Iran's Supreme Council reviewed secret maps detailing the location of dozens of facilities in the United States responsible for mass killings of its citizenry. Chief among them were the boardrooms of major health insurance companies, chemical manufacturers, auto manufacturers, tobacco farms, Wall Street and the US Congress.
They heard testimony that the terror group, Al Qaeda, had killed less than 1/1,000 as many US citizens as any one of the newly identified groups of lethal organizations.
Among their findings:
1) Despite a massive constant propaganda effort, most US Senators and Congressional representatives openly engaged in the practice of idol worship of the wealthiest 1% of Americans- multiplying their wealth - while defrauding 95% of the population out of its modest material holdings via an assortment of nefarious schemes. Among these: mandatory protection racket payments and exemptions that multiply the premium costs of the substance-addicted, labelling a pool of crooked business operators as 'Too Big To Fail' and enacting the greatest transfer of public treasury funds ever from millions struggling to stay afloat to the greatest financial swindlers in US history, and other, similarly dastardly schemes.
Despite the Supreme Council's condemnations, they also noted there were some exceptions, they reviewed the work of several of the lawmakers who worked to expose the propagandists as mealy-mouthed frauds, including one that was trying to recoup billions in losses caused by the financial chicanery.
2) They provided clear evidence that in the US, there are over 600,000 deaths due to heart disease, over 40,000 auto fatalities, over 20,000 flu deaths, and over 15,000 criminal murders, each year in the 8 year period under review. In these last 8 years, there have been just 3 people killed on American soil at the hands of terrorists, all the victims of domestic white supremacists. The report also cited half a dozen plots that were broken up by law enforcement and federal intelligence agencies that were tied to foreign terror organizations and noted that hundreds of Americans could have died had the plots succeeded.
Still, in a country of 305 million people, the likelihood of dying due to terrorist plots -even in the worst year of 2001 - was a tiny percentage of those killed by legally prescribed drugs and considerably smaller than deaths attributed to unsafe workplaces.
3) They singled out several processed food companies, Dow Chemical, several pharmaceutical companies, major financial and insurance companies, and the poor regulatory efforts of the FDA as some of the deadliest organizations in the US. They also cited Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve as the lead organizations masterminding these efforts. They declared several current reform efforts to be probable frauds that would not end the massive wealth transfers, would not reform anything significantly dysfunctional in the financial and healthcare systems, and would continue to impoverish the poorest by mandating unaffordable expenses with financial penalties that would impoverish them further.
The report concluded: "Taken as a whole, these clandestine US organizations cannot be fully exposed due to the massive amount of information each tries to keep secret. Many of them have caused as many deaths as some of the best known genocidal governments in world history, yet they're covered up and protected by their elected politicians, to the detriment of US citizens and countries across the globe."
As a remedy, they're requesting UN sanctions against the deadly organizations and, should that fail as a deterrent, the building of a global military coalition that would invade and destroy the weapons of mass destruction those organizations regularly employ.
Addendum: Jo Comerford adds another deadly component to the list. Deadly to life. Deadly to progress. Deadly to the budgets of the middle class and poor.
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Senator Lieberman palpates the president's back for the purpose of locating the best spot to insert the knife.
(Top 15 Lieberman betrayals: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/top-15-lieberman-betrayal_n_336024.html
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Colbert: "I don't believe it is a choice, I believe you're born thinking gays don't have the right to get married or even be joined in union. And folks, the gays have no right to out those people."
The Word: http://dailydumpbydave.blogspot.com/2009/10/colbert-glbt-and-word.html
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Jim Hightower: Healthcare Hypocrites.
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Tom Coburn (R-OK) has earned a permanent spot in the Misplaced Outrage Hall of Fame for this one:
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has sent a letter (PDF) to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking why contractors under criminal investigation were able to obtain millions of dollars in work from the federal stimulus program.
Recall that earlier this month, Coburn became a corporate sponsor of rape when he, along with 29 of his fellow Republicans, voted no on the Franken Amendment, but now he's worried:
"If somebody fixed your garage door and they defrauded you—or, rather, you thought they defrauded you—would you give them more business? Nobody else in the country would do that."
Well, sure. But if a company allows someone to be drugged, gang-raped, and held prisoner in a barely-ventilated shipping container for days, it would be downright irresponsible to stop doing business with them. What are you people, some kind of freakin' morals police?
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Climate change, NOT TREEHUGGERS, are to blame for pine beetles: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/27/pm-climate-race-1/
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Too close to be humor?
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN— According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever."Quagmirification." That's a word that sounds like something out of "Firefly".
In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.
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Troops in Afghanistan outnumber Taliban 12:1 and we still can't "win" - whatever that means: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/troops-in-afghanistan-out_0_n_336096.html
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Afghanistan - Losing the Village People - By Ron Beasley
While it makes little difference what the people think about the war in Afghanistan for some reason it does matter what the village pundits think. It was not much of a surprise when George Will said it was time to get out - but Thomas Friedman has always been a war happy hegemonist but today he says it's time to reduce our footprint there not increase it.
