22 jul 2008

Manipulating With the Facts in the War on Iraq


It can not be explained too much, that the Bush Administration is forced to keep their opinion in charge that they stop the insurgence in Iraq effectively with a counter-surge and defeated Al Qaeda, while the Iraqi government is handling the Iranian backed extremists with the help of allied occupiers. And it can not be explained too much that this opinion is as false as the historical facts expose.

What was until the recent changes the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki? The opposition, parties who did not collaborate with the occupier’s troops, was a majority in the parliament. The USA had no other choice than to co-operate with what they left to remain the Iraqi government. The core of the government is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by Shiite Ayatollahs, according to the model of Iran and backed by Iran. Also Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself lived in Iran during the reign of Saddam Hoesein later moving to Syria. His Badr militia forces are backed, trained and armed by Iran. Those militia forces were needed during the elections to guarantee the “democratic” support. Most of the political allies of Al-Maliki were in exile in Iran during the Baath-regime.
So, who is backed by Iran, that’s very clear and indisputable.

The other parties were dependent on support of the Iraqi people and that’s why they could not collaborate with the occupiers. Muqtada al-Sadr has the most support of the Arab Shiite people, because he did not go to the Persians in Iran and did not ask or get help from Iran. He has his own militia the Mahdi Army. Than there are also the Sunnis who boycotted the government and the former Baathists who were not involved in the elections. They are in the armed Awakening Forces and this were the forces who could define, find, hunt and defeat the foreign Al Qaeda combatants among the whole of insurgent’s fighters. Third you have the Kurds, most Sunnis and also not backed by the Iranian government, but already strong during the last years of the Baath-regime.
Those who are not backed by Iran, that’s also very clear and indisputable.

The insurgence was in real life a fight of rival tribal and sectarian groups with a lot of bloodshed leading to separation of the different groups. It was always one group against all others and special all groups against the occupiers who could not do very much against it, but shoot violent shooters, moving shadows, kids, and peaceful civilians. Foreign troops also took part in further destructions with air strikes. By the time the separation of different groups was settled and new positions secured there were only the foreign Al Qaeda combatants which maintained terror among all groups of the Iraqi people and only local Sunni fighters could make the distinction between them and former insurgent Iraqi Sunnis. The Americans paid the Awakening Forces ten dollar the man per day to fight Al Qaeda. That was the surge and nothing more than that.

In the meantime the Iranian backed power is no longer Iranian backed.
Almost anybody wants the foreign troops out of their country and no Iranian influence in their place. They are united by that idea and that is the situation by now. It was a concession of Nouri al Maliki after his failed attack on the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al Sadr. It was a concession to save his life and the political existence of his party. They still think different about the future. Al Maliki wants an federal state with borders along tribal and sectarian regions, while Al Sadr and the others opt for an unity-state like during the Baath era. The elections in October will decide the issue. Sunni politicians entered this week the government again to make sure that there will not be an civil war after withdrawal of the foreign troops. Also Awakening Forces are now in the governments army and police, like the Mahdi Army and the Badr Movement infiltrated the army and police forces earlier. Kurds have their own forces in their own territories as before.

There are no Iranian backed extremists or Al Qaeda forces anymore.
Now read the following:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s appeared to be doing everything he could do this weekend to give his statements advocating a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal maximum exposure. Just days before Obama’s trip to Iraq, Maliki must have known that the American press would be covering Iraq in greater detail than usual and that the Prime Minister's endorsement of Obama’s plan would work also its way into every article written about Obama’s travel to Afghanistan.

