List-O-Rama

The Bewildered Herd has been and will be on hiatus for a while until I figure out what to do with it.

My friend time sent the link to this hilarious, albeit a little bit frightening, flash animation of George W.’s many butcherings of the english language.

I know this is a little old, but I just “Stumbled Upon” it. It’s the speech five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned for during World War One. It’s eerily relevant to today’s struggles and proves that nothing much has changed in almost a hundred years, if not longer. Read the relevant anti-war portions or the entire text at the Memory Hole.

Today is Independence Day, the day in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was ratified. The Continental Congress actually adopted a resolution severing ties with Great Britain on July 2nd but took two more days making changes to the Declaration before ratifying it on the fourth. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote most of the document, believed that posterity would remember July 2 as America’s birthday. It seems strange to me then that it did become the 4th of July that is our holiday.

But the more I read history, the more I’m convinced that what we’re told about our history is almost always wrong, twisted or completely fabricated to suit the power structure. Don’t believe me? Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. But the saddest part of Independence Day is that it’s made out to be a celebration of democracy and democratic ideals yet we no longer live in a democracy, if indeed we ever did. We certainly have never had a direct democracy and the founders intended it that way. James Madison, one of the primary architects of the Constitution, believed (as did many of the “founding fathers“) that only the right kind of men should rule the nation (that was part of the reason for the Electoral College) and so true democracy was never really the intent of our original constitution (nor the Articles of Confederation under which the United States had ten presidents before George Washington - our first president was really Samuel Huntington from Connecticut, but in an excellent example of selective history those years under the Articles of Confederation are all but totally ignored today).

Even with those limitations our nation today hardly resembles what was envisioned in September of 1787 when the new Constitution was finalized. The rise of corporate power can hardly be understated. Our lives are increasingly affected by the needs of business with little regard of the real consequences for you and me. For an excellent, and surprisingly well-balanced, look at the history of corporations and their role in modern society as psychopathic see the film, The Corporation (which is available on video and DVD). It’s very entertaining as well as informative.

The United States today is, sadly, a fascist state. I know that’s hard to swallow but political theorists (as opposed to dictionaries which downplay certain aspects) define fascism as “a merging of state and corporate interests” and modern fascism is sometimes also called corporatism to make it sound more palatable. A political scientist studied five of the most famous examples of fascism in the 20th Century and identified 14 elements common to all of them. See how many you recognize as existing in our country today. Personally I think we’ve got all fourteen going right here, right now. I think it’s worth thinking about that today as we hear the patriotic music, watch fireworks and eat and drink like there’s no tomorrow; we are far less free than we imagine ourselves to be. And that is perhaps the real tragedy. Like the society in Huxley’s Brave New World, we wear our shackles willingly while through ignorance or distraction we watch what few hard won freedoms that remain disappear before our very eyes. Happy birthday. Enjoy your day off.

What our flag would look like if we were honest with ourselves.
Available at Adbusters.

This is freaking hilarious.

THE BRAD BLOG: “WHISTLEBLOWER AFFIDAVIT: Programmer Built Vote Rigging Prototype at Republican Congressman’s Request!”. I’m sure this won’t be the last of these stories but here’s a well documented one. I’m sure this sort of thing went on in virtually every precinct in the country. Little by little, perhaps it will all come to light, but I have to remember how gullible people can be and how unwilling the mainstream media is to even look into these irregularities.

Okay, F%#k the South has a little off-color language but the message is quite compelling nonetheless. Paul Krugman says essentially the same thing, albeit more eloquently, is his excellent essay entitled Blue Americans, which appears on page 177 of his excellent collection of essays, The Great Unraveling. Or you can read it here at Common Dreams.

According to today’s New York Times, as reported on GregPalast.com, “the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Parliament, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe - released a preliminary report on Monday declaring that the election [in the Ukraine] did not meet democratic standards.” There were many reported abuses but that, in and of itself, is not surprising or remarkable.

Here’s where the story turns strange indeed. One of the election complaints surrounds the discrepency between exit polls and “official” results. The observers’ findings were seconded by Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Citing the disturbing fact that official results diverged sharply from a range of surveys of voters at polling places, Lugar said, ‘A concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities.’” Well said, but a little strange to hear from a Republican. No mention was made that the same conditions he complained about in the Ukraine also were present in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and virtually every state and precinct where e-voting touch screens were used. These discrepencies are exactly the same as the ones the talking heads talked about early election night and then just as quickly abandoned when they could not explain the anomalies without confronting uncomfortable truths.

So in the Ukraine they were a problem, but not here in the land of the free, the birthplace of modern democracy. Here the exit poll scandals were nothing to concern ourselves with. Ok, Bewildered Herd, nothing to worry about here, Go back to bed, America.

Okay, it’s a spoof, but I for one would love to see the lying mainstream propaganda magazine really tell the truth for a change.

The Optimism of Uncertainty, an older essay by Howard Zinn reads as if it could have been written the day after Tuesday’s election. If offers the best expression of hope that I’ve read in the days since our election was stolen once again by those in power.