Neighborhood Watch Nica Style

The police aren't much help with day to day petty crimes in the neighborhoods so people take it upon themselves to police their block. ...better barrios like mine have some one's unemployed uncle ride a bike around the neighborhood all night blowing a whistle every couple minutes.

I thought the USA was too poor to pay attention

Senate Passes Massive debt inducing $636 Billion Military Spending Bill

The Senate today voted 93-7 in favor of the $636 billion defense appropriations bill to provide funding to the US military over the fiscal year beginning this month.

The bill includes $128.2 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bars President Obama from transferring any of the suspects at Guantanamo Bay to the US for trials.

Two of the Senators voting against the bill, Sens. McCain and Feingold, objected to the $2.5 billion in continued funding for C-17 military aircraft. The Pentagon has said it doesn’t want the aircraft, and the Obama Administration has sought to cancel the funding for them.

Sen. Feingold was the only Democrat to vote against the bill. The six Republicans included Sens. McCain, Enzi, Coburn, Demint, Barrasso, and Graham.

So if I am doing my math right that's about a dollar each for each person on earth? Where are these dangerous extremist liberals I hear about...I think Repub or Dem they are all nothing more than corpracrats, highly paid & perfumed whores in the temple of govt...

The oligarchy is pissed & peasant blood will flow

September 28, 2009 Acoustic and Chemical Attacks on the Brazilian Embassy

The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

By LAURA CARLSEN
Over the past few days, reports poured in from Honduras of the use of sound devices and chemical warfare in attacks on the Brazilian Embassy by the Honduran coup. The use of Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has been confirmed by observers and journalists. Numerous photographers have also documented their use.


The UN Security Council today called upon the de facto government of Honduras to "cease harassing the Brazilian Embassy" and "condemned acts of intimidation."



These devices are described as a "non-lethal weapon" produced by the U.S.-based American Technology Corporation. They emit painful sound at 151 db. with a range of 300 meters on land, and are used in situations of war and to control demonstrations.


While acoustics weapons have been used over the past several days, on Friday the Armed Forces sprayed the Embassy with poisonous gases and by some accounts pumped them into the building through the drainage system. The Honduran News Network reports that First Lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya climbed a ladder to ascertain the source of the attacks and was sprayed with chemicals. She and others in the Embassy are reportedly experiencing bleeding as a result of the effects of the chemicals.


Father Andres Tamayo described the situation to Radio Progreso, "Over a thousand soldiers in front (of the Embassy) left and returned with a cistern and helicopters spraying gases. There are also neighbors that lent their houses to spray these things and house the military. They have placed pipes to spread the gases. We feel a tightness in our stomachs and throat, vomiting, dizziness and some people are urinating blood. There are more than a thousand people around here and at this moment all we can do is drink a little milk."


A press conference was called to reveal the results of the analysis of the gas, done by public health specialist Dr. Mauricio Castellanos.

* Concentrations above normal of amonia, which is used as a base of pepper gas
* Concentration between 100 and 200 particles per thousand
* Hydrocyanic acid, which produces a rapid reaction on inhaling when it enters in contact with the iron in the blood, and produces vertigo, nausea, stomach pain, headaches and breathing difficulties

The report concluded, "This mixture is technologically purely military, prohibited under international treaties. Exposure for a prolonged period is lethal to any living organism."


Juan Almendares, a Honduran medical doctor and human rights leader, states:


"The occupants of the Brazilian Embassy that accompany President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, his wife and family, communities and protesters are the object of the launching of chemical arms from helicopters and airplanes or troops, and the use of sophisticated sound and electromagnetic equipment that have produced severe diarrhea, vomiting, nasal hemorrhages and gastrointestinal problems in both the Embassy and surrounding areas.
"According to the clinical reports, this could be due to the usage of toxic substances including: pesticides, chemical components of gases, radioactive substances like radioactive cesium and toxic mushrooms.



"It is urgent that an international medical team from the United Nations and the World Health Organization be sent. We are facing an irregular war against the people of Honduras. The Armed Forces do not allow the International Red Cross entry into the Brazilian Embassy, violating all international health treaties and conventions and human rights."


Numerous reports, including Honduran News Network sources, also mentioned radioactive cesium. If the use of radioactive cesium is confirmed, the consequences are very serious. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry finds that the effects of high levels include the symptoms listed above and even coma and death.