And what follows next:
“Aware of this predicament, the McCain campaign found an ally today: Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Mullen declared when asked about the consequences of a withdrawal within two years that it could be “very dangerous:” “I’d worry about any kind of rapid movement out and creating instability where we have stability.” Desperate to get any support for its candidate’s position, the McCain campaign was quick to blast Mullen’s comments out in a statement:
Today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest ranking officer, made clear that he believes such an approach could be ‘very dangerous.’ Admiral Mullen further added that his view is shared by U.S. commanders in Iraq, who are ‘adamant about continuing progress, about making decisions based on what’s actually happening in the battle space.’ Barack Obama says he wants a ’safe and responsible’ withdrawal from Iraq, but is stubbornly adhering to an unconditional withdrawal that places politics above the advice of our military commanders, the success of our troops, and the security of the American people.
Joe Lieberman also rushed to McCain’s rescue, echoing the talking-point the campaign first responded with yesterday, namely that the success of (McCain’s) surge is the only reason we can even talk of withdrawal today. Lieberman declared today,
If Barack Obama’s policy in Iraq had been implemented, he couldn’t be in Iraq today, is because he was prepared to accept retreat and defeat, and that would mean, today, al Qaeda would be in charge of parts of Iraq, Iranian-backed extremists would be in charge of other parts of Iraq. There’d be civil war and, maybe, even genocide.

You see how politics are manipulated by lying about the facts.
That’s not new in this war.

