Pardon my Palinese, but — You betcha! You damnbetcha!

For starters, the “conditions” the Times mentions only briefly are, in reality, depraved, corrupt, immoral, inhumane torture. According to the Times…

F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw’…

What is more frightening — that the C.I.A. got its jollies by torturing, even murdering human beings in its secret sodomy frat-houses — or that the F.B.I. took one look, fled the scene and remained silent for years?

Perhaps it’s the two-page memo President George Bush had circulated seven months earlier wherein he determined — under his authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive of the United States –

…none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world because, among other reasons, al Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva.” (emphasis added)

[...]

…I determine that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva. I note that, because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al Qaeda, al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war.

Bush then added piously that our values as a nation that we shared with many nations (?) required us to treat humanely even those not qualified as humans nor entitled to such treatment. So — wink, wink — rack ‘em and screw ‘em, boys!

According to the Times, the documents were released as a result of several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch. Makes you wonder if this nation’s mainstream media, both print and electronic, has no access — nor interest — in freedom of information, doesn’t it?

The Times did provide links (see below) to the released documents — 953 pages it knew most of us would never read. To offset that, the Times assigned two of its top investigative reporters — Scott Shane and Charlie Savage — to get the critical information out.

These guys hopped right on it and, after yawning through the assignment, their bland 306-word “news” article was published on page A28.

I don’t know about you, but even for Halloween — that’s scary!

Links to released documents via New York Times

A.C.L.U. vs. C.I.A. (SDNY) (pdf) (13 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (DDC2) (pdf) (441 pages)
Judicial Watch vs. C.I.A. (DDC) (pdf) (34 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (SDNY) (pdf) (98 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (DDC2) (pdf) (61 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (pdf) (141 pages)
Feinman vs. C.I.A. (DDC) (pdf) (163 pages)
Judicial Watch vs. D.O.J. (DDC) (pdf) (2 pages)

A closer look at the article revealed it wasn’t a Norm Coleman ploy to get folks in Minnesota to quit eating burgers and fries, nor a menu for the genetically obscene monster in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but an announcement by Germany’s Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner that Germany is banning the cultivation of MON 810, a genetically modified (GM) corn produced by US biotech giant Monsanto.

The GM Monster

It appears that MON 810 is also believed to be the “Frankenstein” of GM crops by at least five other European countries — France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg — all of whom have banned its use. MON 810 was approved by the European Union in 1998, and was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in Germany. Aigner said she had legitimate reasons to believe that the genetically modified Monsanto seed “presents a danger to the environment.” The plant produces a toxin that not only destroys the larvae of the corn borer moth, but other, beneficial, insects as well.

Andreas Thierfelder, spokesman for Monsanto Germany, responded that Monsanto would decide “as quickly as possible” whether to take legal proceedings. She said the “matter was very urgent as the planting season was about to start.” Just how urgent was evident days later when Monsanto filed a lawsuit against the German government, claiming that its ban on MON 810 is arbitrary and contravenes EU rules. Although Monsanto sued France in an effort to overturn its ban on genetically modified corn, and lost that battle in March when France’s highest court ruled that the corn “may” harm the environment and wildlife, the German government is justifiably edgy, as it must prove conclusively to the German court that MON 810 damages the environment.

But the feeder GM corn is just one tiny blip on the Frankenfood radar. And, it’s not just Europeans who should worry. As Jim Hightower, former two-time Texas agriculture commissioner warned way back in June 2004:

For some time, the likes of Monsanto have had their white-smocked engineers tinkering merrily and dangerously with the very DNA of food, genetically modifying the natural composition of things like potatoes so they contain a pesticide in every one of their cells, or altering rice so it contains a diarrhea drug in every bite. This is no mere lab experiment, for unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, Monsanto and a handful of other global biotech giants have quietly spread the seeds of these genetically altered Frankenfoods to so many farms over the past decade that about a third of the foods on U.S. supermarket shelves now contain organisms with tampered DNA — everything from baby food and milk to products made with soybean and corn. Thanks to well-placed campaign donations and powerhouse lobbying, this infiltration of our food supply has been done with practically no consumer awareness, since both Bill Clinton’s and George W’s administrations have let these foodstuffs be sold in America without so much as a label on them to tell us that we’re buying something that our families might prefer to avoid.

Kinda ruins the appetite, doesn’t it? Not just the fact that Monsanto has infiltrated the bulk of our food chain, but that it clearly believes it has the right to do so with or without our knowledge. It has fought oversight, regulation, labeling and scientific research for years. The arrogance with which multinational biotech corporations such as Monsanto are disrupting and modifying life’s natural genetic order — from seeds to food to animals to humans to the environment — is creepy. The Almighty must surely be watching in slack-jawed amazement.