It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here's my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.
Note that he even has most of the right reasons. He points out that progress in the middle east rarely involves the United States. And this sounds about right:
What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won't Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.
And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan's warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he'll get zapped by a drone.
And this is right on:
A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don't.
That's the key, even Friedman realizes that our misadventures in The Middle East are destroying the United States
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h/t Dick:
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From the You gotta be f**king kidding me dept:
Rep. Tom Price (R-Gahh) today introduced — along with 75 other Republicans — a resolution to officially commemorate the 9/12 teabagger march on Washington. Other sponsors of H.R. 870 include Rep.. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Steve King, and Rep. Eric Cantor.
Causing the HypocrisyMeterTM to immolate itself yet again, House Minority Leader John Boehner pcked the same day to send out an email blasting Dems for wasting time by noting the birthday of Confucius, "with millions of Americans looking for jobs and the nation's unemployment rate nearing 10 percent."
"Perhaps Mr. Boehner thinks that honoring teabagging will be a boon to the prostitution industry."
If by "prostitution" you mean "hate radio", then yeah.
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Obama pay czar increased pay salaries for Wall Street.
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In the wake of its shocking assessment that employer-provided health insurance now covers only 54.6% of the American people, Thomson Reuters released a disturbing assessment of wasteful spending in the U.S. health care system. Echoing the estimates of Obama OMB chief Peter Orszag and others, the analysis highlighted by Keith Olbermann[*] Tuesday concluded that the United States wastes up to $700 billion a year - a third of the nation's total $2 trillion health care spending.And we're worried about what a 'public option' would do to the deficit? Big Healthcare is already bankrupting us, and then throwing 30% of what we pay them away. How is what we have now better? At least, with the government, you have someone to bitch to and threaten with our votes. The boards of directors of the HMOs don't give a shit.
...
Over $3 *TRILLION* in assets and spending disappeared from the economy last year. Clearly the Obama stimulus, at only $800B, was woefully insufficient. So what's the argument against more stimulus? The argument appears to be, "we can't keep doing this forever!"
But we don't need to do it forever. We need to do it until we create enough jobs building bridges and roads and highways to jumpstart the rest of the economy as those people go out and spend the money they're getting building bridges and roads and highways. As long as a) people are willing to buy U.S. government bonds (right now they're rushing to buy at effective 0% interest rates, so clearly we're nowhere near exhausting the demand for U.S. bonds), and b) people are willing to accept freshly-printed U.S. dollars in exchange for their goods (and since dollars are the default currency of oil clearly that will take a while), the U.S. government can effectively run unlimited deficits. I agree there is a limit at some point in the future, but given that over $3 TRILLION disappeared out of the economy as a result of the collapse of the real estate bubble, we know that the USG can print at LEAST $3T before people start looking askance at the dollars they're getting in exchange for their goods... ah yes, the printing press, that thing which the right wing appears to be unacquainted with!
One thing I *do* say is that right now would be a *very* good time for at least a one-time tax on the wealthy to fund the stimulus. Right now the wealthy are basically stashing their wealth under mattresses rather than use it to buy goods and services, thereby failing to employ people since they're not buying or investing in productive enterprises. I.e., they're buying those U.S. bonds at effectively 0% interest rather than using the money in ways that would create employment. The problem is that we have to re-pay those bonds at some point in the future. Taxing the wealthy right now would basically not change the current money flows -- the money would still be moving from the wealthy to the U.S. government just as it is today -- but would solve the future money flows problem where at some point in the future the USG is going to have to drastically hike interest rates in order to "roll over" the bonds currently being sold. That drastic hike in interest rates would hit just as inflation from printing all that money hit. Can anybody say "stagflation"? Yeah, I knew you could!
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The Moonie Times down 17%.
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"There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.
"Our soldiers are not to blame. They've fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills." ...
"Without [more equipment], without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time" -- Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, November 13, 1986.
If one reads up a little on the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan, one can find comments about generals who, before the war started, advised caution, given the experiences of the British and Russian armies in Central Asia in the 1800s. They were told to shut up and do their jobs. One can imagine that similar conversations took place in Ft. Fumble in 2001.
And so, here we are.
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eBay does the right thing.
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CIA kept detainees alive to torture them. And when they deny this, remember that they lied to Congress five times since 2001.
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell testified to the House Judiciary Committee today about "legal issues related to football head injuries." However, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) decided to use the hearing as an opportunity to defend Rush Limbaugh and quiz Goodell on why the hate radio host couldn't become an owner of a team, even while "offensive" musicians like Fergie and J-Lo (who have "alleged that the CIA are terrorists and liars" and "used…verbal pornography") can. "In fact I don't think that anything Rush Limbaugh said was offensive," added King. Although he requested that Goodell apologize to Limbaugh, the NFL commissioner never did so, repeating his belief that Limbaugh's comments about Donovan McNabb were offensive and inappropriate.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYwM9m1JO0&feature=player_embedded
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Is AARP the GOP's ACORN? http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/is-aarp-the-gops-new-acorn.php