19 jul 2008

John McCain’s Fake Town Halls



It’s always nice to hear both sides, so we have to hear what a McCain admirer has to say about her beloved candidate. If I should try to be objective, you will never believe me anymore, but we have Mayhill Fowler who can do the word. Well I’ve read the article before passing it through to you, thus I know that nothing good can be said about McCain, at least not without lying, but she tries to be kind.
======================================
The John McCain town hall meeting is a fraud. Unlike other writers at HuffPost, I want John McCain to do well this summer, so it pains me to report this. "I believe the town hall meeting is the most important element of democracy," Senator McCain said last week in Portsmouth, Ohio. I wouldn't go that far, but I would hate to see one senator hand the election to another. It's not good for Senator Obama, who already exudes enough confidence to power a wind turbine; it's not good for us, because we profit from spirited debate. And isn't that what a town hall meeting is supposed to be?
The town hall meeting yesterday in Albuquerque, New Mexico is typical in that the real action is not on the ground in the small conference room of Hotel Albuquerque but in the internet air war waged at the same time. There's an old-fashioned quaintness to John McCain's insistence on the centrality of the town hall meeting -- even he doesn't really believe in it, for he always shapes his meetings not to the locals and their concerns but to the action taking place in the campaign email and conference call skirmishes over the addled attention of the press that particular day. McCain, for example, gives his Albuquerque supporters a speech on Afghanistan (much to the surprise of some, who had been hoping to hear about social issues and the economy) because that very day Obama delivers his major foreign policy speech, "A New Strategy for a New World," at the same time in Washington, D.C. Obama is setting the pace elsewhere, far from New Mexico. The McCain Campaign is as usual playing catch-up in Albuquerque, for Obama has been warning about the need to win the war in Afghanistan at least as far back as his Pennsylvania speeches before that state's primary.
Beyond the illusion of locality, there's the atmosphere to these meets. Despite the crackle in the air war, the town hall meetings themselves are soporific. Sometimes we begin with the hagiography of American patriotism: the trooping of the colors, the singing of patriotic hymns, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem. That was the drill in Portsmouth. But then quickly, and without fanfare, Mrs. Cindy McCain, as she's called, is giving a two-line introduction of her husband, and there's something about her soft voice -- I'm ready for a nap. Maybe because Cindy McCain is absent, Albuquerque isn't such a yawner. For one thing, the air war is heated, especially over what Senator Obama did or did not say about "the surge." For another, there is a plethora of security -- in addition to the usual suspects, five state troopers standing and staring, perhaps because most of New Mexico's Republican Party poobahs are seated in the small conference room. (A fillip to the unusual drama is that Governor Bill Richardson is holding an Obama fundraiser nearby at the same time.)
The absence of Mrs. Cindy McCain may be significant, for John McCain does not begin well, delivering his "Comprehensive Strategy for Victory in Afghanistan" speech haltingly. And he had spoken so beautifully just the day before at the La Raza convention in San Diego! I know the Senator is having an off day when he leans on the phrase "my friends" too often. (The McCain Campaign has tried to put their candidate on a "friends-free" diet.) From there Albuquerque descends into gaffe-querque, with poor John McCain stumbling through a series of verbal missteps.
Picked up ad nauseam by the national media is John McCain's calling the Czech Republic "Czechoslovakia" for the second time in two days. In answer to a question about buying gas, the Senator typically ranges far afield and wanders (no surprise) into one of his favorite topics, Iran. "As you also know, in recent days they [the Iranians] have tested missiles which could probably, in some ways, deliver a nuclear weapon, so it's very serious, a very serious situation. Now I believe that we are seeing a positive response from our European friends. I suggested a long time ago a League of Democracies, and it's very clear that Russia and China, especially Russia, will veto significant measures which will impact the behaviour of the Iranians. Now I regret that. And I regret some of the recent behaviour that Russia has exhibited, and I will be glad to talk about that later on, including the reduction of oil supplies to Czechoslovakia after they [the Czechs] agreed with us on missile defense system, etc."
It's too bad John McCain doesn't confine himself to a "talk about that later on." And what's up with the missiles that could probably, in some ways, deliver a nuclear weapon? Shouldn't Senator John McCain be able to speak more to the point than "in some ways?" He has a problem with vagueness all morning long, but it is this first question, the one on buying gas, that is most illustrative. A gentleman suggests that, as a way to help with the gas price crisis, "we first list the people who are selling us gas and doing us harm," like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Then, according to this man, we should have "a good list and a bad list" and buy only from the good.
In reply John McCain says, "I think that you are right. I think that the American people are beginning to understand more clearly that this huge transfer of $700 billion a year of your money is one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history. And it is a national security issue, my friends. It is an environmental issue, clearly an economic issue. But we can't afford this as far as our national security is concerned -- that money goes -- you mentioned a couple of them, Venezuela, ah, some other countries that -- that are clearly not our friends, and there is compelling evidence that some of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations. So it is a national security issue. And I would be glad to identify them, although the American people, whom we tend sometimes to underestimate, have figured a lot of this out."
Who are the "we" who "tend sometimes to underestimate?" Aren't all of us in the room in Albuquerque Americans? Besides the condescension in we v. the people, what's clear is not that "some other countries" are our enemies but that John McCain cannot think of them. This is the third thing that is wrong with the town hall meetings: John McCain is no longer able to muster the facts necessary for spirited discourse. He is not the master of policy detail that is required now, in 2008, to make a credible run for the presidency. Ironically, we have George Bush to thank for raising the bar. The American people are no longer willing -- at least, I believe this to be so -- to proffer their trust to a candidate merely because of his good humor and personality. From what I've seen of John McCain in the summer's town hall meetings, he relies entirely too much on jokes and bonhomie to slide past the specifics he may not be able to recall quite in the moment.


Well, you do know now how it goes but that’s not all.
Read more:

15 jul 2008

The End Of a Murderous Beast


It is better that Barack Obama will not become the next President of the United States of America. Americans do not deserve such a honourable privilege. The American people is the most bloodthirsty monster ever on planet Earth. The murderous monster has to take some lessons.

Here you can find the poll
Half of the 300 million Americans want to kill all the 30 million Iraqi, the only way to win the war, while the Iraqi political parties are united now in a peaceful and orderly approach of their resurrection as a unity-state, without interference of Iran and Saudi Arabia and with the occupiers on leave within a certain schedule. Than the Iraqi War will be lost by the USA. About 94% of the Iraqi people want the foreign troops out of their country and prepare to fight for that.
They have good reasons.
The USA demands 60 permanent military bases in Iraq and legal immunity for their troops and contractors (the private slaughters who kill and rape). That’s an unlimited license to kill.
It is impossible to calculate what will cause more killings, the free hand to the foreigners without resistance of the people or a systematic genocide, but the last will faster be decided. To prevent the genocide it is reasonable for Russia, China and Europe to interfere and protect the Iraqi people with harsh military force, ruining the American economy and defeating them all over the world.
We can not tolerate that the whole population of a sovereign state will be wiped off the map for nothing more than “America’s honour.”
Will Barack Obama be able to defeat McCain in the elections and save the USA?
Yes he can, but Americans do not deserve that.
Half of the American population wants the genocide and that makes it the most bloodthirsty monster-people of the world since human mankind exists. They have to be exterminated for the safety of us all.
If Barack Obama will bring some change for a while, one day the monster will awake with their furious desire to kill again. For ones and all times we have to get rid of this cancer.