This is the notorious "day-after" effect of nuclear bombs. The agency adds that "it is reasonable to expect that individuals exposed to high levels of radiation from a source of radioactive cesium will develop the same types of cancer observed in survivors of the atomic bombs in Japan."



Embassies are protected under the Vienna Convention and any violation of this is an international issue. With the notable exceptions of Colombia and the United States, all nations of the region expressed concern about the Honduran situation at the 64th UN General Assembly meeting.


As the society breaks down into a coup-provoked crisis, the Women's Collective CODEMUH writes in to that workers in offshore assembly plants have been forced to work overtime to make up for time lost due to the coup's curfews, in clear violation of labor law.


The Collective notes, "According to Article 23 of the Labor Code, "Workers can participate in profits or benefits of the boss, but never assume the risks and losses," meaning that business cannot charge workers for the losses caused by the national political crisis, which the businessmen and women are key actors in causing. Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot force workers to pay for the losses that you provoked with the coup d'etat. "We call on transnational brands like Nike, GAP, Adidas, Hanes, HBI and Walmart, among others, as well as university students in the U.S. and consumers in general, who wear the products produced in the sweatshops of Honduras, to demand the offshore industry pay its workers for the days they did not show up for work due to the curfew of the de facto government, without requiring that they make up these days. And that the workers refuse to accept these extra days."


President Zelaya has called on “the resistance to maintain the fight that together, the people and the president, will achieve the constitutional reforms and fall of the usurpers."


With the no-holds-barred repression unleashed by the coup regime and the increasing militancy and organization of the resistance--still adhering to principles of non-violence, to their credit--the political ground has once again shifted in Honduras. The terms of the San Jose Accords, hammered out by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and consistently rejected by the coup regime, have become clearly obsolete. The demand for a constitutional assembly has grown in breadth and volume throughout the country. The urgent tasks before the international community are to recognize that the crisis requires structural reforms and not patch-ups, to halt the human rights violations immediately, and to take all diplomatic steps toward the reinstatement of the constitutional government.


Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).

The Hollywood leftist elite asks us to support Corp CEOs

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Insurance Companies are no friend to me
Never have been, The latest screw was the greatest screw, while I was down here in Nicaragua someone broke into my house in Tacoma. Being a long time pro pack rat collector you just now I had tons of great stuff, gemstone and fossil collections, cash, herb, gold,pocket knives etc etc....Just the kind of stuff tweakers like....
So I been paying premiums monthly to Farmers Ins for maybe 15 years, and what do I get? A special agent and enough mistreatment & lies to eventually involve lawyers and the Wa State Insurance Commissioner's Office. So after 3 months and a mountain of BS those greedy weasels graciously paid me just a little less than half of what my things were conservatively worth.In the mean time a fierce wind storm damaged the house and it started again anyway. I don't think it's an unusual story. I'll bet most Americans have a similar tale to tell. But getting screwed by the corporatocracy is an everyday event. Every time they deny a claim they move one step closer to a ponzi scheme. Ideally in their world the would never be any money paid out, just sucked in. Just like Maddoff....lets leave these folks out of our heath care system.

I was a dedicated RJR man for 27 years. Swiping lip stick stained butts from the xtal ashtray on my moms bridge table as a kid to boosting Lucky Strikes out of the piggly wiggly as a young punk in training. I loved to smoke and the stronger the better I wasn't happy until my middle finger was yellowed and sticky w tar.
Around the middle of my 42nd year after my second uninsured heart attack I decided that I had to put the smokes down and using DEATH and Financial Ruin as inspiration I haven't had a cigarette in 14 years...Best move I may have every made. I am ashamed that I was ever dumb enough to fall victim to the biggest scam in USA history..Led to slaughter like sheep...It's not about smoking good old fashioned peace pipe tobacco, it's about smoking modern American Cigarettes full of mysterious addictive additives...

What's Inside: For a Refreshing Hint of Tear Gas, Light Up a Cigarette

Some perpective would be nice

I hear lots of USAnos shouting we're "number one". A popular phrase in use from town hall meeting to the hockey rink...Statistically speaking some one has to be number one so I googled. We're not the most educated that's Canada.
For the first time in the 11 years that the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal have been publishing the Index of Economic Freedom, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 freest economies in the world.
We aren't even the fattest country on earth anymore....If we are going to shout about being number one maybe we should try harder...Let's be Number One at Something....37th in Health Care

Escape from America

If like me you dream of escaping and starting over some where, somewhere warm sunny and more human than the USA of today...It's a lot easier than you might think and way more fun. If it doesn't work limp back to the states a couple of years from now 20 pounds lighter and tan as George Hamilton... Joe Bageant is a far better writer than I am and he writes often of his experience living in a small fishing village in Belize...

