Author Archives: Lila

Liberals Love to Hate Sarah Palin

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Update: This piece is now up as a full-length article at Lew Rockwell.. Reader responses will be below in the Comments, as usual…

In an August 3 piece in Salon magazine, even the usually well-modulated voice of Professor Juan Cole, shot up a few octaves. He compared Sarah Palin to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and came out in Ahmadinejad’s favor. Now, according to some people, Ahmadinejad stands guilty of anti-Semitism. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But that’s what the establishment media seems to think. So, if the same media thinks Palin is worse than Ahmadinejad, then what it’s saying is that to liberals, being a conservative small-town mother is more dangerous than being anti-Semitic.

Palin and the Iranian president are both dangerous populists, writes Cole. They blame their failures not on their own loose lips (Palin’s stutterings on the Katy Couric show and Ahmadinejad’s alleged anti-Semitism), but on media conspiracies against them.

Of course, there’s no real reason why both things couldn’t be true. Palin could have her short-comings, and she could still be the victim of a hatchet-job by the media. But measured logic is not the style of the Sarah-phobics:

Here’s Cole again on the Irani-Alaskan Axis-of-Medieval:

“Both politicians ‘encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system….’

Dear me. Tut-tut. Political exhibitionism, eh? And that wouldn’t be something ever committed by Barack Obama now, would it – he with the near-halo on many a magazine cover, who dubbed himself a voice for people marginalized by the system – or so I recall – in his celebrated Getty- er- pre-election speech on race?

As for “facts as understood by the mainstream media,” since when are facts determined by how journalists understand them? Isn’t that just what some guy called Donald Rumsfeld said not so long ago and got these very same journalists lathered up at his solipsism?

I’m no fan of Sarah Palin.

Anyone who has five children at home and hankers for high office has her priorities confused. If a real feminist was needed on McCain’s team, Todd was the Palin they should have picked. And no, the photogenic governor doesn’t have the experience needed to take on DC. No more than our genial President himself.

But by trashing Sarah Palin in such a rancid, racial, and bigoted way, the media did itself no good, and turned her into an instant symbol of the double-standards practiced by this country’s political elites toward outsiders.

Whatever you think of the moose-hunting mayor, she isn’t an insider, and it was insiders who dragged America through the mud over the last two decades.That makes her – one way or other – a voice for ordinary people, one of us. The persistent trashing of Sarah Palin is a trashing of ordinary Americans.

What Barack Obama Left Out of His Foreign Policy Speeches

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From Bill Blum’s Anti-Empire Report:

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)2; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 19663, referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.4


My Comment:

The issue here isn’t whether you or I approve of everyone of these leaders…or not (I don’t).

The issue isn’t whether some other country might not have done even worse if it had the power the US had (they might have).

The issue is – is it the business of the US government to interfere in the rule of other countries, foment coups and revolutions, police, bomb, and spy on millions of people?

And how does any of that make us safer, richer, or freer?

Warren Buffett Made Out Big From Bail-Outs

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We told you so…

We hate to say it, but a year back we noted on this blog and in a couple of pieces at Lew Rockwell that Mr. Buffett was profiting every which way from the Goldman bail-out.

We also noted his corrupt ties with AIG. And we refused to bow low before his genius at investment. We figured it was another American media myth. The man was an “insider.”

And so it has come to pass…

Raw Story reports:

Aside from the nearly $100 billion in taxpayer aid extended to Buffett’s holdings — which include mortgage lender Wells Fargo and Bank of America, credit card leviathan American Express and the bonus-happy brokerage Goldman Sachs — his companies also benefit from $130 billion in FDIC backing for their debt.

“Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard,” writes Reuters’ Rolfe Winke, “many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.”

Buffett owns 27 percent of Berkshire Hathaway, for which he serves as chairman and chief executive for an annual salary of $100,000. He’s known for his frank and simple-worded investment advice, often laced with colorful sexual metaphors.

Winke says Goldman Sachs would have collapsed without government aid it received…”

************************

Oh these Masters of the Universe. Turns out that without the Universe, they are Masters of…nothing much at all.


Gore Vidal On the Bridge to Fascism

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Gore Vidal on a bridge to somewhere bad :

“I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”

A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer….”


Trauma and Brainwashing

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Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels

What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.

Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.

Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture – which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.

Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.

In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…

The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.


“Shooter” Conspiracy Theory is a Form of Anti-Sinitism

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My post today is from Canadian trader and blogger, Bill Cara (a critic of the “shooter” theory).

[NOTE: “Shooter,” gentle reader, is my derogatory name for those who believe in the government’s “fringe” conspiracy theory that “green shoots” are popping up all over the economy. This theory, I believe, is premised on “hatred” and “mean-spiritedness” toward creditors, savers, and dollar-holders. In fact, if you are a “green-shooter,” I’d say you are a racist and an anti-Sinite (since the Chinese are the biggest creditors of the US)]

Bill Cara Quote:

“When I started blogging over five years ago, I noted my concern that in America, everything is for sale and everybody a salesman. The problem, of course, is that a salesman believes his own stories because he has to believe. Facts are perverted, history changed, and truth misrepresented. In five years, America has gotten worse in this regard.

The nation has actually become a parody of itself where the most accurate news now comes from sources like Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart.”

My Comment:

There’s the truth from an objective observer. And I’m here to second it. If there’s one thing that’s a problem in America, it’s not “crime,” or “violence,” or “drugs,” or “porn.”
All of these are just secondary manifestations of the underlying problem. That problem is – unreality.
In Language of Empire, I referred to the plastic, virtual world in which the country lives.

That’s the rub.

We leave in a world of phony perceptions, phony reality, phony problems, phony solutions, phony political divisions, phony theories, phony experts…

All other problems America shares with other nations.