The Profit Plan

These giants are “chemical” corporations, and one of their goals is to create seeds that will withstand more (and more and more) of their herbicides. Monsanto, which gave us the deadly Agent Orange and the toxic weed killer Roundup, is not alone in its quest to manipulate, or to control the world’s order. Germany’s chemical giant Bayer, well known for its popular and effective Bayer aspirin, and for Aleve and Alka-Seltzer, was the first to introduce heroin as well as mustard gas, and produces a series of neonicotinoids — insecticides that attack the central nervous systems of insects, such as bees. Other mega-corporations dealing in both pharmaceuticals and pesticides, to name a few, are Merck, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta — but Monsanto has been around for more than a century, produces 90-percent of genetically modified seed — and has many friends in high places. Many high places.

Last year, Vanity Fair’s Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele teamed up to present a well-researched background article, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” wherein they listed some, but not all, of these friends:

Monsanto has long been wired into Washington. Michael R. Taylor was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the F.D.A. commissioner before joining a law firm in Washington in 1981, where he worked to secure F.D.A. approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone before returning to the F.D.A. as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a senior vice president. Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. when she left the agency in 1993. She became a vice president of Monsanto, from 1995 to 2000, only to return to the E.P.A. as deputy administrator the next year. William D. Ruckelshaus, former E.P.A. administrator, and Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, each served on Monsanto’s board after leaving government. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies. Donald Rumsfeld never served on the board or held any office at Monsanto, but Monsanto must occupy a soft spot in the heart of the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale.

Bartlett and Steele go into some detail about the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its patent rights, not only against GM or GE (genetically engineered) farmers, but organic farmers as well. They write:

Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers — anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records.

Once you opt to buy Monsanto seeds, you are no longer a farmer, you’re a “grower” — a serf — and you must sign a Technology/Stewardship Agreement wherein you agree, among many other restrictions, to use Monsanto seed for planting only a single commercial crop…not to sell or give seeds to any other person for planting . . . to pay annual technology fees (in addition to the price of the seed) due Monsanto . . . to turn over your records and receipts anytime Monsanto asks for them. In short, you sign your life — and your livelihood — over when you become a “grower.” And, if you’re ever taken to court (and it’s likely you could be), and you lose (and it’s likely you will) — you will find you agreed to pay Monsanto and its attorney fees and all related court costs.

The End Game

This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life — whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control. As Henry Kissinger once said matter-of-factly, “If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.” Kissinger has long been obsessed with two things — depopulating the world and establishing a New World Order.

What better way to control the food than to ban seed saving — what better weapon is there to use against starving populations than food? The answer is laid out in detail in F. William Engdahl’s November 2007 critical book about genetic manipulation, Seeds of Destruction. Engdahl is no conspiracy theorist. He is a leading researcher as well as an economist and an associate and regular contributor for the Center for Research on Globalization.

In his extensive three-part review of Seeds, investigative journalist Stephen Lendman reveals “the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling.”

Lendman reminds us that Kissinger has been both at the forefront and behind the scenes since the 1960s when, as Engdahl wrote, “the Rockefellers were at the power center of the US establishment (and) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (was) their hand-picked protégé.” Kissinger was there as Nixon’s Secretary of State in 1973 when the food crisis hit and, as Engdahl said, he decided US agricultural policy was “too important to be left in the hands of the Agricultural Department so he took control of it himself.” Even back then, Kissinger’s goal was to go global and seize control of the agricultural food market. Kissinger’s “food diplomacy” was to use food to “reward friends and punish enemies.”

Lendman writes, “Food is power. When used to cull the population, it’s a weapon of mass destruction.” He says “One way or another, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to reduce population through human reproduction by spreading GMO seeds.” And the “world’s number one” in patenting seeds is Monsanto. He explains:

Like it or not, they’re advancing their agenda, and a 2004 Rockefeller Foundation report shows it. GM crop production achieved nine consecutive double digit year increases since 1996. More than eight million farmers in 17 countries now plant them, over 90% in developing nations. Far and away, the US is the world’s leader “with aggressive Government promotion, absence of labeling, and the domination of US farm production.” Here, “genetically engineered crops (have) essentially taken over the American food chain.” In 2004, over 85% of soybeans were genetically modified, 45% of corn, and since animal feed is mainly from these crops “the entire meat production of the nation (and exports) has been fed on genetically modified animal feed.” What animals eat, so do humans.

According to Engdahl, agribusiness giants, aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the US government and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are progressing relentlessly toward the second pillar of Kissinger’s end game — controlling food to control (and expunge) populations of lesser nations. In December 2007, Engdahl sounded the alarm about yet another seed venture (adventure?), “Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic,” a steel-reinforced concrete seed bank built deep inside a mountain on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. This “program” is funded by the Rockefellers, by such seed giants as Syngenta and Monsanto — and by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who knows a bit about monopoly.

The Way Out

Engdahl says that, since 2007, Monsanto and the US Government together hold the patent for a commercial seed called “Terminator,” designed to commit suicide after just one harvest, and farmers will be forced to return to Monsanto or other seed giants to purchase new seeds each year for crops needed to feed their populations. He said if they’re allowed to continue their reckless pursuit of power, in a decade or so, the small farmer will be but a memory and the majority of the world’s food producers would be little more than feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed corporations. “Those who say ‘it can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events,” he wrote. “The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.”