By Joe Bageant

Hopkins Village, Belize

I lie in bed just breathing in and breathing out and feeling so free that I've laughed out loud a couple of times tonight, something I have never done in my life. At least not while simply looking at the ceiling. Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle. After more than two years of effort, I'm outta the gilded gulag, by damned, and tell myself that I have at last quit being part of the problem -- or at least as much as much as anyone can without living stark naked in a Himalayan cave and toasting insects over a dung fire.

The effect of moving was immediate. As one expat told me years ago what would happen, whole days go by when I do not think of America at all, much less rage against it, something I would previously considered impossible. But when you do, you do so more calmly and lose no sleep over the criminals presently running the enterprise up there.

In places like Hopkins Village you can still send your kid to the store to bring back cigarettes. Now the politically correct set up there in the States may be blowing soy milk out their noses at the thought, but it represents a degree of freedom from government control. And besides, it is not American's business how the black Garinago people of Belize run their lives. In Belize it is not against the law to drink and drive and there are no speed limits. Here in Hopkins you can build your house without a permit or inspections, sell real estate without a license, drink liquor openly while you happily burn trash in your front yard. You can peddle homemade darasa -- grated spiced banana wrapped and cooked in banana leaf wrappers -- or barbeque pork to the neighbors from your front porch with no interference from health inspectors.

full article and other great essay at Joe' site

Wow, Rush Limbaugh just had a stroke

and Glen Beck is foaming at he mouth after seeing the pics of a Michael Moore Hugo Chavez meeting at the Venice Film Festival, Where Moore's new film got a huge standing O from those Euro lefties
more pics from Moore's Twitter

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class

Larry Flynt

Publisher of Hustler magazine and free speech advocate

Common Sense 2009

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don't care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as "useless eaters."

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

"A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street."
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: "And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis -- the Great Depression -- was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy."

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama's failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

Read Rockefeller's words again. He actually admits to working against the "best interests of the United States."

Need more? Here's what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order." They're gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn't enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here's what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father's conquered."

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists' attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays' Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America's farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks' predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Perhaps it's time to consider that option once again.

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

Is Florida the craziest state?

I have been thinking about buying a bottom market duplex in Florida soon. Fla has massive foreclosures, balmy tropical weather and I can already speak Spanish but the impression I get primarily from US Cable News is that all the crazy people live in Florida. The ex pat Cuban Oligarchy and paid off Latins bump uninsured fenders with Hillbillies from the deep south and crunkin brothers boomin' cruisin lo rides in the WalMart parking lot. Home to GatorLand Creation museum Burt Reynold's Museum Coral Castle The Holy Land Theme Park and and the grand daddy of American Corporate culture run amok Disneyworld attracting a constant river of crazies just coming for a look..It goes back to the 50s when even Circus freaks picked Florida as a place to wait out the grim reaper.....Now I know extreme heat and extreme religion tend to excite folks but I am more concerned with the dangers in Fl USA than I am w everyday life here in the 2nd poorest country in the western hemisphere.
Here's a handy man special, two houses big lot...ten grand, that's cheaper than here in Nicaragua
http://tiny.cc/slumlord

68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese

The American Way BABY

With fattier diets and changing lifestyles,

Mexico is packing on the pounds.

By Ioan Grillo - GlobalPost http://www.globalpost.com

MEXICO CITY — Dressed in the hand-woven red cloths of her native village and chatting away in her ancient Nahuatl tongue, Pilar Blanco and her family sit down to dinner in what looks like an age-old meal time ceremony.

But when Hernandez serves up the food, there is one major difference from tradition: instead of tortillas and beans, the family eats instant noodle soups, potato chips and fizzy soda.

“I’m out working all day cleaning people’s houses and I have no time to cook. So the instant soups are a big help,” Hernandez explains, sitting with her husband and three children in a cinder block home on the outskirts of this sprawling capital.

Such radical changes in diet have swept through Mexico in the last decade leading to an explosion of obesity. As families guzzle evermore processed food, hamburgers and french fries, they have piled on the pounds to make Mexico one of fattest nations on the planet.

Studies by the Health Department show that a startling 68 percent of Mexican adults are overweight and 29 percent are obese — just behind the United States, where 74 percent are overweight and 39 percent obese.

