Overcoming Divide and Conquer Strategies: 99.9% of the US
Population Should Support the Public Unions’ Fight Against
Occupying Economic Imperialists
Summary: The global bankers, who caused our economic crisis,
are attempting to deflect blame and divide the American public
by escalating attacks on public-sector workers.
The battle in Wisconsin, which is spreading across the entire
nation, should be viewed in a global economic context.
Do not let the obsolete Republican vs. Democrat charade confuse
you.
Even if you believe Unions have been corrupted, in this case you
have to go with the strategy: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The Global Economic Elite have launched a war on 99.9% of the
US public, we must unite and rally together.
Unions have played a key role in uprisings from Europe to the
Middle East.
We must seize this opportunity and let Wisconsin be a spark to light the fires of non-violent rebellion throughout the United States.
By David DeGraw
AmpedStatus Report
February 26th, 2011
There is a rule of war that many people are failing to understand: “Do not fight the last war.”
In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene calls this “The Guerrilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy:”
“What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats. You must consciously wage war against the past and force yourself to react to the present moment. Be ruthless on yourself; do not repeat the same tired methods.”
The sad truth is that most people are still fighting yesterday’s war.
The Republican vs. Democrat charade — good cop, bad cop nonsense — is a mere smokescreen.
Don’t be confused by obsolete preconceptions and propaganda.
There is one war being fought, The Global Economic Elite Vs. The People.
A global banking cartel has looted nation after nation, the world
over, the United States is no exception.
They’ve looted trillions from the US public and now they are trying
to cut the throat of the public unions.
While in the process of attacking private-sector workers and small businesses throughout the country, they are also cracking down on the last layer of worker protections within the public-sector.
The same economic central planners that have systematically
exploited workers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia
and Asia, have exploited American workers as well.
One-tenth of one percent of the population got luxurious life
boats, while 99.9% of us are being left behind to drown in a
sea of debt and social upheaval.
We are all on the same sinking ship – me, you, teachers,
construction workers, fire fighters, police, Egyptians, Europeans.
We are all under attack by the same people. The sooner you understand this, the better off we will be.
All of the global uprisings, against the global bankers, are popular reactions to the implementation of a worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order. People can dismiss and ignore me all they want, but I know what I’m talking about.
In fact, I invite Ben Bernanke and Timothy Giethner to a debate. I’ll take them both on at the same time. I’ll expose the two imperial pawns within a minute, faster than Tyson knocked out Spinks.
The bottom line is this: It is imperative that 99.9% of the US population actively supports the public unions uprising against the occupying economic imperialists who have conquered our country.
If the economic imperialists think they’re going to continue their attacks, by cutting more American workers’ wages and benefits, after looting the nation of trillions, they are going to get a much deserved rude awakening.
If they want to steal trillions, increase the price of food and oil, and make further cuts into our income, they are going to get crushed.
239 million Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Push them another inch, and the global bankers might as well go hang with Gaddafi and Mubarak.
Seriously, think about this: They’re going to cut pensions on people who make $25k per year, while all-time record-breaking profits and bonuses are raining down on the economic top one-tenth of one percent.
That is sick and twisted.
Lloyd Blankfein gets five-times the annual salary of Wisconsin
public employees when he simply gives a 30-minute speech on
“doing God’s work.”
These banks were bailed out after causing this mess, the American people own them now as far as I’m concerned.
Let’s stab the vampires in the heart. Seize their assets and all
these budget problems disappear.
Break these bloodsuckers up. Spin them off, free the market,
free the people, free the planet from this global banking cabal.
We can easily let hard-working Americans keep their pensions
and health benefits.
Do you want to start on the state and individual level, before breaking up the big rackets? Fine.
Look at how easy it is to solve Wisconsin’s budget deficit, as
Paul Jay stated on The Real News Network:
“How about Wisconsin passes a law that takes the estate tax level
back to 2001? And let’s say the first million’s tax free. The collective
net worth of the esteemed group on the Forbes 400 from Wisconsin
comes to around $21.7 billion. That would make Wisconsin’s share
of their estates at the time of passing around $4 billion. We just
paid down the debt.”
Look at that. Deficit eliminated.
As I wrote in The Economic Elite Vs. The People:
“When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.”
In a report entitled, “Nine Pictures of the Extreme Income/Wealth Gap,” Dave Johnson helps make the point:
“Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of
concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see
it. People just don’t understand how much wealth there is
at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that
it is beyond most people’s ability to comprehend. If people
understood just how concentrated wealth has become in our
country and the effect it has on our politics, our democracy
and our people, they would demand our politicians do something
about it…Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined…400 people
have as much wealth as half of our population.”
