Greek "Democracy" In Action

The Greek Parliament just passed a second round of savage economic assaults on the Greek people (aka "austerity program"). The corrupt and cosseted political class- who by the way haven't gotten around to cutting back on any of their own lavish privileges and perks- are also planning on selling off the public's assets for a song, including national monuments, beaches, islands- whatever some foreign finance hustlers can make a buck off of. All at firesale prices, of course. This entire gang now acts as the agents of foreign powers. Hopefully the Greek people will be able to overthrow the entire class of traitors and take charge of their own fate.

Aside from the obvious fact that since the people have no power, Greece therefore cannot be called a democracy, here's an interesting fact about the "vote": one "Socialist" member of Parliament broke ranks with the other 154 "Socialists" and voted against the vicious plan- and was promptly expelled from the parliamentary group by Boss Papandreou.

Wonder if he was taken out and shot for good measure?

P.S. the remedy for unpayable debts is bankruptcy. That allows life to go on. It worked fine for Iceland, Argentina, Ecuador. Russia has reneged on debts. So has the U.S., before the 20th century.

Air National Guardsman Facing 16 Years In Prison For Filming His Own Arrest

Sergeant Anthony Graber of the Maryland Air National Guard, is facing 16 years in prison, for daring to post a Youtube video after receiving a speeding ticket.

The video, filmed with a camera mounted on Graber's motorcycle helmet, shows a plain clothes officer jumping out of an unmarked car and pointing a pistol at Graber.

After he posted the video on Youtube, police raided Graber's home, seized computers and put him in jail. They can do his because America is a police state.

Graber is being charged with illegal wiretapping and is being threatened with 16 years in jail.

Various foreign media have covered the case. The U.S.' own media could care less. As is typical in police states, the media works hand in glove with the police and suppresses news unfavorable to them. In the U.S., sometimes an incident is too explosive to suppress the news entirely, so the media distorts the facts, minimizes and omits the most damaging info, and thus blunts the negative impact on the police. This helps manipulate public opinion, and maintains the media's credibility better than enitrely ignoring a matter of common knowledge would.

Video and story:

Other  states, including Florida, Illinois and Massachusetts, have used similar laws in repressive ways against citizen journalists. For example, in 2007, police in Florida arrested Carlos Miller, after the journalist photographed the arrest of a woman.

So You Think The U.S. Isn't Repressive?

In a common occurrence in America, Miami cops tried to destroy evidence of another of their crimes by attacking a witness and destroying his recording device. U.S. media, outside the "alternative" press, (i.e. actual journalists, not corporate propagandists pretending to be reporters) have ignored it.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201162114131825860.html

Hey, how about the Oakland cop who executed a man (a black man, of course!) who was lying face down on the ground, shooting him in the back of the head? In order to stop the ensuing rioting, the system was forced to actually prosecute the cop. He only was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served a few months in prison. (His defense was, he thought his gun was taser! Go online and view pictures of a taser, if you don't know what they look like- they're shaped like a short tv remote. Absurd lie to say it felt like his gun.)

Quick Quiz: What would the charge be if you shot a cop in the back of the head?  (Answer:  Nothing, actually, because you'd be summarily executed.)

Israel's Latest Threats Against Aid Flotilla

Every time aid ships try to run Israel's blockade of Gaza to bring in supplies for the people of that huge open air concentration camp, Israel uses violence to stop them. A few months ago their commandos slaughtered 9 passengers on an aid ship from Turkey, and stole all recording equipment, phones, etc., of the passengers.

Recently Israel's navy forcibly prevented a ship from delivering sewer pipe to Gaza, to rebuild the sewer system Israel deliberately destroyed several years ago when it targeted all the infrastructure during "Operation Cast Lead."