Only the tiny Pacific island nations of Samoa and Tonga have heavier populations.

There is particular concern about the rising weight of Mexican children.

The Mexico City government announced this month that an alarming 35 percent of school pupils are over the recommended bodyweight.

To try to fight back, the government has kick-started an anti-obesity campaign of sporting events and healthy-eating propaganda aimed at the young.

“We need you children to understand the importance of taking care of your health and the problem of obesity that is worrying to our country,” Mexico City Health Minister Armando Ahued told 1,000 children panting away in a running race. “You are the future of the capital, and we need you to avoid getting diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.”

The campaign is also encouraging young people to lose pounds by joining 11,000 dancers in the largest-ever routine of Michael Jackson’s song "Thriller," scheduled for Aug. 29 in Mexico City’s central plaza.

The changing dietary habits have come as Mexico has switched from a largely protectionist to an extremely globalized economy.

Since it enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, imports of processed food and drinks have soared.

The nation now consumes more Coca Cola products per capita than anywhere else in the world: a total of 635 eight-ounce bottles per person each year. The amount represents a threefold increase compared to 1988.

Ex Veep Dick Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.

RIAA:- Former US vice-president Richard Bruce ‘Dick’ Cheney has been appointed president of the RIAA.

Cheney’s duties will include overseeing senior RIAA personnel currently seconded to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice, and liasing with US vice-president Joe Biden.

Cheney will be responsible for developing and implementing official DoJ copyright infringement and anti-file sharing policies in accordance with established music industry business practices

So that greedy old corpse and his gang has found it's way back into the White House

Does this mean that soon heavily armed Blackwater for profit corporate mercenaries will be invading the side streets and markets here in Nicaragua searching out unauthorized cds?

I guess it isn't that different from the old banana republic days...

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/27459

U.S. Dept of VA is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

By T.R. Reid

Sunday, August 23, 2009

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.

a Bukowski day in the jungle

It's as cool as it gets today on the edge of the jungle...gray and cloudy with just enough rain to keep things shiny and the folks inside..It's days like this that make me wish I liked to drink more:

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. "

"It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"
—Factotum, 1975

"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."
—Sunlight Here I Am: 2003

http://bukowski.net/

Where can I find this "Liberal Media?" I might like it

Click to view large

Download this gallery (ZIP, undefined KB)

Download full size (34 KB)

I have the v chip set to block Fox News but still I hear of the liberal media and it's agenda of liberal fascism..

I thought their agenda was selling soap...

Ownership Chart: The Big Six

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. Here is information about the largest U.S. media firms.

http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main

D.C. scumbag aligns w Honduran Coup Leaders

I Debated the Honduras Coup With Lobbyist and Clinton Confidant Lanny Davis -- Here's How He Lied

By Greg Grandin, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2009.

Last Friday, I debated lawyer-turned-lobbyist Lanny Davis, now working for the business backers of the recent Honduran coup, on Democracy Now.

It actually wasn't much of a debate -- in the way that word means an exchange of ideas -- as Davis was fast out of the box, pre-emptively trying to paint host Amy Goodman and me as "ideologues."

As Hillary Rodham Clinton's major fundraiser during last year's presidential primary, Davis is known for, among other things, leading the attack on Barack Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "Why didn't he speak up earlier?" Davis asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, demanding to know why Obama didn't distance himself from Wright's remarks.

Recently, Davis has been hired by corporations to derail the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize. And all the while, he has touted himself as a "pro-labor liberal."

Davis was also the chief U.S. lobbyist for the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late '90s and played an important role in strengthening relations between then President Bill Clinton and its de facto president Gen. Perez Musharraf.

Now Davis finds himself defending another de facto regime, in Honduras, that is engaging in "grave and systemic" political repression, suspending due process, harassing independent journalists, killing or disappearing at least 10 people and detaining hundreds as "constitutional."

And all the while he has touted himself as a (Honduran) constitutional expert.

The Honduras coup occurred on June 28, when soldiers working on behalf of a the small group of business and political elites who now control the country, kidnapped democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile.

Since then, the military-backed regime of Roberto Micheletti has argued to the world that it was acting constitutionally, even though nearly every country in Latin America, along with the European Union, isn't buying it.

Only in the U.S. is there a debate as to whether the Micheletti government is legal -- largely thanks to the lobbying efforts of Davis.