In this context, every American should take it personally. They’ve already robbed 99.9% of us.
Now they want to further limit our rights and income, with talks of QE3 already creeping up.
Satan is overreaching.
Survival instincts are going to kick in within the US just like they are throughout the rest of the world. They shall reap what they sow.
The Global Economic Elite better watch their assets, hell is about to freeze over.
Say hello to your puppets Mubarak and Gaddafi on the way down.
As for your US puppet, one more statement of caution for the
American People: Do not let Obama fool you, yet again, with
his public statements in support of the people of Wisconsin.
Obama is using the exact same playbook in Wisconsin that he used
in Egypt, which is to publicly declare support for the people, while
working behind the scenes to undermine them.
Obama is a divide and conquer imperial puppet. Never forget that.
Do not let his rhetoric confuse you. Just look at his chief of staff and head economic adviser, a former JP Morgan executive and a NAFTA thug.
It’s clear whose side he is on.
As a great Anonymous Poet wrote:
“Their Divide and Conquer Strategies
Are Old and Feeble
The People Begin to See Through
Cyberspace Air Chokes your Oxygen
Decaying, Crumbling Foundation
Free Radicals Multiply
I becomes We
Down goes the Aristocracy
Tyranny beneath Me”
The global awakening is taking shape, from Cairo to Madison, the revolution has begun.
http://ampedstatus.org/overcoming-divide-and-conquer-strategies-99-9-of-the-us-population-should-support-the-public-unions-fight-against-occupying-economic-imperialists/
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Wrath of God
The time of God's, Wrath is mentioned in both the Old and the
New Testament.
It is a historic event in which God, starts to deal directly with the
satanic forces and the evil people responsible for the destruction
of the Earth.
This event lasts for a period of time, but it is referred to as,
"The Day of the Lord" or "The Day of His Wrath."
This destruction from the Almighty, or "Wrath of God" is what
is necessary to finally defeat Satan on this Earth.
By casting out Satan from Heaven, Michael, and his Angels,
won the first battle.
The next battle in this war against Satan and his demons, is
to restrict the negative influence that they have on Earth.
This begins first by taking out from the Earth what is good,
and second by wiping out the garbage that remains.
The first step is accomplished with, "The Rapture" the second
step is accomplished during, "The Day of God's Wrath."
We read in the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah, that the Wrath of God, is in order to destroy all the land and to destroy all evil men.
Isaiah 13:5-11 They come from a far country, from the end of Heaven, even the Lord, and the weapons of His, Wrath to destroy all the land. Howl for the day of, "YHWH" is at hand. It shall come as destruction from the Almighty...Behold the day of the Lord, comes cruel both with Wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and He, shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it...And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.
Isaiah 13:12 I will make a mortal more rare than fine gold;
and a man (Adamite) than the gold of Ophir.
Isaiah 66:15 For behold, the LORD, will come in fire and His,
chariots like the whirlwind, to render His, anger with fury,
and His, rebuke with flames of fire.
Isaiah 66:16 For the LORD, will execute judgment by fire and by His, sword on all flesh, and those slain by the LORD, will be many...
Zephaniah 1:18 Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to
deliver them on the day of the Lord's, Wrath; And all the Earth, will
be devoured in the fire of His, jealousy for He, will make a complete
end, indeed a terrifying one, of all the inhabitants of the Earth.
It is preceded and/or accompanied by signs:
Joel 2:30 I will display wonders in the sky and on the Earth,
blood, fire and columns of smoke.
Joel 2:31 The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the LORD, comes.
Isaiah 13:10 For the stars of Heaven, and the constellations thereof
shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth
and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.
Isaiah 13:13 Therefore I will shake the Heavens, and the Earth,
shall remove out of her place, in the Wrath of the Lord, of hosts,
and in the day of His, fierce anger...
In the New Testament it is also referred to as the, "Day of the
Wrath" or "Anger of God."
Revelation 6:17 The great day of their Wrath has come and who
is able to stand...
Revelation 11:18 And your Wrath came, and the time came for the
dead to be judged, and the time to reward your bond-servants the
prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small
and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the Earth.
The Wrath of God, starts with, "The Seven Trumpets" and ends
with, "The Seven Bowls of Wrath."
Revelations 15:7 Seven golden bowls that were full of the anger
of God.
Revelations 16:1 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven Angels, "Go your ways, and pour out the bowls of the Wrath of God, upon the Earth."
Revelations 19:15 He treads too the winepress of the anger of the Wrath of God, the Almighty.
The same signs that precede the Wrath of God, as stated in the Old Testament, are given in the New Testament.
