(It is not permitted to discuss the following)
It’s a free country of course, you can say anything. But raise these items in any social gathering and the room gets very quiet
The massive military budget. Different estimates are that from 20 to 42 cents of your tax dollar goes to defense. Is that good? And what’s the connection with for-profit industry?
What has Obama done to the anti-war movement? He’s effectively whipped it. Nobody’s saying anything. Except Z Net
Israel’s authority. Currently the US gives Israel $4Billion a year. So far as anyone can tell, this is a gift. Nobody can really explain why, since Israel is an advanced, wealthy, heavily armed nation. It does not manufacture cars or anything we need, and it does not sacrifice its soldiers in our wars. But Israel’s political influence in the US is huge although it has never been clear what Israel does, or has done for us, and our relationship with the country is ambiguous. Sen. Liebermann of Connecticut is identified as Israel’s primary spokesperson in Congress. He is no longer a Democrat, having switched to Independent.
Question the money, or this relationship, is to risk being called antisemitic. (Brian Cloughley does in his article, Who Runs America?)
This relationship must be clarified. Israel should either be restored to status as a foreign nation. Or perhaps it should be be made a US colony. After all the money we have sent, over the decades, we have paid for it several times over.
(We note that the unofficial translation of the Hebrew word goyim is cattle.)
Debt and coercion. We must pay our debts, so off to work we go. Meaning, we are not free not to work. For life, it appears (since the new bankruptcy laws). Well, they argue, a debtor had the choice not to get in debt in the first place. But any credit card holder knows that you owe interest money long after the principle is paid off, you have to keep working anyway.
What’s the distinction from forced labor?
Prison businesss. Money-for-justice is an old topic, but the prison-industrial complex has grown so impenetrably ugly we don’t talk about it. Business is business, and here judges get kickbacks for sending kids to jail.
Government spying on and arresting dissidents. The ACLU is at it again, complaining about the surveillance, harassment or arrest you can expect if you express your differences of opinion at protests, peace marches, demonstrations and the like. Emily Spence points out here, a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law-abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many of our government departments and agencies. Want to get your name on the US no-fly list (along with Sen. Edward Kennedy and Nelson Mandela)? Make some noise: freely express your dissident political opinions in public.
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Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there is no center.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth. Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich. Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few leftist commentators, talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whetherexploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
[Comments: click on ‘Keeping the pilot light on’ in the Header, or in Pages, below]
How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
– here’swhy.
Left Blog
Left Blog 
Is Israel not manufacturing a new electric car?
Working on a new electric car? Great. Worth $4B a year? Oh, hell no.
let us not forget the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty by Israeli fighter jets, jets paid for by American taxpayer money.
But you never see mention of it or a movie coming out of Hollywood, duh.
Rahm Emanuel will be at Obama’s side watching every move.
Taken from a Republican site:
Rahm Emanuel (Hebrew: רם עמנואל) was born in Chicago, Illinois. His first name, Rahm, means “high” or “lofty” in Hebrew, while his last name, Emanuel, means “God is with us.” His father, the Jerusalem-born Benjamin M. Emanuel, is a pediatrician and former member of the Irgun (Irgun Zeva’i Le’ummi), a military Nationalist group treated as a terrorist organization during British rule.
can we assume that few people know that the actually definition of ‘semite’ is people(s) who belong to a languaqe group that includes Hebrew AND Arabic…thus, of course, in ‘REALITY,’ so to speak, refering to someone as anti-semitic is to suggest they’re anti-both speakers of Hebrew AND Arabic, which of course, these days, means primarily Jews AND Muslims…however, as many of us know, the Jewish Defense League quite cleverly and deceitfully (is that an oxymoronic statement?) usruped the word for it’s own devious purpose to be what most people think it implies…and, in fact, it does…but, big surprise, it’s nothing but another JDL perversion of truth and milking of the Holocaust…that it to say, we’re ALL constantly reminded by those whose self-interest it serves that 6 million Jews were executed by the Nazis…what they conveniently never mention is that there were at least 5 million non-Jews killed by the 3rd Riech and it’s cronies as well, ie, the disabled, gays and lesbian, gypsies, Germans who were not considered Aryans, anti-Nazi German intellectuals and so forth…come on, Israel stills exists and has been allowed to become the vile tryannical power that it is because of the JDL and it’s extreme right wing ilk’s success in creating worldwide fear of critizing ANY of it’s countless cruel, imperialistic, power grabbing actions for the last 60 years, almost completely against Palastinians…likewise, to even question the continual GIVING of billions of dollars in money and weapons to this fascist state is to risk, of course, being considered the proverbial lowest of the low in most people’s minds, an anti-semite
The translation of goyim means nations and the word is also used to refer to the nation of Israel.