The good news is that Europe is fighting back against being forced to plant genetically manipulated seeds for plants and food. Countries like Austria and Denmark, France — and now Germany — are standing up, and standing together, to ban biotech products. As is always the case, when those who lust for power and control concoct their grand schemes, they fail to factor in the human response. Lendman says public opinion throughout Europe is strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients. He writes:

Several EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and Denmark, even ban some EU-approved biotech products to further cloud the outlook. Polls show why, with European public opinion strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients, with hostility levels in France as high as 89% and 79% wanting governments to ban them. This shows European consumers are far ahead of Americans and much better protected (so far) by their overall exclusion as well as having labeling requirements for those allowed to be sold. That provision is crucial as it empowers consumers to use or avoid eating these foods. If enough people abstain, food outlets won’t carry them.

It’s not that Americans don’t care that the Rockefeller-Gates-Monsanto plan to solve world hunger is but a ghastly scheme to cull the population of its nonproductive bottom-feeders. Thanks to conspiratorial US media, most of us are either blissfully unaware or are unable to make a sound because, as Hightower said, our “Congress and the White House (and the media) have Monsanto checks stuffed in their ears.”

The way out is to become informed — and just say no to having unlabeled, untested products crammed down our throats. If we do nothing, we will reap what we sow. We will, as Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of evolutionist Charles Darwin, wrote in his 1952 book The Next Million Years, be condemned to the status of workers in a beehive.

We must stand up and support Europe’s attempt to organize a ban on genetically modified crops and food. It is the way — the only way — out of this mess. Lendman, who maintains “the stakes are much too high — human health and safety must never be compromised for profit,” suggests that we read Engdahl’s book, which is a “wake-up call” for all of us.

I suggest we start by reading Lendman’s review of that book, which is a much louder wake-up call.

From the beginning, those in the military have served their country with unswerving loyalty. They continued to march even after Henry Kissinger belched out the truth that Duty–Honor–Country is a one-way street because, “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy. And, it has long been a dead-end street for those captured or left behind on foreign soil — for those who return from battlefields maimed both mentally and physically, and for those who are innocent victims of malicious life-destroying experiments who have no chance of the extent of their injuries being recognized and are refused the necessary health care.

The most ghastly experiment the military ever conducted was Operation Crossroads, a series of “Manhattan Project” tests requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships and equipment. After bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before, US officials knew the effect of massive radiation on human beings and animals. They had to know. So what else were the thousands of navy personnel positioned on ships from five to eight miles from the Bikini Atoll bombsite in the central Pacific if not guinea pigs?

One young sailor stationed at the Bikini Atoll in 1946 was Anthony Guarisco who, like thousands of others, has suffered horribly for the last 63 years as a result of radiation poisoning and like those others, has been denied the proper health care. Guarisco is the founder of both the National and International Alliance of Atomic Veterans. In 1994, Academy Award-winning team Vivienne Verdon-Roe and Michael Porter produced a documentary, “Experimental Animals,” featuring Guarisco who, very calmly, describes the horrors of that 1946 July. (Note: Ecological Options Network has just re-released “Experimental Animals” on-line and as a DVD, because EON filmmaker/activist Jim Heddle says, “we think it’s as relevant today as it was when it was produced.”)

The first bomb — Able — was dropped from a B-29 on July 1. As a health precaution, military personnel in the area were told to “cover their eyes.” Guarisco said it was awesome. He said it immediately “came home to me what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could see how 55-65 thousand people could die in one-and-a-half seconds.”

But the second one — Baker — was beyond awesome. Guarisco said it was detonated beneath the ocean from a depth of 90 feet, and “sucked a target array of approximately 100 ships into the air like little toys. I saw the U.S. Arkansas soar into the air about 200 feet and come down in two pieces. I saw aircraft carriers just flinging around as if they were toys.”

According to the Navy’s historical report, “The inability to complete inspections on much of the target fleet threatened the success of the operation after BAKER. A program of target vessel decontamination was begun in earnest about 1 August. This involved washing the ships’ exteriors using work crews drawn from the target ships’ companies under radiological supervision of monitors equipped with radiation detection and measurement devices. Initially, decontamination was slow as the safe time aboard the target ships was measured only in minutes. As time progressed, the support fleet itself had become contaminated by the low-level radioactivity in marine growth on the ships’ hulls and seawater piping systems.”

Ironically, although the ships were towed out of the area just 10 days after the blast where the work could be done in uncontaminated water, no warning was given to the human experimental animals, who were allowed to swim in contaminated water, walk barefoot on beaches and breathe poisonous air.

Guarisco said, “We went back into the ground zero area immediately after each of the detonations, and I spent a total of 67 days in the Bikini lagoon within one mile of the epicenter. And I became ill after the second detonation, approximately four or five days after that…I had symptoms similar to having a bad case of influenza. I had welts on my body — I broke out with welts — and it was scary for me. I was urinating blood, I was very sick.”