The signs that occur before, "The Day of God's Wrath" are the same as the signs for the return of Christ, to rapture his people.
God's, Wrath comes upon those who are, "Left Behind" on Earth.
Revelations 6:12 When He, opened the sixth seal, and a great earthquake occurred, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the entire moon became as blood, and the stars of Heaven, fell.
Mark 13:24-25 The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling out of Heaven, and the powers that are in the Heavens, will be shaken.
Jeremiah 30:23-24 See, the storm of the Lord, will burst out in
Wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads of the wicked.
The fierce anger of the Lord, will not turn back until he fully
accomplishes the purposes of His, heart. In days to come you will
understand this...
Luke 21:25-26 There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars and on the Earth, anguish of nations...for the powers of the Heavens, will be shaken.
Acts 2:20 The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord, comes:
Before the Messiah, returns and the rapture takes place, these aforementioned signs have to occur.
We are greatly looking forward to the fulfillment of these prophecies and the signs of His, coming.
http://www.rapturechrist.com/wrath.htm
New Testament.
It is a historic event in which God, starts to deal directly with the
satanic forces and the evil people responsible for the destruction
of the Earth.
This event lasts for a period of time, but it is referred to as,
"The Day of the Lord" or "The Day of His Wrath."
This destruction from the Almighty, or "Wrath of God" is what
is necessary to finally defeat Satan on this Earth.
By casting out Satan from Heaven, Michael, and his Angels,
won the first battle.
The next battle in this war against Satan and his demons, is
to restrict the negative influence that they have on Earth.
This begins first by taking out from the Earth what is good,
and second by wiping out the garbage that remains.
The first step is accomplished with, "The Rapture" the second
step is accomplished during, "The Day of God's Wrath."
We read in the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah, that the Wrath of God, is in order to destroy all the land and to destroy all evil men.
Isaiah 13:5-11 They come from a far country, from the end of Heaven, even the Lord, and the weapons of His, Wrath to destroy all the land. Howl for the day of, "YHWH" is at hand. It shall come as destruction from the Almighty...Behold the day of the Lord, comes cruel both with Wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and He, shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it...And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.
Isaiah 13:12 I will make a mortal more rare than fine gold;
and a man (Adamite) than the gold of Ophir.
Isaiah 66:15 For behold, the LORD, will come in fire and His,
chariots like the whirlwind, to render His, anger with fury,
and His, rebuke with flames of fire.
Isaiah 66:16 For the LORD, will execute judgment by fire and by His, sword on all flesh, and those slain by the LORD, will be many...
Zephaniah 1:18 Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to
deliver them on the day of the Lord's, Wrath; And all the Earth, will
be devoured in the fire of His, jealousy for He, will make a complete
end, indeed a terrifying one, of all the inhabitants of the Earth.
It is preceded and/or accompanied by signs:
Joel 2:30 I will display wonders in the sky and on the Earth,
blood, fire and columns of smoke.
Joel 2:31 The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the LORD, comes.
Isaiah 13:10 For the stars of Heaven, and the constellations thereof
shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth
and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.
Isaiah 13:13 Therefore I will shake the Heavens, and the Earth,
shall remove out of her place, in the Wrath of the Lord, of hosts,
and in the day of His, fierce anger...
In the New Testament it is also referred to as the, "Day of the
Wrath" or "Anger of God."
Revelation 6:17 The great day of their Wrath has come and who
is able to stand...
Revelation 11:18 And your Wrath came, and the time came for the
dead to be judged, and the time to reward your bond-servants the
prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small
and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the Earth.
The Wrath of God, starts with, "The Seven Trumpets" and ends
with, "The Seven Bowls of Wrath."
Revelations 15:7 Seven golden bowls that were full of the anger
of God.
Revelations 16:1 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven Angels, "Go your ways, and pour out the bowls of the Wrath of God, upon the Earth."
Revelations 19:15 He treads too the winepress of the anger of the Wrath of God, the Almighty.
The same signs that precede the Wrath of God, as stated in the Old Testament, are given in the New Testament.
The signs that occur before, "The Day of God's Wrath" are the same as the signs for the return of Christ, to rapture his people.
God's, Wrath comes upon those who are, "Left Behind" on Earth.
Revelations 6:12 When He, opened the sixth seal, and a great earthquake occurred, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the entire moon became as blood, and the stars of Heaven, fell.
Mark 13:24-25 The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling out of Heaven, and the powers that are in the Heavens, will be shaken.
Jeremiah 30:23-24 See, the storm of the Lord, will burst out in
Wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads of the wicked.