Israel spends the bulk of that money buying US products, and provides a great deal of intelligence to our government.
Israel provides a great deal of what we in America benefit from including computer technology and life-saving medical advances.
The same amount of aid goes to Egypt, the source of Al Qaeda masterminds.
Hmmm. Maybe we should be investing that money in America, so we can get our computer technology and life-saving medical technology from, say West Virginia, or maybe Utah, or let’s see, Arkansas. If Israel wants to buy US products, they have more than enough money to do so. They could buy American cars instead of American weapons.
I agree–cut Israel off and let them fend for themselves. Then Egypt will be the biggest recipient of military aid (about $2 billion), plus some to Pakistan, Gaza and West Bank Palestinians, and Iraq. Now that’s a balanced foreign policy!
As a consequence of no assistance, which is mostly in the form of loan guarantees for new purchases of U.S. military equipment, the Israelis will be free to develop their own substitutes. The Americans persuaded them not to develop a fighter jet out of fears that the advanced Israeli avionics would be a little too competitive and it would hurt American fighter jet exports. Obviously, the Israelis would go right back to making this jet and selling it to China and whoever else wants it.
America at this point would have no leverage whatsoever over Israeli foreign policy and Israel would be free to do exactly what it needs to survive. Like crush Hezbollah once and for all, perhaps nuke that Iranian bomb facility, and kill or drive the Gazans into Egypt and take over the Gaza strip once and for all.
Indeed, please write your congresspeople and let’s get this thing passed! No more aid for Israel!
P.S. in 2001, Mossad warned the CIA about a passenger jet-related terrorist plot, and this information was apparently heard but not acted upon by the Americans. As a payment for their attempts to help, the Israelis are now accused of masterminding 9/11 themselves. Yeah, with friends like us, Israel needs no more enemies. Let them go their own way, free of American interference.
There are literally millions of people in this country who choose not to work, you’re just looking to gripe about something.
oh if ONLY the list was capped at these few things! don’t forget the fact that bankers are creating war, because they profit from it, that inflation is not necessary for us to live, in fact, just the opposite is true, and that we really have no freedom of speech. something as simple as that, we can’t even openly discuss in public.
Don’t spend what you don’t have. Don’t purchase what you cannot afford. Individual choice. You can’t fix stupid no matter how much you tax the productive.
The purpose of government is to protect our rights. So yes, protection will take up a lot of the budget. You didn’t even try to show anything wrong with us spending money on defense. Lol.
Israel keeps radical Islamic people not blowing us up. Google: strategy.
Well I’m going to comment on the other 2 headlines. (does that make me anti Isreal?or just anti talking about them).
Military spending being 42cents of every $1 to DC? um Link please? The IRS puts the number at about 20% (and I think that includeds veterns benifits, so not just new cost) This is in the back of the 1040 ‘how your money is spent’ or something like that.- yeah I looked it’s tax time.
Second, give that we have to work to eat. And we have to pay taxes on our work, doesn’t that mean by the reasoning that we are slaves to our bankers we are also slaves to our Government? (and our tummies?)
Defense budget nowhere near 42% of tax revenue. Budget high because we effectively defend EU, Japan, adn Australia.
Jews have one word to describe non-jews (goyim)and I don’t know of any other religion that can do that. I have understood it to mean non-people, hence “the chosen” I have spent time on youtube viewing clips of how goyim is treated in Isreal, and it is indeed disturbing. Westerners are being harassed and intimidated by orthodox extremists who apparently subscribe to that definition. One video has a youth screaming at a man “f*** Jesus, I f*** your Jesus!”
and many others showing men in orthodox garb mocking a group of tourists about again Jesus. What other religion sanctions such hatred from its so-called religious leaders?
There is an awful lot of ugliness in Judaism and much of it is coming to light as hatred and bigotry. Could that (Goyim) be the reason they are universally despised? …by their belief the entire world are non-people? As a child I remember a man say “The world just doesn’t hate them people (jews) for nuthin’ ya know!”
“But any credit card holder knows that you owe interest money long after the principle is paid off, you have to keep working anyway.”
“Interest” is just rent on money. Do you think credit card companies should rent you a house or a car for free? Why should they rent money for free? The solution is, if you don’t like the terms of the contract, don’t get a credit card! Stop paying exorbitant rent on money! That’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper than trying to get yet another law, with more loopholes and pork included. Millions of Americans just use debit…