And Guarisco wasn’t the only one who became ill. In a 1998 National Radio Project interview with Michael O’Rourke, who monitors veterans health issues for the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Guarisco said, “Other people on my ship were also feeling very sick. And for many, many years I thought that, well, certainly if there was anything wrong surely they would let me know. But,” he said, “I found out many years later that’s not how it is. You know, the government and the U.S. military are not about to say anything about anybody who’s exposed to high levels or low levels of radiation. It was hard for me to come out of denial, to understand that I was dealing with people who really were not interested in anything else but waiting for me to die.”

Guarisco says that, in one — two — blinding flashes, “we saw what World War III will look like. We have seen the firestorm, we have been witness to the sacrilegious devastation that nuclear weapons put forth, and we have seen our brother and our sister veterans die from being exposed to this terribleness.” He says the bottom line of nuclear weapons is the bottom line of the profit margin — that “deterrent” or “first strike” are fear code words used to keep the population at bay and to pave the way for the nuclear industry to keep building more expensive (profitable) weapons.

In his March 2008 tribute to both of his parents, Guarisco’s son, Vincent, goes into greater detail about his father’s lifelong battle, not only with the effects of radiation but with the nuclear industry and government itself. For more than 60 years, both Anthony and Mary Guarisco were out there, militant activists armed with the truth, relentlessly attempting to derail the nuclear train before it goes over the cliff, taking human survival with it.

The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Although we have avoided the instant, negative repercussions of another Nagasaki or Hiroshima, we have nevertheless managed to contaminate most of the world with Depleted Uranium.

In 2006, Japanese professor Dr. K. Yagasaki, by using the known amount of uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb — about the size of a two-liter milk container — calculated that a ton of DU used on the battlefield results in the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima bombs worth of radiation released into the atmosphere. So, when it was reported that 2,000 tons of DU were dropped on Iraq from 2003 to 2006, we need to understand that what was released in the Iraqi atmosphere, and then spreading worldwide, was the equivalent of 200,000 Hiroshima bombs.

The total amount of DU the US has used since 1991 is approximately 4,600 tons (1,000 in the first Gulf War, 800 in Kosovo, 800 in Afghanistan and a further 2,000 tons in the second Iraq war.) This amounts to approximately 460,000 Hiroshima bombs, ten times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from all previous nuclear testing worldwide. And, it’s important to note this calculation was three years ago. Since that time, we’ve had three more years of non-stop DU bombing…

Throughout the ’60s, the US conducted numerous toxic and chemical weapons tests on its military personnel. In July 2008, Nic Maclellan, journalist, researcher and development worker in the Pacific, wrote:

Under Project SHAD, the US Navy conducted six tests in the Marshall Islands and off the coast of Hawai’i between 1964-68. Pentagon documents released in 2002 show the US Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors, and sprayed a germ toxin on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“These Cold War-era experiments to test the Navy’s vulnerability to toxic warfare involved about 4,300 US military personnel, mostly from the Navy. Most were never informed that the tests were being conducted, breaching all ethical principles about informed consent for test subjects.

It’s time that we, as a nation, not only face the truth — but come to grips with it. Those who serve with such trust and loyalty cannot imagine that they are, at best, “experimental animals” to be used and cast aside by ruthless corporate thugs.

How many generations of Anthony Guariscos must we lose before we realize that “support the troops” means protect the troops? Like Guarisco said, we must stand up, stand together and demand the abolition of all nuclear weapons if human beings on this planet are to survive.

It’s time for the madness to stop. Before we are all atomic veterans.

Everything you can imagine is real.

~~ Pablo Picasso

In 1974, a year after orchestrating a mass terror bombing of Cambodia — after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council completed “National Security Study Memo 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This document, whose sharp edges are dulled by page after leaden page of how to reduce over-population in the Third World through birth control and “other” population-reduction programs, was classified until 1989, but was almost immediately accepted as US policy, and remains the US blueprint for ethnic cleansing today.

It is difficult to imagine the staggering number of innocent humans who have perished through war or famine as a direct result of Kissinger’s half-century obsession with, and lust for, genocide. It’s even more difficult to imagine the cruel indifference with which Kissinger, and those like him in positions of political and corporate power — the elite — continue to plan the elimination of millions, even billions. All under the guise of national security, or to spread freedom . . . democracy . . .

Kissinger targeted a number of “key countries” whose populations, he said, must be curtailed and controlled lest they gain economic, political and military strength, and thus threaten US strategic interests. “Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world,” Kissinger said, “because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”

Then, as now, any nation refusing to surrender its natural resources was an ominous threat to our national security and was dealt with initially through birth control and other population-reduction programs such as food rationing. But that was too slow for Kissinger, for Brent Scowcroft who replaced Kissinger as national security adviser and was put in charge of thinning out the Third World population, and for his eager enabler, CIA Director George Bush who trotted like a love-starved puppy at Kissinger’s heels for decades.

