter-terrorism” can apparently sense.

Your honor, he looked as though he was going to commit a terrorist act. Well, shoot him just to be safe.

TSA gangsters in Houston were stopping bus passengers as they disembarked, asking them where they were going and why they were riding the bus. What sort of government, what sort of social system, what sort of polity does this sound like to you?

In past years, it has sometimes been a condition of parole that an offender could be subject to search of his or her person at any time. Now it is a condition of living in America. No charges, no proof, no probable cause, no trial, no lawyer, no reasonable doubt, no habeas corpus. Guilty until proven innocent. Hell, the President can have you killed if he wants to, according to Attorney General Holder. Indeed, Obama had a 16-year-old boy blown to hell by a drone attack simply because he was the son of another citizen Obama had ordered killed.

Under these conditions, gropings on public transport and having a stranger go through your pockets is not much to complain about. These are necessities in order for us to maintain our freedom against the terrorists.

I’ve been writing for years about some of the seminal events in modern American history but a lot of people don’t want to know about them. They’re more comfortable buying the official versions, even when those versions are so patently false they wouldn’t fool your average 12-year-old. They don’t want to know because that would make them uncomfortable. It’s easier to sleep, isn’t it?

There was nothing special about the Germans, although they thought there was. They just wanted to party, and they wanted to sleep. Hitler and his friends –– with considerable assistance from American bankers and industrialists –– murdered, both in camps and outside them, in war, over ten million people.

He was able to do that because the people didn’t stop him.

I’ve been getting regular e-mails from the Obama re-election campaign asking for cash. Sometimes I write back, although I am sure that nobody reads my missives. I do it for therapeutic value. I recite the administration’s record, well, part of it –– the list of horrors is too long for a letter –– and suggest that they pick up the bucks from Goldman Sachs.

These cheery little letters from Barack, the first lady, the campaign chairman, the guy who is putting together the North Carolina festivities, and so on, alternate between notes on how dangerous Mitt Romney is (he’ll wage a ‘war on women’, mostly; they can’t really point out that his foreign policy would be more bellicose, nor that he would attack the Bill of Rights any harder than the incumbent) and chest-thumping about Barack’s ‘accomplishments’, which of course keeps these letters short.

One of the solicitations repeated several times by some clown assigned to raise money for Carolina told me that unlike in the bad old days the Democrats were not going to pay for their convention with corporate funds. This would be a ‘people’s’ convention, paid for by ordinary Americans like me.

This morning, in an announcement thus far missed by the mainstream media, the Democrats said they had changed their minds. The Charlotte whoop-de-do will be paid for by Wells Fargo Bank, Bank of America, and Duke Energy, the latter corporation a prime beneficiary of the Obama push for nuclear power plants. No word yet on money from Monsanto, but can it be far behind?

I just love these guys. For a sleight-of-hand carnival act the Obama presidency is right there with the best of them.

Over the past week, Barack has been glorying in his courageous, ‘evolved’ position on gay marriage. He was against it once and then sort of for and sort of against, and now he’s all for it. This announcement has been met with wild cheering and a not-coincidental massive inflow of money from what is termed ‘the gay community’, and the usual reactionary stupidities from the right wing. It may have cost him six votes in Tulsa but he was not going to carry Oklahoma anyhow.

I don’t want to criticize it too much. After all, this is a President who has done virtually nothing of any positive consequence. Just taking a position is sort of a miracle.

Someone pointed out to me that President John F. Kennedy once took to the airwaves to argue that racial equality was a moral issue, and that while this didn’t change anything it offered a strong and purposeful leadership; Obama’s announcement, my friend said, was the same thing.

Well, no.

Kennedy’s great televised speech was a much more direct message to the American people. He pre-empted regular programming to deliver it. He did not ‘offhand’ it as Obama has done. But more than that: he followed it up with an executive order banning racial discrimination in federal contracts and in the companies which wanted to do business with the government.

In other words, Kennedy walked the walk. Obama, by contrast, lots of talk, no executive orders. Obama’s executive orders are about assassinating American citizens. Not quite as inspiring, somehow.

It was announced this morning that the U.S. was expanding its sale of advanced weaponry to the regime in power in Bahrain, where the government is killing pro-democracy protesters.

Same as it ever was.

I have not expired, not yet. Also, I haven’t run out of ideas, although I suppose I can be charged with repeating myself.

