Someone please loan me a bar of soap. Red soap please.

As a candidate, Barack Obama advocated the public option and ridiculed the for-profit individual health insurance mandate. Then as President he quickly switched positions, secretly bargaining away the public option and embracing the mandate.

In the leaked Podesta e-mails, we discovered that Hillary Clinton believes the key to political success is lying about your real position on the issues. Did she learn that from Obama?

"[I]f everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."

They fight tooth and nail to preserve the myth of a democracy whilst at the same time crushing any attempt to actually have one.

article on RT this morning:

Assange blasts 'embarrassing' ODNI report, says 'no evidence' given

Pretty good piece by Caitlin Johnstone.

So here’s the thing, if you’re still with me: those goofy hippies were right. There is indeed a great awakening in the mail. It’s taken a bit longer than they thought it would take, and it sure as hell doesn’t look anything like what they thought it’d look like, but it’s coming, and, unlike the initial spark of truth which appeared in their movement, this one can’t be shut down. No amount of cultural backlash or Nixonian drug wars or Reaganite yuppyism is going to get this cat back in the bag, because its carrying agent is so radically decentralized. The great awakening is not coming by means of psychedelic drugs as so many early hippies foretold, nor by communism, nor by the spread of eastern philosophy and Transcendental Meditation. It’s coming through the internet.

Some good hippie spiritualism, coming back like a boomerang:

Anyone who’s ever had a sufficiently profound psychedelic or spiritual experience knows that it works the same way on a personal level as well. Virtually every aspect of the human experience is shaped and confined by the stories we tell about it. Your stories about what you are, what the world is, what other people are etc. completely determine the way life will be experienced on your end. Spiritual enlightenment could rightly be described as nothing more than an energetic disinvestment in mental narrative, a falling away of all belief in all mental stories and allowing life to be just as it is, with thought taking its proper place as the useful tool it was evolved to be rather than as the writer, director and star of the entire show.

In the exact same way, humanity is waking up as a whole. Not by a sudden increase in individual awakenings as the hippies envisioned, but collectively as we unpack belief in the stories we’ve been fed for as long as we can remember.

Most of my readers have probably had the experience of wondering why humanity is so crazy, why society functions so irrationally and so counter to our every fiber of intuition as to how things should be. Anyone who’s ever had to explain what war is and how it works to a small child is familiar with the shock and revulsion this alien concept elicits when it lands on fresh ears.

Like the "Ten Percent" quoted piece inside the essay too, and nice Assange quote: "Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful."

Barry O'Bummer has nothing to say to me that I need to hear. He can go practice auto-felatio as far as I'm concerned.

The same formula was used during the first Cold War. Wikileaks revealed that Hillary blamed anti-fracking protests on Putin. Marcy Wheeler noted an article in the NYTimes last September basically accusing Putin of causing anti-TPP protests.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/09/03/attempted-hit-piece-nyt-mak...
In Attempted Hit Piece, NYT Makes Putin Hero of Defeating TPP

The point about this accusations is as in the EU, they are not coming from fringe elements but from establishment media and elites.

People will say tongue-in-check that Putin is responsible for all of society's ills as a way to mock the McCarthyites. Problem is, the McCarthyites are deadly seriously about attributing dissent and social problems as arising from Russian subversion and agitation.

Back then we were 'fucking retards'.

"The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don't think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered," Obama said.

Actually Barry, it's a failure BECAUSE it didn't go enough AND it left too many people still uncovered. It's also way too expensive and, BTW since your own criteria for success is not medical efficacy but mere popularity, the mandate was perhaps the most unpopular piece of legislation ever enacted.

But hey, some of us retards tried to explain all that to you back in 2010. Perhaps if you'd had taken those criticisms to heart instead of blaming us for your own tragically flawed policies, your signature Presidential initiative might have survived more than a year after your embarrassingly graceless exit.

Like Jesus, always a community activist.
Like Jesus, I hate the moneychangers too.
And I'm not even Christian.

How Misincoivcing Masks Foreign Resource Exploitation in Africa - Leonce Ndikumana of the Political Economy Research Institute explains why as much as 67% of exports in some countries are simply not registered in trade data

Leonce Ndikumana is Professor of economics and Director of the African Development Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute (www.peri.umass.edu) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a member of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy, Commissioner on the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, a visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town, and an Honorary Professor of economics at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He has served as Director of Operational Policies and Director of Research at the African Development Bank, and Chief of Macroeconomic Analysis at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

A report published by UNCTAD titled "Trade Misinvoicing in Primary Commodities in Developing Countries" found that when researchers tracked exported commodities they encountered large discrepancies between export data registered by the exporting countries and import data registered by the importing countries. This phenomenon, called misinvoicing in Africa, makes it difficult to know how much was actually exported. As much as 67% of the exports in some countries were simply not registered. Why is this happening and what are the consequences?

I am still trying to listen to the interview and recommend to read the transcript on the Real News link above., as it's a bit difficult to follow otherwise, It's just a subject that interests me. May be it interests you too?

[video:https://youtu.be/YjlU3dxkwa0]
For me it's tough reading even. I need to read twice...
I wished it would be "translated" for the dummies of the 99 percent.

but you didn't hear me through all of it.

So isn't this dude some kind of bean counter who has found a flaw in the data of disaster capitalism ... Looking at who he works for and his prestigious education I find this kind of revolting. Face it Africans are screwed and no matter the imbalance in the accounting of the global 1%'s books it's just nit picking with the details of how screwed ordinary African people and the general population globally.

I think the dummies who make up the 99% are well aware of what this guy is saying and do not need any more translations of the 1%'s perfidy or 'values'.

You find his attitude of bean countering into the details of balance sheets revolting? I don't find it revolting, I find it saddening, he has to do that to speak up at all. Because it's the only way for an African to try to talk "straight". I don't know anything about this particular man, but I know that you don't know where he is coming from. And I don't think that there is any African who doesn't know about details of how screwed ordinary African people are. He or his parents in all lilkelyhood came from those.

He has no other way of "talking straight", the emotional alternative which might have made you feel more comfortable, would mean he would never work in the organizations he does. There is no other way than to "speak professionally" in places where he works. And most probably he didn't get his precious education, because he was a privileged black trust fund baby of African millionaires, whose parents just could afford to send him to the US and let him sail smoothly through the institutions of higher learning in the US. And as long as one doesn't know that, I think it's a bit too easy to just slam him as a bean counter without a heart who hides behind the details of data, who at least hint at ways of where to start to work against those discrepancies and the misery it causes for the 99 percent of African people in their homelands. I know Africans who have lost their minds and their livelihood by loosing their jobs trying to talk straight in those organizations "from the heart". You might not have an idea how well Africans can "fake it' and hide their own feelings in order to survive in the world of Western academic or institutions that are related to the UN.

And Obama is not an African, he had an African father, who was not in his life, but he happened to be a brownish child, raised by white grandparents and his mother. Michelle Obama is even less an African. I don't like to go into that. But I think one could try to look beyond the color, and rather look for context and background. Obama might have betrayed or disappointed Americans for not fighting for those values he so much talked about in his campaign. This guy is not betraying his own folks in Africa, he tries to look for solutions from within these institutions. Of course he could play the revolutionary and be out and gone. That would have helped more? You kid me not.