At first, they used food as “an instrument of national power” to coerce the dumb masses to stop copulating and populating, and then as a deadly weapon because widespread famine not only dealt death quicker, but it was cost-effective. And it made more sense. Like Kissinger said, “To give food aid to a country just because they (sic) are starving is a pretty weak reason.”

If we could imagine the suffering endured by victims of such perverse inhumanity, we might feel a twinge of outrage or, as George Washington so succinctly put it — a “little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Or not. Perhaps we are so far removed from reality because our minds cannot grasp the horror of that reality. Those who seek to destroy the denizens of this planet are totally without compassion or remorse. They are grotesque mutants who kill indiscriminately in their relentless drive for world conquest and domination.

It’s naive to think the carnage will stop once predators such as Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Robert McNamara, George H.W. Bush, and other One World advocates, many of whom are in their 80s or 90s, are no longer in our midst. With the release of thousands of tons of Depleted Uranium in both Bush Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, they have poisoned food, water and air, and turned the entire region into massive radioactive death camps. Without fear of accountability, they have ensured the slow, agonizing extermination of entire populations, to include the American military, whom Kissinger views as “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy” — and their families — that will continue for many generations.

We’re like herds of cattle, grazing placidly, unable or unwilling to imagine that we might share the same fate as the millions throughout the Third World targeted by the elite as “bottom feeders,” contributing nothing — eating into their profit — gluttons who must be dispensed with. Any rancher or farmer will tell you that it’s good business to cull the herd for a variety of reasons, such as market outlook, cash flow, or just to maintain a healthier, more easily controlled mass of cattle. It makes no sense to keep problem cows, the elderly, the ill or non-productive around. There comes a time when you must cut your losses — and cull the herd.

There are those who, unlike Kissinger and his co-conspirators, are not interested in profit or power, but believe fervently that human population is destroying the planet. Perhaps the most outspoken is University of Texas evolutionary scientist Dr. Eric R. Pianka, who gave a speech in March 2006 advocating the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population.

According to Forrest M. Mims III, Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, and the editor of The Citizen Scientist, Pianka shrugged aside war and famine — too slow — and said “the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die” is disease. Pianka advocates airborne Ebola because, he explained, “it is highly lethal, and it kills in days, instead of years.”

Pianka drew rounds of enthusiastic applause throughout his speech, and a standing ovation when he threw in the Bird Flu for good measure, and quipped gleefully, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.” Five hours later, the University presented Pianka with a plaque, not for winning hands down as “Mad Scientist of the Year,” but in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

It doesn’t take a wild imagination to know that genocide is real, and it’s underway in America. The most blatant example is the barbaric response to Hurricane Katrina victims — withholding food, blocking aid, ignoring those clinging to rooftops while crying out in vain for help, leaving corpses to float in the flooded streets or to rot in the Superdome. If you start with the poor, minorities, elderly, the ill or non-productive, the culling becomes much easier the next time around. Those who wait become inured to the inhumanity and, rather than rise up against it, breathe sighs of relief that it’s others and not them who are rounded up and herded to the slaughterhouse.

Imagine what life would be like if the Food and Drug Administration did not ensure the safety of our food chain. . . . if our creeks and rivers were polluted by sewage and industrial waste . . . if vaccines forced on our children caused mental deficiencies, even death . . . if mothers were afraid to breast-feed their babies because the environmental toxin perchlorate present in our food and water supply accumulates in mother’s milk…if our air was contaminated…if we had a government cold-hearted enough to withhold food and aid from the needy and health care from poor children . . . if we were spied upon and incarcerated, tortured, disappeared without charges.

Oh yeah. I forgot. That is what our life is like. All that, and more, is grinding relentlessly away at our safety, our health and our lives.

We have the power to remove these madmen. They are criminals under Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and they must pay for their crimes. One more year wherein millions more throughout the world are slaughtered is, as they say, not an option.

The culling must stop, even if we are forced to stampede. They must be impeached. Go here, here, and here and take action.

You’re A Whole Different Person When You’re Scared

– Warren Zevon, Hunter S. Thompson

My friend Bernie says since Democrats won the Congress, George Bush reminds him of a cartoon where this destructive Texas jackrabbit was careening headlong down a path, his eyes riveted on a rabbit hole in the distance. A tortoise, sunning himself at the side of the path, looked behind the rabbit where a baying pack of dogs, in hot pursuit, was gaining on him. The tortoise smiled. The poor bunny was in a race for his life. As he shot by, the tortoise called out lazily, “Think you’ll make it?” The rabbit, looking neither to the right nor left, shot back desperately — “I gotta make it…”

Bernie says Bush is running scared. So scared he’s “pantin’ like a lizard…”

Pantin’ like a lizard? Hah. Having been raised in New Mexico with me, Bernie should know that Bush is panting because, well, that’s what lizards do…Especially the venomous gila monsters, who are fun to chase, but only a fool would try to catch one. That’s why the few Democrats out there who appear to be chasing Bush are, in reality, just trotting along in his wake. I suspect they fear the holocaust he is capable of inflicting if they catch him.

