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.
NOTE: This is the first in a series of articles that will lay out an action plan for uniting the populist movement.
The Political Landscape
To accurately gauge the efficacy of the Democratic Party base as a political entity, you need to understand how deeply compromised its members are by “magical” thinking.
Here's a quick question: What was the progressive community outraged about last week? How about last month?
I'm not talking about real issues, like inequality or the Forever War we are engaged in.
I'm talking about the never-ending serious of petty outrages that the online community loves and can't do without. You know what I'm talking about.
It's hard to get too excited about national electoral politics right now. At the moment it doesn't seem like much of an avenue for the sort of radical change that is needed to make the political system work for the 99% again. The game is rigged, the 1% control the parties and through the parties and a compliant corporate media, the choices available to the 99%.
Could the 99% take back the political system, purge the money power from it and flush out the politicians that form the "coalition of the bribed?"
It has been over two years since the Occupy Movement was brutally destroyed by a coordinated national effort led by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Since that time, much documentation has been released under the Freedom of Information Act.