Davis's argument is based on a disingenuous description of the legal and political maneuvers by Zelaya's opponents in the Supreme Court and Congress prior to the coup. He calls these power grabs constitutional.

REST OF THE STORY:

http://tiny.cc/scumbag

Putting the wacky in wacky doodle

This is some more crazy right wing fear mail, another boogie man from those Xtian wack jobs at Digital Minitries..
The Socialist Elite is going to declare martial law!!
YIKEs forced lattes and mandatory chablis...

Militarization of Swine Flu Preparations
By Alex Newman

The increasing militarization of preparations for an outbreak of swine flu is proceeding rapidly and without very much public debate, despite the relatively mild nature of the disease so far and the fact that many experts believe the panic has been overblown.

Earlier this week, Republican Representative Paul Broun of Georgia warned a town hall meeting that a “socialistic elite” may be preparing to declare martial law in the United States using a pandemic disease as the pretext. “They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he told attendees according to an article in the Athens Banner-Herald. “We’ve seen that historically.”

In another alarming development this week, National Guard troops are involved in a drill to take over a high school in Maine to deal with potential riots and panic over distribution of treatment for the H1N1 virus, the Maine Sun Journal reported Thursday. “The National Guardsmen will take on the roles of panicked citizens and military police and practice what they would do, such as using tear gas, in the case of a riot,” said the newspaper article entitled “National Guard Drill at High School to Prepare for Possible H1N1 Riot.” The story also noted that local law enforcement would be involved.

This is all despite the fact that the Maine Center for Disease Control has reported just one death tied to the swine flu, and the man actually died from “underlying conditions complicated by H1N1,” according to Dr. Dora Mills, the center’s director.

“This is just a component of moving the stuff from point A to B,” assured the director of Oxford County’s emergency management agency, Scott Parker. He told the Sun Journal that the plan would only be put in place “if needed.”

Apparently concerns about panic and disorder were raised during a conference in April, so the governor and the adjutant General of the Maine National Guard decided to formulate a plan to bring in military police.

But if state military police preparations weren’t bad enough, the federal government now wants to usurp state forces for domestic use under the Pentagon’s command. Though at least the states are fighting back on this issue.

The National Governors Association wrote a letter to the Department of Defense last week criticizing the proposals to take control of their National Guard units for domestic disasters. “Strong potential exists for confusion in mission execution and the dilution of governors' control over situations with which they are more familiar and better capable of handling than a federal military commander," the letter stated.

But no matter who retains control of the National Guard troops preparing to deal with swine flu, the federal government’s increasingly militarized “emergency preparations” for the virus are developing quickly and mostly under the radar. Just last month CNN and Fox News reported online that the U.S. military was drawing up plans to deal with a spread of the swine flu. “The Pentagon is preparing to make troops available if necessary to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency tackle a potential outbreak of the H1N1 virus,” according to a July 29 Fox News article entitled "Military Poised to Help FEMA Battle Swine Flu Outbreak."

And as early as last year, reports also began to surface that federal troops were preparing for “homeland defense” missions and would be operating on American soil — in what would appear to be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military forces in domestic law enforcement.

“They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control,” noted the Army Times in a 2008 article entitled "Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1." The soldiers will also be responsible for things like knowing how to set up road blocks and the use of “nonlethal” weapons normally reserved for war-zones to subdue Americans.

Additionally, the Obama administration has recently resurrected the heavily criticized Bush-era proposal to “update” quarantine regulations, while the U.S. Army advertises jobs for “internment/resettlement specialists” on its website.

The federal government’s health authorities operate quarantine centers from Anchorage to Miami, and in 2005 George W. Bush used an executive order to add flu that has the “potential” to create a pandemic to a list of quarantinable diseases. Will the military be used to enforce the quarantines? It is appearing increasingly possible, if it comes to that.

This is all happening at a time when countless experts are warning that fears about the swine-flu virus have been blown out of proportion. In many places the disease even seems to be dissipating. “We'll probably see something that won't be that bad,” said Ontario’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Richard Schabas. “We would not expect it to be as bad as the flu year was in 2003 with the Fujian strain.”

He noted that a pandemic would be expected to kill thousands just in Canada, but so far the swine flu has claimed 66 lives there. “You tell me how overblown that is.… Our preparations always have to be advised not just by the sense of possibilities, but by a sense of probabilities.”

England’s chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, recently announced plans to scale back the National Pandemic Flu Service from about 1,600 call-center workers to less than 600 as the number of cases there continues to fall. He warned of the potential for a “second wave,” but so far the disease has been less deadly than even the regular seasonal flu.