What has caused this hysterical desire for total genocide?
Well, it is simple and alone that they can not stand to lose an illegal war. That is only their honour, no need or ratio. For the Americans honour is the records of slaughtering people. They offer the lives of their youngsters to kill more of the others without any reason. The honour to be the most bloodthirsty killer is for most of the Americans the highest goal to achieve. And do not make mistakes, a part of them think that the young Barack Obama will do the job better than the old creep John McCain, a 100% mental disabled Vietnam veteran!

We sought that a peaceful and orderly transition to a democratic Iraq should satisfy the USA. It would be difficult. This year in his spring briefing general David Patreus said to see no light in the tunnel and McCain called that a tremendous success. During some months there was real success, but not thanks to the occupiers, who were at the side of the Iranian funded PM Nouri al Maliki fighting against the Mahdi Army of the mighty nationalist shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr who has the support of the whole opposition. Muqtada, a better politician than strong in armed forces, negotiated a cheese fire, The Russian President Putin granted Iran’s security in return for Iran’s not interfering in Iraq and by then Nouri al Maliki, his Badr party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq stood alone with the Prime Minister’s life in play, if and as soon as the foreign troops should leave the country. Muqtada al Sadr position was stronger than ever and Nouri al Maliki went the other, the nationalist side and refused to negotiate the American proposals, for the first time gaining full support of the majority in the parliament and Al Sadr. Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites were united!
And the light in the tunnel?
There was no tunnel anymore.
The foreign troops were bound to leave and the Prime Minister of the sovereign unity-state Iraq demanded a time schedule to achieve that end of the occupation.
One can say, the war has made things better in Iraq.
It had to be so.
It’s just what Barack Obama wanted and that point of view was popular in the USA. But things changed in a way where McCain can believe in. Fuel prices rise to unthinkable record highs and the American economy is in bad shape, while the troops sit on the third largest oil reserve in the world and are foreseen to be send home. That makes all the difference.

What is the profit of the war?
If there is no profit, the war is lost!
To gain profit you need a crime.
To call that honour, McCain has to become the next President and that will cause World War III and the end of America.