The fierce anger of the Lord, will not turn back until he fully
accomplishes the purposes of His, heart. In days to come you will
understand this...
Luke 21:25-26 There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars and on the Earth, anguish of nations...for the powers of the Heavens, will be shaken.
Acts 2:20 The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord, comes:
Before the Messiah, returns and the rapture takes place, these aforementioned signs have to occur.
We are greatly looking forward to the fulfillment of these prophecies and the signs of His, coming.
http://www.rapturechrist.com/wrath.htm
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the
feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.
By Matt Taibbi
FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this
past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished
off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the
check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail.
You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail.
This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail.
Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and
pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened
to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off.
Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.
Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.
Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.
Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling.
What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing.
To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the
crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught
defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to
foot the tab of justice.
"If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully
about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool
that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get
their companies to pay their fines for them.
Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration.
"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-
month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,"
says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up
to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.
Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-
street-in-jail-20110216
feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.
By Matt Taibbi
FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this
past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished
off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the
check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail.
You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail.
This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail.
Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and
pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened
to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off.
Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted.
Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.
Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.
Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling.
What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing.
To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the
crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught
defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to
foot the tab of justice.
"If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully
about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool
that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get
their companies to pay their fines for them.
Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration.
"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-
month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,"
says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up
to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.
Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-
street-in-jail-20110216
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Wisconsin: The First Stop in An American Uprising?
It took awhile, but Wisconsin shows that the poor and middle class
of the U.S. may be ready to push back. Madison may be only the beginning.
By Sarah van Gelder
February 19, 2011 "YES! Magazine" -- - The uprising that swept Tunisia, Egypt, and parts of Europe is showing signs of blossoming across the United States.
In Wisconsin, public employees and their supporters are drawing
the line at Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate collective
bargaining and unilaterally cut benefits.
School teachers, university students, firefighters, and others
descended on the capital in the tens of thousands, and even the
Superbowl champion Green Bay Packers have weighed in against
the bill.
Protests against similar anti-union measures are ramping up in Ohio.
Now, a US Uncut group has formed and announced a February 26 Day of Action here to coincide with UK Uncut's planned protests on the same day. Already, a dozen local events are planned.
Some groups are keeping quiet about their targets, but several are targeting Bank of America.
The goal, according to a statement on the US Uncut website, is “to draw attention to the fact that Bank of America received $45 billion in government bailout funds while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens [...] And to highlight the fact that the poor and middle class are now paying for this largess through drastic government cuts.”
The Politics of Class Warfare
Across the country, the poor and middle class have suffered from the economic collapse: jobs disappeared, mortgages sank underneath debt, and opportunities for a college education evaporated.
Much of the bailout that was supposed to fix the economy went to
the very institutions that caused the collapse.
Many of these institutions are now using tax loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes.
It took some time for a political response to coalesce. The Tea Party movement was able to direct discontent away from the Wall Street titans who brought the economy to its knees.
Funding from the Koch brothers’ petro-fortune along with fawning
attention from Fox News helped get the libertarian movement off
the ground.
But progressives remained fragmented and few built active, organized bases. Many waited for President Obama to act.
The tide may now be turning. Inspired by people-power movements around the world, people in the United States are beginning push back.
The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.
Politicians are scurrying to cut spending, but fewer than one in five
Americans say the federal budget deficit is their chief worry about
the economy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center;
44 percent say they're most worried about jobs.
Polls show that Americans also want spending for education,
investment in infrastructure, and environmental protection.
Yet spending in all these areas is up for drastic cuts in state
and federal budgets.
Likewise, on the tax side, 59 percent of Americans opposed
extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, according to a
Bloomberg poll. Congress cut the taxes anyway, and the package
will cost $800 billion over just two years.
Until now, polls have been one of the few places where anger at
government policies that favor the rich while cutting service to
the middle-class has been visible.
But the crowds in Madison and the momentum of US Uncut tell
us that may be about to change.
As a statement on the US Uncut website puts it:
“We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families
of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations
who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our
bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair
share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize,
we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27523.htm
of the U.S. may be ready to push back. Madison may be only the beginning.
By Sarah van Gelder
February 19, 2011 "YES! Magazine" -- - The uprising that swept Tunisia, Egypt, and parts of Europe is showing signs of blossoming across the United States.
In Wisconsin, public employees and their supporters are drawing
the line at Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate collective
bargaining and unilaterally cut benefits.
School teachers, university students, firefighters, and others
descended on the capital in the tens of thousands, and even the
Superbowl champion Green Bay Packers have weighed in against
the bill.
Protests against similar anti-union measures are ramping up in Ohio.