But this one problem is more unique to her than to any other country – almost because of her virtues, rather than on account of her vices.

Other people don’t have governments that are nearly as efficient, thorough-going, or as clever at spin as ours.

That’s their good fortune.

Pots & Kettles Update: White House Accuses Drudge, Bloggers of Spin…

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From an AP report this morning:

WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.

The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.

In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“

My Comment

And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”

Oh nooooooo.

Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…

As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.

The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”

Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?

Now the president is a runway model too?

Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?

“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.

Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)

[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]

Please. Talk about feeding a fire…

Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.

He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.

Adriana Varela Sings Mario Benedetti’s “No Te Salves”

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Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti, was the poet of the urban guerrilla movement of the 1960s-1980s called the Tupamaros. He  died on May 17, 2009 at the age of 88.  Here, the distinctive Argentine tango singer, Adriana Varela, sings a poem of his, “No Te Salves”:

No Te Salves/Don’t Save Yourself

by Mario Benedetti

No te quedes inmóvil          Don’t stay motionless
al borde del camino             by the way side,
no congeles el júbilo           don’t freeze your joy

no quieras con desgana       or love half-heartedly.
no te salves ahora               Don’t save yourself now
ni nunca                               or ever.
no te salves                         Don’t save yourself,
no te llenes de calma           don’t be so calm,
no reserves del mundo         and in this world don’t keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo       a tranquil corner,
no dejes caer los párpados   or let your eyelids
pesados como juicios           drop heavy with judgments.
no te quedes sin labios         Don’t be left without lips,
no te duermas sin sueño       don’t sleep without dreams,
no te pienses sin sangre       or imagine yourself bloodless,
no te juzgues sin tiempo       or judge yourself with haste.

pero si                                 But if,
pese a todo                          after all,
no puedes evitarlo                you can’t help it,
y congelas el júbilo              and you freeze your joy,
y quieres con desgana          and you love half-heartedly,

y te salvas ahora                   and you save yourself now;
y te llenas de calma              if you stay serene,

y reservas del mundo           and in the world keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo       only a tranquil corner,
y dejas caer los párpados     let your eyelids
pesados como juicios          drop heavy as judgments,
y te secas sin labios             remain without lips,
y te duermes sin sueño        and sleep without dreams;
y te piensas sin sangre        if you imagine yourself bloodless,
y te juzgas sin tiempo         judge yourself in haste,
y te quedas inmóvil             and stay motionless
al borde del camino             on the side of the road,
y te salvas                           – and you save yourself –
entonces                             Then –
no te quedes conmigo.        don’t stay with me.

(Mario Benedetti)

[I’ve made minor changes to the translation to make it easier to understand the sense…I apologize if that detracts from the poem for those who know it in its original form].


Libertarian Living: Before You Sign a Contract

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I was answering a letter from a reader earlier this morning. He’d had some problems with health insurance. Then, to compound that, he got cheated by a contractor when he was redoing his house….

It got me thinking. Besides medical bills, legal bills are probably the ordinary person’s worst nightmare.

In the US, you’re never too far from a lawsuit.  Even the slightest disagreement tends to erupt into a full-scale legal battle. We’re a litigious country, no two ways about that.

Earlier, I wrote down a few tips about doing without health insurance (it’s in my archives at Lew Rockwell). They seem to have helped a number of people.

But this evening I’m mulling over what I’ve learned about staying clear of the legal system, without being taken to the cleaners. And I’m wondering how I can help ordinary people protect themselves without lawyers. After all, it’s tough times, and most of us can barely get by, let alone factor in huge chunks of money for legal bills.

This is only a preliminary blog post, but here are my random thoughts:

1. Never sign a contract in a language you don’t know well.

(Does this sound obvious? There are, amazingly, people who actually sign off on documents that they’ve never read). People will often present you with a document in English and then follow that up with a document in another language, which they’ll tell you is the translation. Most of the time, it probably is a translation. But just occasionally, you’re going to get scammed.

If you’re not absolutely fluent in the language (and no – “donde esta buquebus” doesn’t count as fluent), or if you don’t have a trustworthy translator who can verify for you, you should hold off on signing.

2. Never sign a document that you “think” you read through before.

This is a common trick. Someone shows you one document and you read it from cover to cover.  An hour later, they ask you to sign what looks like the same document.  Take the time to go through it all over again. One missing phrase or line is all it takes to make the whole thing mean something radically different. Don’t fall for it.

3. Never sign anything so long you can’t read it carefully.

Doctors are especially good at waving 200-page binders crammed with abstruse medical terminology under your nose a day before surgery. They’ll wink and tell you “it’s just for the lawyers, ” as though that means you needn’t pay attention. But read that thing like a Talmudic scholar. Call up any lawyer or doctor you know and read out the passages you don’t understand to them.  If you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to read it for you, go online and study the subject so you at least have some inkling what it is you’re signing off on.

4. Cross-examine anyone who asks you to sign something.

It’s not very polite, but you’re not training for Ms. Manners. You’re trying to protect yourself. Write down every question you have and get your opposite number to write down his answer. Get him to sign it. He will probably try to brush the whole thing off, or say something like, “we always do business with a handshake.” Thank him for the biographical information, but tell him, “I always do business with a written contract.”

5. Don’t assume “is” means “is.”

Legalese is a language dense with man-traps and land-mines for the innocent. The whole object is to be as opaque and misleading as possible. Remember these things are written by 400 buck-an-hour suits, not Renaissance wits. If something can ramble, be incomprehensible, ambiguous, senseless, contradictory…or all of the above…it will be. While you’re reading it, keep a dictionary next to you, a handbook of contract law, and the phone number of a lawyer.