Overstating Our Fears


Glenn L. Carle was a member of the CIA's Clandestine Service for 23 years and retired in March 2007 as deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats. He has something to say to us, which is heard from his position outspoken a bit more convincing than my comments.
As it goes:
Sen. John McCain has repeatedly characterized the threat of "radical Islamic extremism" as "the absolute gravest threat . . . that we're in against." Before we simply accept this, we need to examine the nature of the terrorist threat facing our country. If we do so, we will see how we have allowed the specter of that threat to distort our lives and take our treasure.
The "Global War on Terror" has conjured the image of terrorists behind every bush, the bushes themselves burning and an angry god inciting its faithful to religious war. We have been called to arms, built fences, and compromised our laws and the practices that define us as a nation. The administration has focused on pursuing terrorists and countering an imminent and terrifying threat. Thousands of Americans have died as a result, as have tens of thousands of foreigners.
The inclination to trust our leaders when they warn of danger is compelling, particularly when the specters of mushroom clouds and jihadists haunt every debate. McCain, accepting this view of the threats, pledges to continue the Bush administration's policy of few distinctions but ruthless actions.
I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government's most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat.
We rightly honor as heroes those who serve our nation and offer their lives to protect ours. We all "support the troops." Yet the first step for any commander is to understand the enemy. The next commander in chief should base his counterterrorism policies on the following realities:
We do not face a global jihadist "movement" but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears. Al-Qaeda is the only global jihadist organization and is the only Islamic terrorist organization that targets the U.S. homeland. Al-Qaeda remains capable of striking here and is plotting from its redoubt in Waziristan, Pakistan. The organization, however, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation. Al-Qaeda threatens to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but its capabilities are far inferior to its desires. Even the "loose nuke" threat, whose consequences would be horrific, has a very low probability. For the medium term, any attack is overwhelmingly likely to consist of creative uses of conventional explosives.
No other Islamic-based terrorist organization, from Mindanao to the Bekaa Valley to the Sahel, targets the U.S. homeland, is part of a "global jihadist movement" or has more than passing contact with al-Qaeda. These groups do and will, however, identify themselves with global jihadist rhetoric and may bandy the bogey-phrase of "al-Qaeda." They are motivated by hostility toward the West and fear of the irresistible changes that education, trade, and economic and social development are causing in their cultures. These regional terrorist organizations may target U.S. interests or persons in the groups' historic areas of interest and operations. None of these groups is likely to succeed in seizing power or in destabilizing the societies they attack, though they may succeed in killing numerous people through sporadic attacks such as the Madrid train bombings.
There are and will continue to be small numbers of Muslims in certain Western countries -- in the dozens, perhaps -- who seek to commit terrorist acts, along the lines of the British citizens behind the 2005 London bus bombings. Some may have irregular contact with al-Qaeda central in Waziristan; more will act as free agents for their imagined cause. They represent an Islamic-tinged version of the anarchists of the late 19th century: dupes of "true belief," the flotsam of revolutionary cultural change and destruction in Islam, and of personal anomie. We need to catch and neutralize these people. But they do not represent a global movement or a global threat.
The threat from Islamic terrorism is no larger now than it was before Sept. 11, 2001. Islamic societies the world over are in turmoil and will continue for years to produce small numbers of dedicated killers, whom we must stop. U.S. and allied intelligence do a good job at that; these efforts, however, will never succeed in neutralizing every terrorist, everywhere.
Why are these views so starkly at odds with what the Bush administration has said since the beginning of the "Global War on Terror"? This administration has heard what it has wished to hear, pressured the intelligence community to verify preconceptions, undermined or sidetracked opposing voices, and both instituted and been victim of procedures that guaranteed that the slightest terrorist threat reporting would receive disproportionate weight -- thereby comforting the administration's preconceptions and policy inclinations.
We must not delude ourselves about the nature of the terrorist threat to our country. We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have exaggerated. In fact, we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are.
==================

But even this is too scaring, while 9/11 was a false flag operation, an inside job and Al Qaeda did until now not dare to attack the USA homeland.

Giant Steps in the Near East Peace Process and the Mediterranean Partnership With Europe.


If you can’t beat them, buy them!
The Mediterranean Union is a fact, but all states of the European Union speak about the rebirth of the “Barcelona Demands”. Anyhow it is a great triumph for the French President Sarkozy to get it done that all the Mediterranean countries accept Libya were on the top-conference in Paris, 43 heads of states, in Paris.
There was the Palestinian President Abbas and the Israeli President Olmert to announce that peace is very close and there was the other President Abbas of Syria to as assistance in achieving peace with Israel, while Syria and Lebanon agreed to open embassies in each other’s countries.
France became this month chair-country of the EU for the next half of the year. When it’s your turn to chair the Union you want to reach something special and substantial and it is planned and prepared years before. The French achievement is impressive and the prestige of Sarkozy, succeeding where Bush and Rice have failed and making more with less, that prestige of the French President gets a boost.
An Arab journalist asked the Egyptian President Mubarak if it wasn’t a trick, that Mediterranean Union, to push the Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel. The Egyptian President waved his hands in the air and said: “one day anybody will have to make attempts to relations with Israel.”
Mubarak is for the next two years together with Sarkozy appointed to co-chair the Mediterranean Union. France has close and long times relations with North Africa. There are also some concrete projects, such minor as environmental measures and cleaning the Mediterranean Sea and the common rules for freight ships along with giant ambitions to develop Solar Energy Plants in the desert.
Yes, it’s not direct the need of electric for the Mediterranean but the heat of the sun is such an unlimited source of energy that there is enough to produce clean water which they terrible need in the region. That is gold for that thirsty nations and their agriculture. Food, water and energy. In return Europe wants room in their sunny desert and peace.
Yep, if you can’t beat them, buy them.

