caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

The earthquake that struck Nepal killed around 6,000 people and displaced nearly half a million. It was a horrible humanitarian crisis that justifiably got the world's attention.

If only Syria could be so lucky.

Do you ever get the feeling that the mainstream news you receive online is filtered? That the whole story is not coming through? That the narrative is biased and propagandized? That the inconvenient truths are suppressed?

How do you feel when entire news stories are concocted to manipulate you politically? Reuters is usually behind the most egregious lies written at geopolitical levels. For example, on April 28, 2015 it was reported that a US cargo ship was by seized by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz and the ship was fired upon by Iran. Every aspect of that headline was a context-free lie. But within minutes it was on all the US news channels and raging across the hate-radio nation, embellished by even more lies.

(For context, the US Navy and Coast Guard stop and board an average of 50 ships per month in the Strait of Hormuz; Iran about 30. It's a non-story about a routine daily event. Furthermore, the ship involved was not a US cargo ship or connected to the US in any way. The issue was a legal one related to past-due payments for passage. However, most Americans currently believe that Iran attacked a US ship. Who benefits from reinforcing the paranoid notion that Iran is a terrorist nation and blocking any movement toward peaceful diplomacy and normalcy? Which military/industry profit-pumps and congressional corporate-poodles want Americans to believe such dangerous lies? Is the new congressional budget sitting on the President's desk right now, complete with a massive demand for increased war spending? What timing! This your Neocon-infested pseudo-government at work.)

Every government has a propaganda hose that they use on their people to a greater or lesser extent. Educated and informed citizens anywhere can find alternative news sources and incorporate the information into their critical analysis of world events. The blast of corporate-generated news Americans endure every day reflects deliberate and sanctioned government propaganda. During critical national issues, enabling propaganda is endlessly spewed in the US by such CIA mouthpieces as the New York Times. (Waves to war-crimes enabler, Judith Miller.) The media monopolies follow suit with so-called analysis, using false equivalence and spoken lies to manipulate the audience. They unleash a firehose of blatant suppression in the US, where it is actually legal to lie to citizens about matters of national security over public-owned airwaves. As a result, Americans grow dumber month over month, year over year.

And then, they vote.

In my first diary in this series, I noted how far removed most of us in the United States are from those who serve in our armed forces. The number of Americans who have a close family member who is or has served in the military has steadily decreased over the last several decades from 75% to around 33%.

The insanity of negative interest rates is one of the most under-reported, under-appreciated developments in recent days.
For instance, consider this.

Somebody has been screwing up. We Americans are in the midst of some serious problems - endless wars, an endless cycle of economic depressions, recessions and panics and the failure to address climate change (except in giving lip service) which has the potential to make the planet uninhabitable by humans, just to mention a few of the screwups of the Somebodies.

You might ask, how did these Somebodies manage to get into a position to screw up so badly and why are they still in place?

Franklin D. Roosevelt at his first inaugural address encouraged Americans to stand up to that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
It may have taken a few more generations, but America finally lost the war against that “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror".

In Part1 of this series, I noted how far removed most of us in the United States are from those who serve in our armed forces. The number of Americans who have a close family member who is or has served in the military has steadily decreased over the last several decades from 75% to around 33%.

The Cooperative Global Strategy to marginalize US influence in the world has been in place since, at least, 2003 — following the criminally spurious US attack on Iraq, which killed more than a million innocent civilians and destabilized the entire Middle East.

Most likely, the Strategy to marginalize the US first came into existence in the late 1990s, after the "Project for a New American Century" Neocon manifesto — America's Mein Kampf — was published. I first became aware of the strategy in 2005, working the FOREX trading desk during the Asian and London markets. It was there that I fully understood the extraordinary privilege that a nation has when its currency is the Reserve Currency for world trade. I saw how that privilege could be used and abused to bully the rest of the world both economically and militarily. (Don't even get me started on what the NSA did to the psyche of the world, which thoroughly ended any future the US might have as a global power.)

Is it possible to create an effective political movement using a shared leadership platform?

The answer is an unequivocal, yes.

In fact, many business models and government programs are now embedding a shared leadership paradigm into future plans because it increases accountability and promotes employ ownership. Cooperative environments simply tend to facilitate productivity better than business models plagued by incessant discord.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are our longest and third longest duration wars for the United States and yet few Americans have been personally touched by them. While our second longest war, Viet Nam, was fought with draftees, these two current wars are being fought using a very scaled down, all volunteer military.