Australian National University microbiologist Peter Collignon told ABC News the H1N1 virus was no worse than annual influenza strains. “My major concern about what's happening is the fear is out of proportion to what the data shows," he said, adding that the use of the word “pandemic” was creating unnecessary concern.

But here in the United States, the emergency preparations continue to expand along with the power of the federal government. There has already been discussion of forced vaccinations. And an inspection of so-called “executive orders” issued by past presidents and continuing under Obama reveals that the executive branch already claims sweeping “emergency” powers to deal with health concerns.

Unless Americans start demanding some transparency and accountability, the trend towards bigger and more aggressive government will likely continue. This time the excuse happens to be swine flu, but there will always be some “crisis” not to be “wasted,” as Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it.

The preparations currently under way to deal with swine flu are not only unconstitutional, they are probably more dangerous than the virus itself. It is time for Americans to take personal responsibility for their health and their government and to say enough is enough.

Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don't have a sense of humor it just isn't funny anymore. .........Wavy Gravy

mz7vjyghbq

The coup in Honduras is a symptom of the underlying imperialist cancer eating away at Latin America

Honduras : back to 1963

Monday, 17 August 2009, 5:23 pm
Column: Toni Solo

Honduras : back to 1963

by Toni Solo

The democratization of Honduran society - any society - requires a significant redistribution of wealth. Recognizing that, Manuel Zelaya tried implementing a programme of government to deliver the benefits of the nation's resources to the impoverished majority. Over 50% of Hondurans live in poverty. Zelaya's attempt at some moderate level of social justice brought a vicious response from the country's entrenched plutocrat elite. In Latin America, this is an ancient political motif.

Some history

The pattern of reform and reaction in the region became fixed in the decades before the Second World War. In Central America, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala were all ruled by brutal dictatorships through the 1930s until the mid and late 1940s. One reading of the murder of the reformist Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitan in 1948 in Colombia is that it defined the permanent rejection of reform by regional oligarchies allied to powerful foreign corporate interests, especially those of the United States.

But it took some years for that rejection to consolidate itself fully in Central America. The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 was preceded by the great popular strike in Honduras of the same year. Moderate reformist programmes by governments like those of Arbenz in Guatemala and of Ramon Villeda Morales in Honduras were paralleled in El Salvador under the Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática lead by army lieutenant-colonels Oscar Osorio and José María Lemus.

It was the violent United States government reaction to the Cuban revolution, especially after the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which ended prospects of broad democratic reform in the region. 1963 saw two clear embodiments of this reality. First, in September of that year in the Dominican Republic, reformist President Juan Bosch was overthrown in a military coup effectively supported by the United States. Then just a few days later, in Honduras, Colonel Lopez Arellano overthrew the Liberal Party government of Ramon Villeda Morales.

Lopez Arellano's coup was staged ten days before general elections in which the progressive Liberal Party candidate Modesto Rodas Alvarado was the overwhelming favourite to win the Presidency. US policy in regard to such coups has hardly changed at all in fifty years. Kirk Bowman writes of the coup by Lopez Arellano :

"When López went ahead with the coup, his conservative allies scoffed at the threatened suspension of U.S. aid and a break in diplomatic relations: The U.S. 'would be back in six months'. The U.S. threat was hollow. Numerous democratic presidents were ousted in 1962 and 1963 and all of them were friends of Villeda. Coups in El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador were followed closely in the press and the conservative opposition in Honduras could track the pattern: The U.S. in every case suspended relations, publicly exclaimed support of democracy, and then quickly renewed relations with the generals. The pattern would be no different in Honduras. "(1)

Little has changed. US policy remains almost exactly the same now as it was in 1963. The European Union and its member governments will eventually follow the lead of President Obama. Some formula in the name of stability - for rich country corporations and banks, not for ordinary people in Honduras - will be agreed. Foreign governments will probably make every effort to legitimize the practical anti-democratic effects of the coup so as to protect their corporate sectors' investments.

Specific local context in Honduras

Honduran indigenous peoples' leader Salvador Zuniga remarked in a recent interview that the coup against Manuel Zelaya meant a regression of 30 years in Honduran politics. He might well have said over 45 years, because Manuel Zelaya very much represents a return to the original sense of the rodista current of the Honduran Liberal Party. That is why descriptions of Zelaya as a "leftist" are ridiculous. Rodas, was a moderate reformer anxious to modernize the country and turn it into a successful capitalist social democracy similar to the Costa Rica of Pepe Figueres.