For six long years, Bush has “water-boarded” all who oppose him — especially those in Congress — with a steady stream of 9-11. Each speech is laced with visions of 9-11 — 9-11 horror just over the horizon, 9-11 around each corner, 9-11 behind each tree. “Fear Itself” is the only option on the Bush-Cheney table, and they have used it relentlessly, not only to wage genocidal war in order to gain control of the world’s resources, but to seize dictatorial power and to control the quivering masses. Constant and repetitive warnings and false-flag alerts, evidence of plotters and planners skulking among us, hateful ideologies swirling above us like mushroom clouds — is it any wonder our elected representatives, once inside the Kingdom of Fear, lose all sense of direction, the ability to reason?

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, former vice president Al Gore shines the light of truth upon this Orwellian prison of fear in which we are held captive. In fact, Gore says more in his Introduction than most people can manage to get across in an entire book. He says there is a “connection between the withdrawal of reason from the public sphere and the resulting vacuum that is filled by fear, superstition, ideology, deception, intolerance, and obsessive secrecy as a means of tightening control over the information that a free society needs to govern itself according to reason-based democracy.”

Bernie says that sounds good, but as far as he’s concerned, they’re all just a bunch of spineless hypocritical weasels. “Something ain’t right here,” Bernie said. “These Democrats are different from the ones we sent up there. We elected them to do the two things they promised to do — stop the massacre in Iraq and impeach the shallow, warmongering fool who lied us into his greedy war. They’ve been there nearly 11 months and they refuse to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their treasonous lies or the massive destruction that gets worse every day. Blood keeps gushing from the sands of Iraq. Bodies keep piling up.”

Bernie glared at me as he headed for the door. “Are they really scared, or are they just playing politics?” he asked. “Either way — how do they sleep at night — how in the hell do they sleep at night?”

If I knew the answer to that question, I’d know why my hero, Sen. Russ Feingold, gave a speech on the floor of the Senate in early October wherein he urged his peers to take a stand and insist the $150 billion war-funding bill include a timeline for beginning to withdraw troops because, he said, “There have been more than 3,600 killed in Iraq…”

I was aghast. Perhaps Feingold overslept that morning. Had he bothered to check, he would have discovered that, as he spoke, more than 3,800 of our soldiers and marines had been killed. He might even have mentioned the more than 37,000 injured and more than 21,000 suffering from disease and other medical problems. No matter how you stack them, that’s a lot of bodies piling up…

I’d know why another of my heroes, Rep. John Conyers, who had been out there hugging the peerless David Swanson and the courageous Cindy Sheehan — holding meetings in basements, whipping up articles of impeachment — suddenly shut up, backed off, and dove under his desk when the polls closed. Freaked out — after 21 terms in Congress!

I don’t know if House droid Nancy Pelosi experiences fear; if she sleeps, or even blinks, but her strident insistence that she alone is the Decider on impeachment is a power grab indicating either her ignorance of, or contempt for, the U.S. Constitution. Article II, Section 4 leaves no wiggle room, but is a mandate — “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Pelosi’s mantra that “impeachment is off the table” mirrors Bush’s 9-11 broadside, and is clear evidence that she is far more concerned with politics than with the faceless, invisible bodies that keep piling up because of her inaction. In a recent interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Pelosi said she is determined that Bush will not escape his legacy. “This war is Bush’s war and it’s Cheney’s war. And now,” she said, smacking her lips in delight — “this war is the Republican’s war . . . ”

So there you have it. When Pelosi and other members of Congress were sworn in after the 2006 election, 2,761 American uniformed military had been slain. In the ensuing 11 months, while Democrats were caving in, kissing ass, and giving Bush everything he demanded to expand his war, an additional 1,072 of our young men and women have perished. With 13 months remaining for this administration, one must wonder how many more innocent Iraqi citizens and American military must die in order for Pelosi to write Bush’s legacy with their blood…

If Democrats in Congress actually read that document which they swore to “support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic,” they would know that any member of the House can start impeachment proceedings by (are you listening, Rep. Dennis Kucinich?) merely tossing a resolution in the hopper for referral to the appropriate committee.

There is good reason for Americans to be scared, for as George Orwell said, “It does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous . . . The war is waged by the ruling group against its subjects.”

It’s them against us — a greedy corporate cabal protected by a cruel and sinister Dick Cheney and Bush, a vicious, brainless jackass who endowed himself with “wonder-working” masturbatory power to torture and kill at will.

I once read that the Constitution is our birth certificate. If we are to remain a legitimate republic and escape this Kingdom of Fear, we must impeach both of these illegitimate warmongers. We must resist being fatigued into compliance with murder and into relinquishing our freedoms.

As Hunter S. Thompson wrote so succinctly just prior to the 2004 elections, “We are down to nut-cutting time,” and, again, with Warren Zevon, Thompson admonished — “If you can’t run, walk . . . If you can’t walk, crawl . . . But don’t look down . . . It’s a long, long fall.”