Now, with another aid ship announcing plans to take needed supplies to Gaza, which is facing a medical crisis, Israel is threatening to steal the equipment of any journalists who dare accompany the aid ship and bar them from Israel for 10 years. (Israel hates witnesses to its brutality against defenseless civilians.)http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/06/201162611220564941.html

Depression And Suicide Rate "Soaring" In Greece

Le Monde reports that suicides and depression are "soaring" in Greece, thanks to the vicious economic assault on the Greek people's standard of living and future economic prospects by the financial overlords of Europe and the world. No surprise. Same thing happens everywhere during depressions. People are conditioned to blame themselves for their circumstances, instead of seeing that the problem is society. This psychic ignorance suits the rulers perfectly, of course. Atomized individuals are easy to control and oppress. People who blame themselves for their "failures" are not going to become angry revolutionaries blaming the rulers.http://www.worldcrunch.com/greece-depression-and-suicide-rate-rising-face-economic-crisis-national-shame/3350

"Inexplicable" Murder of 4 In Suffolk County Pharmacy

A seven year army veteran named David Laffer has been arrested for executing 4 people in a Medford, Long Island pharmacy so he could steal drugs.
Over and over, the police commissioner is quoted in the media saying no one can figure out why or how he could do such a thing.
Well, not to besmirch soldiers, the vast majority of whom do not become murderers in civilian life, but perhaps being trained to kill might explain how someone could coldly kill?
Not a big "mystery."

Star of "Jackass" Movie Turns Out To Be Jackass In Real Life

Some fool "actor" named Ryan Dunn, who plays a dumb white lout in the movies, apparently just had to act naturally to become a star. Getting extremely drunk, he drove 140 mph with a friend in his car, exiting the road like a rocket, and dying in a dramatic fireball. Too bad Hollywood wasn't on hand to record the scene. It sounds like something out of their typical trash these days.

Are Israel And the U.S. Now Killing Russian Nuclear Scientists?

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/nuclear-experts-killed-in-russia-plane-crash-helped-design-iran-facility-1.369226

A plane crash in Russia killed 5 top Russian nuclear scientists who worked on Iran's nuclear reactor. Haaretz made vague reference to other plane crashes and "accidents" that killed Iranian nuclear scientists. (No "accidents" have been a number of assassinations and assassination attempts, including two in Tehran a few months ago on the eve of new talks between Iran and the West about Iran's nuclear program. [Tells you something about the sincerity of U.S. offers to "negotiate." You murder the other side's scientists right before negotiating! Did they think the Iranians would come crawling and beg for mercy after that?] One died and one was wounded in those shootings, which were not the first assassinations. There was also a kidnapping/"defection" of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

Haaretz vaguely hints at a possible connection with the Russian plane crash. Given the very aggressive nature of both the U.S. and Israel in dealing with other nations, and their fetish for covert ops, anything is possible.

Israel and the U.S. just created the STUXNET worm, used to infect Iranian computers controlling the centrifuges used to spin uranium gas to enrich it. Reportedly the goal was to destroy the centrifuges by having them spin too fast. Apparently there was some success at this, since Iran had to shut down their operation subsequently.

7 GOP Giants Debate

Actually it wasn't a debate at all. That is, they didn't take issue with one another, but just tried to outdo each other in extremist prattle.

And they're giants in the eyes of the corporate propaganda system (aka "the media") ONLY. Like top of p. one in the NY Times (June 14, 2011), with a big photo of the phonies waving triumphantly with huge fake grins on their faces like they're on laughing gas.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1106/13/se.02.html


Dems of course are "dwarfs." This was the epithet applied by the corporate propagandists a few years back when a bunch of  Dems were vying for their party's Presidential nomination. (That time a similar number of  Repubs were running. In fact, as many as fourteen Repubs have run for President at the same time.)

Washington D.C. ruling class elitist Cokie Roberts (who was born into her post, she never had to get elected to it- that's "Democracy" U.S.-style)  even invoked the "dwarf" epithet for those long-ago Dems a few months ago on NPR, the Government propaganda network emanating from the empire's Capital.

It's one of the propaganda system's common annoyances, namely a blatant double standard right in your face, and pretending it's not there. Another example is when Time magazine cattily referred to some old Soviet ruler as "younger," putting the word in quotes. This when Ronald Reagan, who was older than the Soviet ruler at the time, was President.