14 jul 2008

The Friendly Fire of Fear to Fabricate Fabulous Faceless Force Against You


In the former democracy it was government’s first goal and custom to free you from fear and sorrow and give you the opportunity to unfold your best qualities to the full extend of your capacity. Good for you, good for society, good for the government too. It is a political holistic idea to provide circumstances to achieve the best for as much people as possible. And, of course, there is also misfortune which is as much and effective as possible to avoid by rules and prescriptions. Take care! That makes the traffic much less dangerous.
Only dictators rule by terror and fear.
By now the reign by fear is introduced in democracy. And the browbeating is not unique for single parts of the western world. How come?
The concerns of government to free you from fear is privatized and now it’s your own responsibility. But all what is privatized will become corporate and by then there are benefits of fear to gain.

The British essayist Frank Furedi denounced last year on his website Sp!ked the politics of fear which is invoked anywhere.
As the sociologist David Altheide has argued, ‘fear does not just happen; it is socially constructed and then manipulated by those who seek to benefit’. While this description of socially constructed fear tends to inflate the role of self-interest – the extent to which fear entrepreneurs exploit fear in order to gain some direct benefit – its emphasis on the role of human agency in the making of fear is nonetheless a useful counterpoint to the idea that fear is something natural or purely psychological.
So, the meaning and experience of fear are continually shaped by cultural and historical factors. The historical fear of famine is very different, for example, to today’s ‘powerful fear’ of being fat. The meaning that societies once attached to fear of God or the fear of Hell is not quite the same as today’s fear of pollution or of cancer. And fear does not always have negative qualities.
The sixteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes regarded fear as being essential for the realisation of the individual and of a civilised society. For Hobbes, and others, fear could be seen as a fairly reasonable response to new events and big changes. In the individual, too, fear has not always been viewed as a negative emotion. As David Parkin argued in his 1986 essay ‘Toward an apprehension of fear’, as late as the nineteenth century the sentiment of fear was linked to ‘respect’, ‘reverence’, ‘veneration’. ‘Fearing the Lord’, for example, was culturally celebrated and valued. In contrast, the act of fearing God today sits far more uneasily with the prevailing cultural outlook.
Matters are complicated further by the fact that the words and phrases used to describe fear are culturally and historically specific. Today, we talk about fear as something unspecific, diffuse, and intimately tied to the therapeutic view of the individual. In her important study of the cultural history of fear, published in 2005, Joanna Bourke points to the importance of the recent ‘conversion of fear into anxiety through the therapeutic revolution’. Anxieties about being ‘at risk’ or feeling ‘stressed’ or ‘traumatised’ or ‘vulnerable’ show very clearly that today’s individualised therapeutic vocabulary influences our sensibility of fear.
That’s all in the toolkits of fear mongers.
Threats are mediated through the cultural outlook. And today, the role of culture is arguably more significant than it was in previous times. According to Stefanie Grupp, in her paper on the ‘Political implications of a discourse of fear’, individual fears are cultivated through the media and are less and less the outcome of direct experience. ‘Fear is decreasingly experienced first-hand and increasingly experienced on a discursive and abstract level’, concludes Grupp. She also suggestively notes that ‘there has been a general shift from a fearsome life towards a life with fearsome media’.
This point is echoed by Altheide, who claims that ‘popular culture has been the key element in promoting the discourse of fear’. Even Osama bin Laden seems to have grasped this trend. In an interview in October 2001, when asked ‘why is the Western media establishment so antihuman’, bin Laden replied: ‘Because it implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States.’ The legal theorist Christopher Guzelian argues that this indirect aspect of fear is the most distinctive feature of contemporary fear culture. He believes that ‘most fears in America’s electronic age’ are the results of ‘risk information (whether correct or false) that is communicated to society’. He concludes that it is ‘risk communication, not personal experience, that causes most fear these days’.
However, the influence of fear today cannot be explained as a direct outcome of the power of the media. The very real dynamic of individuation means that fear is experienced in a fragmented and atomized form. That is why fear is rarely experienced as a form of collective insecurity, as it often was in earlier times. This shift from collective fears to individuated fear is captured well by Nan Elin, who argued in the 1999 book Postmodern Urbanism that the fear we sense today is no longer the fear of ‘dangerous classes’; rather, fear has ‘come home’ and become privatized. The sensibility of fear is internalized in an isolated fashion, for example as a fear of crime or as a rather banal ‘ambient fear’ (as Hubbard describes it) towards life in general. Hubbard notes that this is a kind of fear that ‘requires us to vigilantly monitor every banal minutia of our lives’, since ‘even mundane acts are now viewed as inherently risky and dangerous’.