Manuel Zelaya's political project was an effort to take up again the meaning of the political programme that Modesto Rodas Alvarado originally put to the Honduran people in the election campaign of 1963. One can see this in the development of the Liberal Party since the country's tenuous, nominal return to electoral democracy in 1981. In Honduras, the National Party, whose members are called "cachurecos", has always been the party of the conservative landowners and their allies. The Liberal Party is disparaged by its opponents as the party of the "chusma", the rabble, the impoverished majority.

In Honduras, the effective period of military dominance lasted thirty years - from 1963 until 1993. Throughout that period, the armed forces dictated the acceptable parameters of political action. Political disagreements in the army high command were at least as important as political arguments within the two traditional political parties. Constantly overseeing matters was the United States government, regularly brokering policy arrangements and smoothing over fractious splits between its local corporate allies in the Honduran plutocrat elite and its proxies in the Honduran military high command.

Left wing political input into Honduran public life was completely marginalized until the victory of Carlos Roberto Reina in the presidential elections of 1993. Carlos Reina represented the centre-left current in the Liberal Party. One has to remember that the Liberal Party has always included plutocrats like Jorge Bueso Arias, Miguel Facussé and Carlos Flores Facussé and Jaime Rosenthal, among several others.

In 1982, Reina and like-minded Liberal Party members had formed formed the Alianza Liberal del Pueblo in an attempt to counter the pro-US government policy of the rodista Roberto Suazo Cordoba. ALIPO failed to counteract the "dirty war" and the terror war against Nicaragua waged by Nicaraguan Contra from Honduran territory, supervised by US ambassador John Negroponte. Largely in protest, Carlos Reina and his brother Jorge Arturo formed the Movimiento Liberal Democrático Revolucionario (M-Lider).

But it was the moderate rodista Jose Azcona Hoyo, a keen supporter of United States regional policy, who easily won the 1985 Presidential elections. Manuel Zelaya back then supported Azcona, not Reina. When Carlos Reina did finally win the Presidency his administration was hobbled by a dreadful economic situation and dramatically worsening social problems, especially violent crime. Reina's main achievement was to advance the subordination of the military to civilian control.

Under Reina, Manuel Zelaya was director of the Honduran Social Investment Fund, an entity whose primary purpose was to mitigate the socially destructive effects of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies like public spending cutbacks, privatization and deregulation. Reina was succeeded as President by another Liberal Party boss, Carlos Flores Facussé, a plutocrat oligarch determined to maintain the status quo. Flores Facussé, a leading conservative rodista , had been an enthusiastically pro-US minister under the Suazo Cordoba regime duirng the "dirty war"era of the death squads.

Very close to Flores Facussé, Zelaya was given special responsibility for reconstruction following Hurricane Mitch. In 2001, Zelaya formed his own current within the Liberal Party, called Movimiento Esperanza Liberal (MEL). It is worth bearing in mind what Honduran activist Lidice Ortega thinks of Zelaya's political position, "At no time has Mel's government been a left wing government." (2)

Zelaya as President

By 2005 Zelaya was able to win sufficient support from the other Liberal party machine-bosses to secure his candidacy for the presidential elections of that year. He campaigned on a platform of poverty reduction and greater citizen participation in decision making. The actual election was tainted by a long delayed count lasting almost a month with very obvious negotiation around the results between the leadership of the Liberal and National parties. Zelaya's resulting administration represented a mosaic of power brokers from the various strands of the Liberal Party.

For Zelaya, the make or break measure of his government's success was always poverty reduction within a context of political democratization and economic modernization. The energy crisis of 2006 led to a showdown with the corrupt monopolistic oil companies that had rigged fuel prices for years so as to inflate their profits. Around the same time, Zelaya refused to privatize the Hondutel state telecommunications company, as urged by the International Monetary Fund. In both cases, Zelaya antagonized local big business as well as foreign multinationals.

Initial US government acceptance in 2006 of President Zelaya's proposal to recoup for civilian use the US military's Palmerola-Soto Cano air base, turned to antagonism through 2007 and 2008. Zelaya took Honduras into the Venezuelan-led Petrocaribe energy security initiative in December 2007, beginning his engagement with Venezuela and Cuba. Zelaya had already completely normalized diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2007 by assigning an ambassador there for the first time since 1961.