Now, a US Uncut group has formed and announced a February 26 Day of Action here to coincide with UK Uncut's planned protests on the same day. Already, a dozen local events are planned.
Some groups are keeping quiet about their targets, but several are targeting Bank of America.
The goal, according to a statement on the US Uncut website, is “to draw attention to the fact that Bank of America received $45 billion in government bailout funds while funneling its tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens [...] And to highlight the fact that the poor and middle class are now paying for this largess through drastic government cuts.”
The Politics of Class Warfare
Across the country, the poor and middle class have suffered from the economic collapse: jobs disappeared, mortgages sank underneath debt, and opportunities for a college education evaporated.
Much of the bailout that was supposed to fix the economy went to
the very institutions that caused the collapse.
Many of these institutions are now using tax loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes.
It took some time for a political response to coalesce. The Tea Party movement was able to direct discontent away from the Wall Street titans who brought the economy to its knees.
Funding from the Koch brothers’ petro-fortune along with fawning
attention from Fox News helped get the libertarian movement off
the ground.
But progressives remained fragmented and few built active, organized bases. Many waited for President Obama to act.
The tide may now be turning. Inspired by people-power movements around the world, people in the United States are beginning push back.
The poor and middle class, those who didn't cause the collapse but have felt the most pain from the poor economy, are now being asked to sacrifice again.
Politicians are scurrying to cut spending, but fewer than one in five
Americans say the federal budget deficit is their chief worry about
the economy, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center;
44 percent say they're most worried about jobs.
Polls show that Americans also want spending for education,
investment in infrastructure, and environmental protection.
Yet spending in all these areas is up for drastic cuts in state
and federal budgets.
Likewise, on the tax side, 59 percent of Americans opposed
extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, according to a
Bloomberg poll. Congress cut the taxes anyway, and the package
will cost $800 billion over just two years.
Until now, polls have been one of the few places where anger at
government policies that favor the rich while cutting service to
the middle-class has been visible.
But the crowds in Madison and the momentum of US Uncut tell
us that may be about to change.
As a statement on the US Uncut website puts it:
“We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families
of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations
who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our
bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair
share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize,
we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27523.htm
Friday, February 18, 2011
Make The People Pay!!
Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War
By Paul Craig Roberts
February 18, 2011 "Information Clearing House" ---- Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.
Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their
fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’
job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout
at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of
Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with
several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly
created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.
The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on
inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value
are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined.
The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012.
This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose--the
enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/
security complex.
These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who
elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates
by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing
foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast,
but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s
coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but
the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders.
The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in
order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed
the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 billion, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared:
“We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.”
The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to
Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they
come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped
bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their
internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.”
Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes,
train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and
by a newly created imaginary threat--”domestic extremists,”
that is, war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any
number of false flag events in order to make these threats
seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV,
shopping mall experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the
Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that
sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and
its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work.
The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as
they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to
the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt
and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.
With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.
The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to
be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another
American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade
of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the American elite than
Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education,
or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income
energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers
are forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs.
They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print
money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s
myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The
poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment
is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class
college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because
their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at
home without having to do anything.
A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare.
The elites have programmed, through their control of the media,
a large part of the population, especially those who think of
themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare.
America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years.
Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think
tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of
its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that
America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees.
America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to China and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27513.htm
By Paul Craig Roberts
February 18, 2011 "Information Clearing House" ---- Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.
Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their
fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’
job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout
at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of
Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with
several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly
created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.
The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on
inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value
are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined.
The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012.
This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose--the
enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/
security complex.
These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who
elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates
by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing
foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast,
but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s
coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but
the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders.
The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in
order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed
the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 billion, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared:
“We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.”
The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to
Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they
come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped
bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their
internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.”
Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes,
train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and
by a newly created imaginary threat--”domestic extremists,”
that is, war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any
number of false flag events in order to make these threats
seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV,
shopping mall experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the
Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that
sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and
its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work.
The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as
they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to
the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt
and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.
With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.
The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to
be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another
American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade
of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the American elite than
Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education,
or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income
energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers
are forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs.
They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print
money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s
myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The
poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment
is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class
college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because
their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at
home without having to do anything.
A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare.
The elites have programmed, through their control of the media,
a large part of the population, especially those who think of
themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare.
America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years.
Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think
tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of
its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that
America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees.
America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to China and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27513.htm
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Obama’s Budget and the Rot of American Capitalism
Obama’s Budget and the Rot of American Capitalism
By Patrick Martin
February 15, 2011 "WSWS" -- On Monday, the Obama administration released its proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2012.