23 jun 2008

Escape, Avoiding the Teutonic Limbo


If you are a politician you have not only to tell the truth, but also you must have a good and realistic plan to make things better.
I like Ron Paul for his manner of life and he seems to be very sympathetic, but his ideas about economy and government are disastrous and that is obvious enough to withhold people to vote for him. He should have been a writer to work out his romantic fantasies in fiction stories and than he should soon recover that public life according to Ron Paul brings more than half of the population in the Teutonic Limbo. The most cruel idea is losing regular education. He does not know what that means. Think about it. Quote:
Paul has stated: "I agree on getting rid of the IRS, but I want to replace it with nothing, not another tax. But let's not forget the inflation tax." In other statements, he has permitted consideration of a national sales tax as a compromise if the tax need cannot be reduced enough. He has advocated that the reduction of government will make an income tax unnecessary. Paul would substantially reduce the government's role in individual lives and in the functions of foreign and domestic states; he says Republicans have lost their commitment to limited government and have become the party of big government. He would eliminate many federal government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Energy, the US Department of Commerce, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, calling them "unnecessary bureaucracies".
Paul would severely reduce the role of the CIA; reducing its functions to intelligence-gathering. He would eliminate operations like overthrowing foreign governments and assassinations. He says this activity is kept secret even from Congress and "leads to trouble." He also commented, "We have every right in the world to know something about intelligence gathering, but we have to have intelligent people interpreting this information."
End quote

