Readers are reminded however that Castro runs an authoritarian regime which serves a small power elite, that has sent its troops to fight in far-off wars, maintains secret intelligence services, spies on its people recording their phone calls and internet messages, suppresses voter turnout, maintains secret prisons, detains prisoners indefinitely and controls an obsequious media. Uh? Whoops, that’s our side, isn’t it?

SOURCE: http://reform-dem.blogspot.com/2007/01/future-of-cuba.html

And on and on and on . . .

Empires require secrecy and tyranny to survive. Do we really need to support an Empire?

For those of us who grew up during 70 year struggle known as the Cold War, one of the defining features of our lives was to make sure future generations would live in a free society and not one run by the commissars  of a totalitarian State. It has been the great disappointment of history that we lost that struggle. Oh, sure, the Soviet Union fell but its successor, China, has developed the model of Capitalism which is our future. A very small power elite owns and controls 90% of the wealth created by the exploited labor of a vast majority who are allotted a bauble or two before expiring. Commissar or Capitalist? Who can tell the difference? Is there a difference when American industry manufactures its widgets and whiz bangs using Chinese slave labor?

The biggest retailer in the U.S. is Wal-Mart, one out of four retail dollars is spent at Wal-Mart. Where does Wal-Mart get their goods? It purchases over $ 27 BILLION goods a year from China. So while 40,000 factories closed here, China is building labor complexes where the workers work for 16 hours and then sleep for 8, seven days a week. American CEOs marvel at the Chinese accomplishment and look forward to reducing American wages and benefits down to a point where homegrown labor camps could compete with the Chinese.

As Sara Robinson wrote in The Progressive Populist (August 15, 2012), “It’s not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that’s awful enough). It’s also that they’ve taken control over -and put serious limits on – our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.”

A new Feudalism uniting America and China is underway. Tom Friedman will get his wish, the world will flatten by bringing the American worker down to the level suffered by the Chinese, Indian and Indonesian worker while bring the Chinese Commissar and Third-World Potentate up to the standards enjoyed by the American CEO and Bankster.

We have seen the future and it is Hell.

David Simon, unlike you and I sinners, performs so well on behalf of the gods of the Free Market that he is rewarded with a salary of $ 137,ooo,000 a year or $ 68,500 an hour. He is worth so much more than you and I who have not devoted ourselves in service of the market deities.

Like the other blessed CEOs who make in one year what we would make in 244 years, Simon is among the Elect chosen by the Market as holier than we.

So, fellow sinners, we should strive to be like Dave.

The Obama Administration proves to be true believers as well. Obamaians invoked the powers of regulation not to prevent the spread of the disease but to prohibit testing by a private firm. Hard to believe but when a private beef producer,  Creekstone Farms, announced its intent to test its own cattle, the USDA was swift to prohibit this voluntary use of private property. According to the USDA such a test would be an unfair trade practice suggesting to consumers that Mad-Cow-free beef was better than run-of-lot infected beef. Such blasphemy, how dare they offend the gods of the Market. Thankfully, our Government is guarding our freedom to become infected.

It remains a truism that we have the best Government that money can buy.

Excerpt from David Sirota writing at http://www.salon.com:

On the political junkie side of this chasm are those of us who follow politics and social issues closely. We typically get our information through niche media, email newsletters, membership organizations and the attendant social media feeds. The media that serves this audience seems perfectly happy to commodify dissent by providing niche content that speaks only to a narrow audience — and nobody else. To many looking in from the outside, that creates the image of a holier-than-thou insularity that is, to say the least, off putting. Ultimately, from within this bubble, “activism” becomes narrowly defined as a grinding project of political work trying to somehow convince A) politicians to do things their donors don’t want them to do or B) the larger politically disengaged world to do stuff that can seem too difficult (door knocking, phone banking, etc.) or wholly futile (signing petitions, sending a letter to a lawmaker, etc.).

On the other side of this divide is Everyone Else. This is the much larger throng of people who are either completely politically disengaged or who have informed views on social issues but see the entire political system as too corrupt/dysfunctional to bother with. There may indeed be huge political potential in this latter subset — but because it isn’t really served by the red-versus-blue hyper-political media, and because politics appears so inaccessible and so dominated by junkies, this potential goes largely untapped.

This stasis, of course, suits the professional political class just fine. After all, those who have accrued money, power and status in the existing system are more than happy for activism to be defined as tiny disempowered cadres of already-convinced zealots screaming at each other, rather than what it should be: a mass-appeal activity that focuses on direct action and that is pretty easy to incorporate into the ordinary citizen’s daily life.

Read the complete article at http://www.salon.com/2013/06/07/crush_elites_carefully_maintained_status_quo/?source=newsletter

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I’d seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

Read the complete article at The Rolling Stone @ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2Tc99YbqB

575 died under the command of Commander-in-Chief George W Bush

1541 died under the Hopester-in-Chief Barack H Obama

Obama wins ! We lose