In August 2008 Honduras joined the broader regional ALBA economic and trade bloc. That move made Honduras eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of concessionary trade deals and lines of credit, valuable health care resources and participation in multifarious cultural, educational and sports programmes. That decision represented a challenge both to US government influence in Honduras and the control of the Honduran plutocrat oligarchy of important sectors of the Honduran economy, like pharmaceuticals or credit and other resources for small businesses and farmers .

At the end of 2008, the decision to increase the minimum wage by 60% outraged the Honduran business and land owning oligarchy even more. Finally, Zelaya's efforts to try and work out how to hold a Constituent Assembly posed a fundamental threat to the traditional political control of the country's most powerful business and media interests in both the National Party and, especially, in the Liberal Party. The obvious support and domestic political autonomy Zelaya had accumulated by July 2009 destabilized the corrupt Liberal Party leadership, epitomised by sharp, suave corporate gangsters like the Facussés and mediocre bullies like coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti.

As Zelaya's Interior Minister Victor Meza has said, in 2008 Zelaya "became convinced that in order to change Honduras it was necessary to break with traditional bipartisan arrangements. His change of opinion has to do with, on the one hand his direct contact with ordinary people, which is intense and, on the other hand, with the obstacles created by the party leaderships and their economic interests to the reforms he proposed. Convinced that reforms, even minimal ones, would be impossible with the traditional parties, he bet on creating another party." (3)

Meza also makes clear that the conflict between Zelaya and the traditional party elites predated any relationship with Venezuela, "Zelaya's change predates his relationship with Hugo Chavez and conicided with the increasing opposition of the communications media who got more hostile by the day. So it is quite false that everything results from the influence of Chavez, as the de facto regime states, because the conflict had begun before the Venezuelan's arrival on the scene."(4)

Meza is absolutely clear that the coup d'etat originated among the business and media-owning oligarchy who then co-opted their political allies and the military. Along the way they seem to have readily secured permission to go ahead with the coup from the US government. Meza's view is confirmed by the Honduran sociologist Leticia Salomon, who asserts that the coup was "planned by a business grouping lead by Carlos Roberto Facussé" (5).

The never-ending story

The coup d'état in Honduras represents an attempt to prevent democratic change and economic renewal so as to benefit the country's tiny plutocrat elite of no more than ten or a dozen families. The United States government effectively supports the coup regime because it conveniently rolls back efforts at genuine social and economic reform in Central America, helpfully perpetuating US dominance in the region. A simple measure of this truth is literacy.

North American and European aid has poured into Central America to the tune of tens of billions of dollars since 1990. But literacy indicators have either worsened or stayed the same throughout that period. In 2006 Nicaragua joined ALBA. Three years later, UNESCO has now declared Nicaragua free of illiteracy. In Honduras, illiteracy is still around 20% in a country that never experienced the war devastation endured by Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The coup in Honduras is a symptom of the underlying imperialist cancer eating away at Latin America's natural resources and human potential. The complete cast of global corporate villainy nestles snugly within the interstices of rich country debt and trade extortion backed up by US militarism. The history of North American and European imperialist aggression and coercion applied to weaker, resource-rich countries, amounts to a never-ending war on the global poor.

The Latin American theatre of that war now pits the US and its allies - like Colombia, Honduras, Mexico and Peru - against the ALBA countries - Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Latin American ruling elites expect - and receive - foreign military and economic help to sustain their oligarchical power by denying their countries' impoverished majorities a decent life. In all the years since Simón Bolívar and Francisco Morazán, hardly anything has changed. As things stand now, the chances of defeating the coup depend almost entirely on the resistance of the Honduran popular movement.

Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings

When a friend first introduced me to the writings and rantings of fellow expat Joe Bageant, he said:

"you'll like Joe he writes like you would if you could write"

I think Joe sounds like a lot of us....and there are a lot of us!

Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed

This essay was originally published on AlterNet.

By Joe Bageant


A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:

"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.

"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."

My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.

I have indeed slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.

For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Savile Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.

The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.

For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.

Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels. 

DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"

"I am the Son of God."

"Grab a cross on the way out."

On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...

Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?

Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.

The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.

With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.

Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.

High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.

"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.

During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.

Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!

For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.

You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.

Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.

Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.

Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!

Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...

Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership. Rent a Life, Inc. (Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.

Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.

Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.

Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.

The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"

Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.

Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).

Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Virginia, Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"

Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?

How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?

"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."

I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.

Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.

After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.

Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.

Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."

Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.