Let us begin.

“Your head in the clouds?” I suggested helpfully.

“Yeah. That too,” Bernie said. “We believed them when they said they wanted to end the war. They promised to stop the torture, the slaughter of innocents, the killing and maiming of our own citizens. Just give us the power, they said, and we’ll put a stop to Bush and Cheney’s killing spree — we’ll jerk a knot in Gonzales’ tail, stop the illegal spying on Americans — restore our battered Constitution. They promised to impeach the treasonous warmongers, and we believed them. Well,” Bernie said, “we were wrong. We gave them the power — and they betrayed us.”

Bernie’s right. They betrayed us. Scarcely had the polls closed in November before the victorious Democrats were out in force, backing down, caving in, reassuring George Bush and Dick Cheney they had nothing to worry about. Incoming House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi held an immediate news conference, then hit the airwaves, to include CBS 60 Minutes and Tim Russert’s Meet the Press, with a single announcement — impeachment is no longer in the Constitution. Oversight…accountability…checks and balances…all gone.

Senator Chuck Schumer candidly admitted that getting elected and getting along were his top priorities regardless of what the people expected. He told the Wall Street Journal that “75% of this election was about the people’s opinion of the president,” but added, “…If we are seen as just blocking the president, it will not serve us well in 2008.”

Others, like Rep. Charlie Rangel can’t see the point in challenging Bush since he threatens to veto anything that is not what he wants. Rangel said, “We don’t want really a fight with the president. What we want to do is to prove we can govern for the next two years…” And Rep. John Dingell, who’s been around longer than anybody, agrees, saying the Democrats will “do what makes good sense, while not getting into any extreme positions on any matter.”

What is it about 75% — three-fourths — of the votes that these craven gerbils don’t understand? The 2006 election was an indictment of a president who is ruthlessly destroying our republic, our democratic freedoms, our way of life — simply because he can. And he can because we let him. Apparently, Democrats are so brain dead they think the “voice of the people” they heard was permission to show they can manage a treasonous genocidal war better than Bush. Whereas, if like Bernie, they’d put their ears to the ground, they’d know that each vote was a primal scream erupting from the masses — a mandate to stop the madness. Now.

The corrupt political cabal before whom Democrats and Republicans grovel is evil, disgusting, and dangerous. But even more so are their lame excuses for allowing Bush to strip the other two branches of government of their powers and to rule via signing statements and Executive Orders. We believed his lies, they say. We don’t want to be blamed for opposing him if there’s another attack on the “homeland.” We can’t speak out…we can’t take a stand for democracy lest we be accused of aiding the enemy…please don’t hurt us…

I can only hope that Dante was right when he said, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” The silence of the Democratic lambs has been deafening since Constitutional traitors on the Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 election to strike the first blow against democracy. Since that time, the erosion of personal privacy and the alarming increase in citizen-control laws has been achieved by this administration under cover of fighting a senseless, baseless, illegal “war on terrorism.”

And Bush grows bolder with each victory. He’s determined to have no restraints placed upon him in any area. Immediately upon ramming through the USA Patriot Act just six weeks after 9-11, the administration went on a spree of sweeping up and detaining thousands of citizens without charges and no access to counsel. This act was, and continues to be, the greatest threat to American liberties in our history. It is buoyed by Bush’s Military Commissions Act of 2006, or “no consequences torture bill,” giving himself the empirical right to torture anyone he views as a “terror suspect.”

Perhaps this act is one reason Democrats remain so subservient. Right up front, in Section 948a(2), Bush has the empirical right to decide who is a “lawful enemy combatant.” If you are a “member of the regular forces of a State party engaged in hostilities against the United States,” or even a “member of a volunteer corps or organized resistance movement and you wear a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance,” Bush has the power to decide you are not only hostile but an enemy combatant.

Bush IS the United States — a government of Bush, by Bush and for Bush. He has seized the power to “grant” or “take away” basic inalienable rights of American citizens. “I will decide who serves in my government,” Bush recently told a member of the media questioning him about calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. Does it not follow, then, that those coming out against the war, those not supporting the troops by insisting they come home, or those calling for impeachment would be engaged in hostilities against the United States? Isn’t that right, Mrs. Pelosi — Mr. Conyers?

Is it any wonder that legislators on both sides of the aisle recoil and beat a fast retreat when they look up and see Bush, caught up in the wild influences of his own idiotic imagination, running at them with a lighted firecracker in each hand? Is anyone surprised that Bush so easily got them to agree to his Protect America Act of 2007, which allows the continued secret collection of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails with no oversight…no checks…no balances?

It is madness to stand upon the precipice of a Constitutional crisis and even consider for one moment plunging into the abyss by giving Bush additional time to spy on Americans, to torture and kill innocents abroad, and to abandon an exhausted and ill-equipped military on the killing fields of a nation embroiled in the spiraling violence of civil war.