After committing trillions in federal bailouts to the banks and billionaires, the White House is demanding cuts that will devastate the working class, and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sections.
The $1.1 trillion in cuts for the next decade proposed by the White House is to be only the starting point for further cuts, as spokesmen for both big business parties acknowledge.
Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat, declared,
“We’ve got to do substantially more than $1 trillion worth of
deficit reduction in the next decade.” Republican House Speaker
John Boehner said, “There’s no limit to the amount we’re willing
to cut.”
Democrats and Republicans agree on gargantuan military spending, an uninterrupted flow of funds to the financial aristocracy, and continued tax breaks for corporate America and the wealthy.
As a top White House official told the press at a background briefing
on the budget, “The debate in Washington is not whether to cut or
to spend. We both agree we should cut. The question is how we cut
and what we cut.”
The Obama budget projects that the ten-year cumulative deficit
will reach a staggering $10.4 trillion.
By attempting to wring such vast sums from the hides of the
population, the ruling elite is trying to set American society
back to conditions not seen for generations.
Programs to be cut include not only those targeted by Obama and the Republicans in the current budget debate—home heating assistance, Pell Grants, WIC, Head Start, etc.—but the much larger entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, which will face cuts later in the budget process.
The social impact will be incalculable.
As hundreds of thousands of people face the bitter cold of winter without heat and gas, Obama is proposing halving the grossly inadequate federal assistance that is available.
As students graduate with record debt and no job prospects, the administration is proposing significant cuts in government aid.
Such gross indifference to social distress is repeated in every sphere.
Significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare—which amount to
denying America’s elderly their right to pensions and health care—
would have an even broader impact.
Behind the “debate” in Washington and the media over the budget
is a massive lie—the claim that the budget deficits are a product of
excessive social spending.
Obama’s budget director Jacob Lew summed up this grotesque falsification an op-ed column published in the New York Times February 6, under the headline, “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us.”
Lew claimed that the causes of the projected budget deficits were
“decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and
to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it,
combined with the effects of the recession…”
This list is notable for what it leaves out: the cost of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, which runs into the trillions; and the bank bailouts, where more trillions in public funds were placed at the disposal of the financial aristocracy, with no questions asked.
The military budget by itself accounts for the lion’s share of the
ten-year deficit: more than $7 trillion of the projected $10 trillion.
Lew’s more fundamental omission, however, is the grotesque class inequality that pervades American society. The top one percent of the US population owns over one third of the country’s wealth.
The greatest wealth, however, is concentrated in an even smaller layer.
Indeed, the $1.1 trillion in proposed cuts—which will have a terrible impact on the lives of millions of people—is somewhat less than the combined wealth of only the 400 richest Americans.
The arguments presented by the ruling elite for the cuts are
staggeringly hypocritical. As they drown in floods of cash, they
insist that no money is available for workers’ most basic needs.
Workers must reject this argument out of hand.
They are not responsible for the orgy of swindling and profiteering that produced the 2008 Wall Street crash and pushed the world economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
On the contrary, an essential feature of the speculative binge was
that the share of national income received by workers has shrunk
to the lowest level in nearly a century.
Underlying the rise of the financial aristocracy—which exercises control over the entire political system—is the failure of the world capitalist system as a whole.
In amassing its wealth, this tiny layer of the population concentrated
above all in the United States, has overseen a vast destruction of industry and social infrastructure.
The ruling classes of every country now openly proclaim that the maintenance of their system depends upon an unprecedented destruction in the living conditions of the broad masses of the population. These measures will provoke mass opposition.
The revolutionary struggles in Egypt—in which protests and strikes of millions of workers and youth forced the resignation of a US-backed dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years—point to the forms of struggle that will spread worldwide in the coming period.
Mass unemployment, record inequality, and the corruption of the
political system are common to Egypt and the United States, and
are in fact universal.
At the foundation of this system is the principle that economic life must be subordinated to private profit and the maintenance of the wealth of those who control the giant banks and corporations.
The working class can secure its interests only through the overturn of the capitalist system as a whole—that is, the reorganization of economic life to meet social need.
In every aspect of its policies and of its social being, the ruling
class itself makes the case for socialist revolution.
Copyright WSWS
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27481.htm
By Patrick Martin
February 15, 2011 "WSWS" -- On Monday, the Obama administration released its proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2012.
After committing trillions in federal bailouts to the banks and billionaires, the White House is demanding cuts that will devastate the working class, and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sections.
The $1.1 trillion in cuts for the next decade proposed by the White House is to be only the starting point for further cuts, as spokesmen for both big business parties acknowledge.
Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat, declared,
“We’ve got to do substantially more than $1 trillion worth of
deficit reduction in the next decade.” Republican House Speaker
John Boehner said, “There’s no limit to the amount we’re willing
to cut.”
Democrats and Republicans agree on gargantuan military spending, an uninterrupted flow of funds to the financial aristocracy, and continued tax breaks for corporate America and the wealthy.
As a top White House official told the press at a background briefing
on the budget, “The debate in Washington is not whether to cut or
to spend. We both agree we should cut. The question is how we cut
and what we cut.”
The Obama budget projects that the ten-year cumulative deficit
will reach a staggering $10.4 trillion.
By attempting to wring such vast sums from the hides of the
population, the ruling elite is trying to set American society
back to conditions not seen for generations.
Programs to be cut include not only those targeted by Obama and the Republicans in the current budget debate—home heating assistance, Pell Grants, WIC, Head Start, etc.—but the much larger entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, which will face cuts later in the budget process.
The social impact will be incalculable.
As hundreds of thousands of people face the bitter cold of winter without heat and gas, Obama is proposing halving the grossly inadequate federal assistance that is available.
As students graduate with record debt and no job prospects, the administration is proposing significant cuts in government aid.
Such gross indifference to social distress is repeated in every sphere.
Significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare—which amount to
denying America’s elderly their right to pensions and health care—
would have an even broader impact.
Behind the “debate” in Washington and the media over the budget
is a massive lie—the claim that the budget deficits are a product of
excessive social spending.
Obama’s budget director Jacob Lew summed up this grotesque falsification an op-ed column published in the New York Times February 6, under the headline, “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us.”
Lew claimed that the causes of the projected budget deficits were
“decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and
to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it,
combined with the effects of the recession…”
This list is notable for what it leaves out: the cost of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, which runs into the trillions; and the bank bailouts, where more trillions in public funds were placed at the disposal of the financial aristocracy, with no questions asked.
The military budget by itself accounts for the lion’s share of the
ten-year deficit: more than $7 trillion of the projected $10 trillion.
Lew’s more fundamental omission, however, is the grotesque class inequality that pervades American society. The top one percent of the US population owns over one third of the country’s wealth.
The greatest wealth, however, is concentrated in an even smaller layer.
Indeed, the $1.1 trillion in proposed cuts—which will have a terrible impact on the lives of millions of people—is somewhat less than the combined wealth of only the 400 richest Americans.
The arguments presented by the ruling elite for the cuts are
staggeringly hypocritical. As they drown in floods of cash, they
insist that no money is available for workers’ most basic needs.
Workers must reject this argument out of hand.
They are not responsible for the orgy of swindling and profiteering that produced the 2008 Wall Street crash and pushed the world economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
On the contrary, an essential feature of the speculative binge was
that the share of national income received by workers has shrunk
to the lowest level in nearly a century.
Underlying the rise of the financial aristocracy—which exercises control over the entire political system—is the failure of the world capitalist system as a whole.
In amassing its wealth, this tiny layer of the population concentrated
above all in the United States, has overseen a vast destruction of industry and social infrastructure.
The ruling classes of every country now openly proclaim that the maintenance of their system depends upon an unprecedented destruction in the living conditions of the broad masses of the population. These measures will provoke mass opposition.
The revolutionary struggles in Egypt—in which protests and strikes of millions of workers and youth forced the resignation of a US-backed dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years—point to the forms of struggle that will spread worldwide in the coming period.
Mass unemployment, record inequality, and the corruption of the
political system are common to Egypt and the United States, and
are in fact universal.
At the foundation of this system is the principle that economic life must be subordinated to private profit and the maintenance of the wealth of those who control the giant banks and corporations.
The working class can secure its interests only through the overturn of the capitalist system as a whole—that is, the reorganization of economic life to meet social need.
In every aspect of its policies and of its social being, the ruling
class itself makes the case for socialist revolution.
Copyright WSWS
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27481.htm
Monday, February 14, 2011
22 Years Ago Yesterday
22 years ago yesterday, my beautiful, strong, wise, and
unconditional loving, Mother, suddenly died,
22 years ago yesterday, I cried, and I cried, and I cried.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, we celebrated you turning 60
on February 11,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, God, whispered to you, "Carnelia,
I now need you up in Heaven."
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, my life was changed for the worse
and not for the better,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I couldn't even imagine, I would
now be sitting here today, writing you this very long overdue,
"I Love You Letter."
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, in some of your final words, you told me you would always love me, to always keep my faith in God, to always try to do my very best, and to always try to stay strong,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I couldn't even bear to hear your final words to me, because in both my heart and mind, I knew all of this had to be one big terrible mistake, because it felt so very, very, wrong!