I get letters and notes wondering. This is when I don’t post a column for several days. How can anyone as wordy as me refrain absent some health issue or the intervention of the jackboots of Fatherland Security?

This short column is a partial explanation, a placeholder in a sense. I expect to recharge the presses for more regular pieces shortly. In the meantime, I am slightly preoccupied.

I have a novel, written over maybe a dozen years or more, it’s hard to remember specifically when this thing started, and it’s time to publish. Since, while I spent about 10,000 hours writing, revising, editing, rewriting this masterpiece, the book publishing industry consolidated so severely –– and the world changed so much –– that avenue has turned out to be seriously frustrating. You don’t need the whole boring tale but it involves the usual, several literary agents who each raved and then combusted for one reason or another, a publisher who was greatly interested and then fell of the charts, and so forth.

As someone pointedly noted, it might be a good idea for me to publish the damned thing before my reading audience was dead.

And so I am publishing both an electronic version and a print-on-demand version; the accompanying brilliant web site which is being technically put together mainly by one of my grandsons will be up soon, and I’m getting together what remains of my wits to make this process happen.

It turns out that formatting a book for e-publishing is very complicated and apparently crazy-making. It is also different from the formatting required for P.O.D. There are numerous operations which assist one in doing these things but unless you’ve got cash, they are limited to carrying your uploaded work to availability only after you set it up so that their computers will handle it. And I ain’t got any cash.

Would you believe that every paragraph in my 471-page novel is indented incorrectly? That’s a lot of paragraphs to fix. Also, no assurance that italicized portions will survive the transformation. I’ve got a shitload of italics.

There are at least a dozen e-publishing businesses and a similar number of P.O.D.s, and I am trying to weigh the costs, the charges, the fees, the book price, and what’s available. There are book sizes to consider, too, since the ordinary paperback for P.O.D. seems not to exist.

I’ve got a very cool cover, though, thanks to the kindness of the Kennedy Library and the nimble thumbs of Travis Rivers.

I spent yesterday and today reading articles and instructional manuals on the web and it’s not getting much clearer. On top of which, the e-publisher I like best so far does not place the book on amazon, which is where it ought to be; the P.O.D. will be on amazon. These other guys will put the electronica on Apple and Barnes & Noble, which is nice. But not enough. I’ve been buying books on amazon for years and I want to see my own there, which means both versions I want to click a couple of things and order a copy.

So I’ve been distracted. This will continue until I can finally get the damned thing airborne. Then, of course, I will have to flog it all over the web. I will need to sell about 20,000 copies to be able to quit my self-destructive day job and I’m counting on all of you to not only buy them for yourselves, for everyone you know, and for all of your relatives as Christmas presents, but to write glowing reviews on amazon and everywhere else, as well.

Right now, however, you can’t do any of that because I haven’t finished my job here. I will be doing that when I’d otherwise be snapping off a political critique or pummeling you with a long-winded research paper on something such as British Petroleum and its long-time CEO, which I’ve got on the back burner here.

My mind is under construction. Thank you for your patience.

Here she comes, Myth America...

Readers of this column know that I’ve got plenty of theories, some of them verging on the crackpottery side of the aisle but not the ones you’re thinking of, Mr. Wade.

I’ve got a theory about why everybody’s getting crazier than ever these days. It has to do with what the smart guys call ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Mainly, as I understand it, it’s how what people are telling you does not correlate to what’s right in front of your eyes.

It’s also where your own sense of things is constantly denied by what other people, voices of ‘authority’, and the mass media tell you.

People are cracking, I think, because they want very much to cling to the nonsense peddled relentlessly by the public society while the evidence is piling up that what is being peddled is unadulterated cow pucky.

As the façade begins to fall, there’s a tacit, desperate agreement between a society’s anointed ‘authorities’ and the general population which wishes its sleep undisturbed. Give us an explanation, the people say, and it doesn’t have to be much good. It can be a total bleeding lie, as far as that goes. Just something we can hang onto.

And so we get official fairy tales.

We weren’t really starting a war with North Viet Nam. They attacked our ships in international waters in the Tonkin Gulf. We’re just defending ourselves.

We weren’t really starting a war with Spain. They attacked the Maine in international waters pretty close to Florida. We’re just defending ourselves.

We weren’t really starting a war with Iraq. They were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. We’re just defending ourselves.

And so forth. We do not want to ask too many questions about these things because, we’re told, patriots don’t question their government. We need only an argument, any sort of argument, and we can avoid troubling our little minds.