When party loyalty gets so screwed up it is based on a commitment to — an obsession with — opposing ideologies neither of which, in all its twisted glory, concerns itself with doing what is right for the people in this nation, it’s time to take a break from that loyalty. John F. Kennedy was right when he said, “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.”

We still have a Constitution. And we have a choice, perhaps the last one we are free to make. We can either use it — or lose it.

The Fed just poured a bunch of money into the market, which was news to me, but Walrath said the Fed has been manipulating the market for years, especially during the Bush years.

“There was great fear the United States was going to follow Japan into a period of deflation and recession — maybe even a depression,” Walrath said. “Interest rates were cut close to zero while hundreds of billions of dollars were added to the National Debt through tax-cuts for the rich and ‘Big Bidness.’ And it gets worse just at the time the National Debt limit has to be raised again.”

With things as bad as they are, Walrath says it’s going to be interesting to see how this crisis is handled. Congress may have to return early to pass legislation to raise the National Debt. But it makes more sense to me — since the bulk of our lawmakers were so eager to get out of school for recess, that Bush could decide to handle the whole thing like he does everything else to avoid partisan jawboning or oversight — just dash off an Executive Order.

But the National Debt is just one of many problems battering our economy. Walrath points out a major problem is “all those margin accounts out there with people getting calls to come up with some real money because their stock is down. As you might expect, this led to speculation in housing — let’s flip it — and millions of people who couldn’t afford to pay their rent bought houses.”

Wait a minute…Let’s flip it? What does that mean? Nothing comes to mind — okay one thing does — but Walrath never takes such a cavalier attitude about economics.

Let’s flip it, Walrath says is when “–you buy the house with no intention of ever living in it. You add a kitchen, spruce up a bathroom, and “flip” it, or put it back on the market, hoping to make a profit.

This goes on all the time, Walrath says, but there were more flippers than buyers this time around because it cost almost nothing to own a house while you were waiting to sell it. That’s sub-prime credit. You could buy a house with no money down, no income, no job, no assets.

Of course! Now I understand. If you buy a house with no money down, you have little or nothing invested. Just walk away. Let the banks worry about selling them.

But to whom will banks sell them? What are the banks going to do? “That’s why houses for sale are now piling up all over the country,” Walrath said. “It’s a terrible situation.”

Donald Trump begs to differ. When you’re in a hole, keep digging as hard and as fast as you can. Trump’s advice, according to Walrath is to “just go back and make another deal with whoever holds the mortgage. Trump says you’ll get a better deal this time than the one you had before. Don’t walk away from it — go make another deal. The last thing the bank wants is your house. What are they going to do with it? They can’t find anybody to buy it.”

So, who’s flipping whom in this credit seizure?

According to an unsigned editorial in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, the root cause of this credit correction was the Federal Reserve’s willingness to keep money too easy for too long.

The Journal warns an “emergency rate cut, as some in the market seem to be anticipating or hoping for — carries the risk of introducing even greater moral hazard into the financial system.”

We can’t have immorality in our financial system, now can we? Oh, the horror!

While chiding Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton for proposing a $1 billion federal bailout fund for homeowners at risk of default and foreclosure, the Journal goes on to channel Barbara Bush’s flash of morality when speaking of homeless Katrina victims — “No one wants to see someone lose his home to foreclosure. But many of those most at risk bought their homes with little or no money down, and so have very little at stake economically. Bringing in the feds to bail them out would send precisely the wrong message — that risky or overly aggressive borrowing will be rewarded by the government rather than punished in the marketplace. To the extent that bad loans were made, the market needs to clear, not be propped up by federal-aid programs.”

Unfortunately, despite what the Journal and the endlessly bleating “Money Heads” on TV would have you believe, millions of Americans are in deep trouble. CNBC’s Jim Cramer “flipped out” last week in a torrent of truth about the current economic situation.

Walrath agrees, and says if we continue in the direction we’re headed, Bush’s “boom” will make the Savings and Loan bail-out look like a Girl Scout Cookie Sale.

According to Walrath, there are four sets of losers in this housing meltdown…

* Those caught with the homes they bought for flipping purposes are not going to be able to find buyers. They are going to lose whatever they have invested, plus whatever mortgage payments they make. It may be cheaper for them just to walk away.

* Those who own homes will see the value of their houses go down because of the current oversupply due to overbuilding when interest rates were lower and people were buying homes with little or nothing down with the idea of flipping the houses as soon as possible.

* Those who bought homes with variable-rate mortgages are having trouble making payments because those payments keep going up, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Many did not even realize they had such a mortgage. Millions are going to lose their homes.

* And then, there’s the murky many — the banks and the hedge funds which ended up with mortgages used as collateral for junk bonds, which ended up as holdings by French and German and English banks, not to mention those in this country.

“This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and we ain’t seen nothing yet,” Walrath says.

“When it comes to saving the rich from losing money, no expense will be spared.

Actually,” Walrath mused, “the economy is good — if you’re rich. For the rest of us, there’s not much to write home about.”