All right, at last he writes some fine words about the CIA, showing he is very human. I don’t want to demonize the man as others were calling him a racist, he is not. With the best intentions he is terrible naïve and, of course, hyper-conservative.
About taxes I can say, that it does not matter how high taxes are if you can see by control or transparency that the benefits come back to the people and that the government is effective, affective en efficient and the rules don't restrict private life.
The business of collective facilities is best managed by a democratic government structure to supply
justice and order,
clean water,
domestic and industrial energy,
safety and infrastructure,
education,
health care,
basic science and scientific development,
cultural maintenance and development and also
pensions and assurances.
That's a lot less and a lot more than by now and by improving the government's efficiency at all levels you don't need more people to manage all the tasks in the row above because efficiency is the second weakest point in the apparatus of government. The first weakest point (or in worst case the defensive shield) is the non-transparency. You pay taxes and you don't know exactly where the money flows, how and to who. The answer is the internet but even the use of broadband transmissions is behind in the USA.
We in Europe have the same problems after two decades when we followed the USA until the beginning of the new century. Large collective facilities became privatized in the expectation that the profits would become cheap when the corporate businesses are in charge. That is the logic of the free market, but it doesn't work. Look at the railway traffic to see how the concurrence on the free market works:
Business one owns the rails
Business two/a/b owns the trains used countrywide
Business three/a/b/c owns the trains used local
Business four/a/b/c owns the trains used in subways
Business five does maintenance on trains
Business six/a/b/c/d supplies electric energy
Business seven manages the passengers schedules
Business eight manages the freight schedules
The passengers union ROVER became the largest of all unions. Safety, personal and technical, is in sharp decline and does not meet the European rules. Prices are fast inclining for years, two times doubled in 12 years, but wages of engineers are dropped down, fare dodging and related violence is exploded resulting in fewer personnel in control on the trains (typical kind of Ron Paul idea).
You understand that it drove me and a large amount of fellow train travellers back to the overcrowded road traffic.
All this trouble is called freedom by Ron Paul.
In Belgium there are some successful experiments with free public transport. It works and is also safer by social control, but you need taxes and public management to finance and regulate the system and in the end it is cheaper too voluntarily freeing the traffic lanes from much private transport.
Yes, it is big government and conservatives cry that such is very, very, very bad, near criminal. But reality shows convincing the opposite.
If the public wants freedom, let the public rule and the government has to serve the public.
Look what the corporate society has done to you!

The concept of Ron Paul is to minimize ruling and control, partly because he doesn't trust the servants of the corporate businesses who are their hired core of the government. We all understand that.
The solution is not to crack the government but to strengthen and clean the government, dropping out that servants of corporate business and defending the public interests. Taking back the privileges of corporate businesses is enough to crack them and the government can buy them out and nationalize the tasks of public interests and cut down the multi-million dollar wages of no-care but dividend managers. What is a sovereign nation while half of the country is owned by Arab princes and other foreign multi-billionaires like the family Bin Laden to decide for instance what you will eat today and tomorrow?

One of the better ideas of libertarians is that the economy has to be consumer-driven instead of supply-driven. The public has to get what they ask, buying a product that meets their needs. But the libertarian Ron Paul does not meet that idea in his concept.
I am not against small scale thinking. As an ocean sailor I bake every day's bread myself and I eat a lot of fish, which keeps me very healthy and with my length of 183 cm on a weight of 75 kg. Out on the sea I purify seawater and most of the energy I need comes from the sun/daylight. I need to take some diesel oil about enough for a daily ride of 30 miles, 0.5 kg flour a day and dry-frozen vegetables with me, while curious fresh fishes form a queue in the stern wave. That’s all to survive comfortable without seeing any coast for months. I don't ask you to adopt my ascetic way of life, but I give it as an example how less your needs can be without any suffering. So, you have a lot of freedom in your choices, when all the sham-needs are removed from the market and it will be amazing how the costs of health-care will drop.
By now you are almost liable to punishment if you withhold your kids from obesity and violent computer-games and that makes me thinking there is something rotten in the whole western world, also in Europe.
Psychologists blame this to overacted individualism. Societies seem to have lost the feeling for collectivity. How come?
When our world is ruled by the corporate society, the anonymous rulers, living in multi-million estates paid by tax cuts and the profits of decisive power, you are left behind by the governments, who serve those bosses. When the government shows no responsibility as parents of the country's household, then you get what your choice has been on the ballot, because democracy is a self-help organisation and as Michelle Obama stated: you have to take your own seat at the table of democracy.
Crack down the rulings, like Ron Paul wants to do? That's something else. Living alone in a toilet is no democracy, left alone in a toilet is the Pauline democracy. That left is too far left.
The difference with a conservative libertarian for a progressive liberal is the solidarity of the community and common responsibility and the chosen transparent government has to go ahead as an enlightened example, like parents in a national's household.
Therefore you need a capable community builder as your next President of the United States of America.