We weren’t really starting a war with Afghanistan. They were harboring Osama bin Laden and wouldn’t turn him over to us, and he planned the attack on the World Trade Center. We’re just defending ourselves.

Remember yellow cake uranium? Lies don’t matter. No one will be held accountable.

In the news yesterday, a witness to the shooting of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 has recanted what she now says is a statement attributed to her in FBI files. She was pressured not to insist on what she saw at the time, pressured to change her story to conform to the official tale, and she did so.

She is only the latest, not the only, witness to see a second person draw and fire a gun in that pantry; the second gunman was positioned behind and to Kennedy’s right, exactly where the fatal shots came from according to the coroner’s report which was suppressed at Sirhan’s trial. The wrong man has been in prison for more than forty years. America doesn’t want to know about it. YOU probably don’t, either.

It is one of those little things, like the video now available on YouTube of the presidential motorcade leaving Love Field on November 22, 1963, which shows Secret Service agents positioned where they were supposed to be, on the rear corners of the limousine, standing on special platforms built for the purpose, and they are suddenly waived off by the chief of the Dallas Secret Service, and one of the agents, clearly surprised, raising his arms at his side, palms up, asking what the devil was going on.

It is one of those little things, like the unwelcome memorandum from the director of the CIA, John McCone, to the head of the Secret Service, James Rowley, which specified that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a double agent for the CIA and that J. Edgar Hoover had taken a pile of documents on the assassination into his private possession.

It is one of those little things, like the positive identification, by people who knew them, of three CIA assassins having a friendly chat amidst the celebratory crowd, in photos taken in the Embassy Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the night of June 4, 1968, shortly before RFK was murdered.

Few want the responsibility which comes with too much information. Yet our national failure to come to terms with what is actually done by people in power leaves us emotionally and psychologically disconnected.

I’ve been in domestic environments in which there were problems with drug addiction, which residents and family members refused to acknowledge. You don’t have to be a specialist to predict that people will go bonkers in that situation. That’s because there’s a vast hole between what one sees and what one is willing to acknowledge.

Much of the anguish experienced today in America’s public life is due to the national agreement to cover-up the worst excesses of the powerful, to deny that the past has any purchase on the present.

As Senator J. William Fulbright once observed, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Tonkin Gulf episode. He and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lied and knew they were lying, and they did so in order to trick the country into supporting a war which Johnson’s predecessor had tried to stop. Fulbright noted that people lying like that in court would be convicted of perjury, but that Johnson had not been under oath.

When Bush and Cheney were summoned to testify before the committee investigating the attack on the World Trade Center, they declined to be sworn in, and they declined to be interviewed separately. They also lied, but they were not under oath.

The nation’s leaders routinely lie, and these lies sometimes result in unimaginable horror and tragedy. Kissinger lied about Viet Nam and about Chile. Rice lied about Iraq. Powell lied about Iraq. Bush lied about everything. Bill Clinton lied about Somalia. Hillary Clinton lied about Libya, Egypt, and Honduras.

Nobody prosecutes these criminals. Instead, they launch a massive inquiry into whether Bill Clinton lied about oral sex with an intern. The public, meanwhile, was much more curious about presidential semen on a blue dress than about presidential policies in Somalia.

That’s the agreement, the unspoken agreement by which the American people avoid knowing too much and the pimps and enforcers for the corporations burn documents and avoid having to testify.

It results in what we see today.

History is not a random series of accidents –– the wishful thinking of at least one advocate of delusion I know. It is not just bad luck which claims the lives of every major voice for peace or equality. But it’s easier to believe that because it relieves the believer of any sense of guilt or silent complicity, or of any obligation to act as a citizen.

It’s easier to go along. When Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke against the war in 1967, he was criticized by other ‘Negro’ leaders who told him to ‘stick to civil rights.’ He had an eloquent answer to that but it cost him his life.

I was around then. I remember quite clearly the voices of some ‘liberals’ who stuck with Johnson despite the war because he was ‘so good on civil rights’, which I guess meant they saw the disproportionate number of black casualties in Viet Nam as a statistical fluke.

There are always apologists and rationalizers. It’s easier. But in the end, ladies and gentlemen, it will make you insane. And in America today, with ‘liberals’ defending the war crimes of the black Democrat in the White House, all you’ve got to do is look out your window. But too many do not wish to do that.