Of course, the most blatant double standard is U.S. criticism of repression by dictators they don't back. The vicious crimes of dictators they DO back are either ignored or greatly minimized in U.S. media "coverage." Perfect example right now- a 20 year old poet in Bahrain just got sentenced to a year in prison- after being viciously tortured of course- for reading a poem at a democracy rally that the rulers didn't like, and the U.$ media has ignored it.

Let's do a thought experiment: what is CHINA had sentenced a poet to a year in prison? How would the U.$. media (and lackey media like Europe's) have covered it? Well, we actually know, since we just had the case of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei being arrested- not tortured, and not sentenced yet. This was a major story for days in the "prestige" U.S. media, with the non-prestige media copycatting as they always do.

Of course, the U.S. doesn't have a naval base in China. It has one in Bahrain, however.

Bill Keller, Accessory To Murder

U.S. Establishment apparatchiks will never stop lying about the 1963 coup that murdered then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Since the Warren Commission was convincingly refuted almost as soon as it came out as a pathetic pack of transparent lies, and since then voluminous evidence has dribbled out proving the CIA (with help from the FBI, U.S. military, and Dallas PD, and complicity of the corporate media) carried out the assassination, you'd think the smart thing to do would be to avoid talking about it and waiting for people to just die off. Instead they engage in a chronic campaign of disinformation and ridicule to create a false historical record, a la in George Orwell's 1984. Not only are the absurd lies of the Warren Commission treated as gospel- without examining them of course- but people who challenge it or merely repeat inconvenient facts are ridiculed as kooks, nuts, and "conspiracy theorists."

Bill Keller, a particularly loathsome example of a bourgeois propagandist, has just been replaced without explanation as chief editor of the New York Times, an organ that fancies itself as the combined Tass and Pravda of the U.S. ruling class. His new job there is akin to what the mass murderer Abraham M. Rosenthal, one of his notorious predecessors, did after he stepped down from that post, namely to act as a sort of chief ideologue at the Times.

Keller, in his first post-editor screed in the Times Sunday Magazine, (a major platform at that rag), once again repeats the tired trope that anyone who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid and dutifully repeat the Establishment line on the JFK hit is a nutty conspiracy theorist. [6/5/11] (Conspiracies apparently are in the same category as unicorns and UFOs, namely mere superstitions, purely imaginary. Apparently the only conspiracies that exist are those imputed to people persecuted by the U.S. legal system- drug sellers, political dissidents, arms dealers who fall out of favor with the U.S., ex-U.S. allies now considered "terrorists," and assorted and sundry criminals. U.S. conspiracy laws are so broad and vague that prosecutors can use them in virtually any situation- even against single defendants, as long as they assert the existence of "unindicted co-conspirators," unindicted conveniently freeing the prosecutors of having to prove anything against those individuals. But a conspiracy by the U.S. rulers? You must be insane to think any such thing is even possible!)

He starts his column- placed right in the front of the rag- with an excerpt from someone who made the mistake of trying to reason with him about the FACTS of the JFK hit. This person's reward is to be used as an example of human irrationality and borderline mental illness.

Keller, and other Times hack propagandists, lately keep linking belief in JFK "conspiracies" with 9/11 delusions and "birthers," white racists whose need to reject the legitimacy of a (half) "black" President leads them to insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Never bothering to refute, they throw into one category obviously false and irrational beliefs (like "birther" nonsense- but the media, including the Times, was happy to give Donald Trump obsessive and big coverage pushing that crap- and speculating that Trump might run for President, when he obviously wasn't going to- the same media that blacks out legitimate opposition candidates like Ralph Nader, who actually DO run for President and DON'T spout nonsense). So they can discredit truth by lumping it in with crackpotism, without having to engage the facts, without having to have an honest debate. Meanwhile they pose as sober and responsible arbiters of what is real and what isn't.

Nothing better proves the essentially propagandistic nature of the Times and all its ruling class media ilk, and the fanaticism that motivates them, then the treatment of the JFK assassination/coup.