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you told me that I really needed to start cleaning up my act, because someday, I would have a very special place and a divine destiny to fulfill,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I promised you that I would always
keep on trying to make you proud of me, but at this point in my
life, it is truly up to God's, love, grace, mercy and will.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, most of the world had never even heard of the Internet, Google, MySpace, Facebook or Twitter,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you always told me, "Son never give up, on all of your hopes and your dreams, because your Dad and I, never raised you to be a quitter!"
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, my heart was broken and shattered into a million little pieces, and to this day, it has still never been healed or fully repaired,
22 years ago yesterday, I loss my beautiful, strong, wise, unconditional loving, Mother, to cancer, but to those of you who are currently hating on me because of Expotera, I am not even scared.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, God, in His, infinite wisdom, decided to suddenly end your all to short, yet truly inspirational and very courageous life,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you died peacefully in your sleep,
without ever having the chance to meet, your Granddaughter, or
my future Ex-wife.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, "Valentines Day" along with all other holidays, really stopped meaning all that much to me,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I was so full of rage, disappointment,
and anger, a, "Happy Valentines Day" or a bright future without you,
I couldn't even begin to see.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you promised me, that you would
always be there for me, and now sometimes, you even come to
visit me in my sleep,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I didn't say it to you back then, but I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for always keeping your promises and your word with me, and now, I sincerely pray the Lord, your Soul, He, will always keep!
22 years ago yesterday, a little baby boy, who had been abandon
by his unwed, teenage Mother, exactly one day after his birth,
22 years ago yesterday, suddenly loss the woman, who had taken
him in as a foster child, and had given his seemingly hopeless little
life, some much needed unconditional love and some tremendous self-worth.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I never really fully understood or
appreciated, the true meaning of unconditional love, or even
knew what I truly had in you, until you were gone,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I will alway love you with all of my heart, and through me, your Granddaughter, and Expotera, your loving memory, your incredible spirit, and your lasting legacy, will always live, on and on and on.
Happy Valentines Day, Mom!!
Love You Always and Forever,
Tony
unconditional loving, Mother, suddenly died,
22 years ago yesterday, I cried, and I cried, and I cried.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, we celebrated you turning 60
on February 11,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, God, whispered to you, "Carnelia,
I now need you up in Heaven."
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, my life was changed for the worse
and not for the better,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I couldn't even imagine, I would
now be sitting here today, writing you this very long overdue,
"I Love You Letter."
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, in some of your final words, you told me you would always love me, to always keep my faith in God, to always try to do my very best, and to always try to stay strong,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I couldn't even bear to hear your final words to me, because in both my heart and mind, I knew all of this had to be one big terrible mistake, because it felt so very, very, wrong!
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you told me that I really needed to start cleaning up my act, because someday, I would have a very special place and a divine destiny to fulfill,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I promised you that I would always
keep on trying to make you proud of me, but at this point in my
life, it is truly up to God's, love, grace, mercy and will.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, most of the world had never even heard of the Internet, Google, MySpace, Facebook or Twitter,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you always told me, "Son never give up, on all of your hopes and your dreams, because your Dad and I, never raised you to be a quitter!"
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, my heart was broken and shattered into a million little pieces, and to this day, it has still never been healed or fully repaired,
22 years ago yesterday, I loss my beautiful, strong, wise, unconditional loving, Mother, to cancer, but to those of you who are currently hating on me because of Expotera, I am not even scared.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, God, in His, infinite wisdom, decided to suddenly end your all to short, yet truly inspirational and very courageous life,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you died peacefully in your sleep,
without ever having the chance to meet, your Granddaughter, or
my future Ex-wife.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, "Valentines Day" along with all other holidays, really stopped meaning all that much to me,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I was so full of rage, disappointment,
and anger, a, "Happy Valentines Day" or a bright future without you,
I couldn't even begin to see.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, you promised me, that you would
always be there for me, and now sometimes, you even come to
visit me in my sleep,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I didn't say it to you back then, but I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart for always keeping your promises and your word with me, and now, I sincerely pray the Lord, your Soul, He, will always keep!
22 years ago yesterday, a little baby boy, who had been abandon
by his unwed, teenage Mother, exactly one day after his birth,
22 years ago yesterday, suddenly loss the woman, who had taken
him in as a foster child, and had given his seemingly hopeless little
life, some much needed unconditional love and some tremendous self-worth.
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I never really fully understood or
appreciated, the true meaning of unconditional love, or even
knew what I truly had in you, until you were gone,
22 years ago yesterday, Mom, I will alway love you with all of my heart, and through me, your Granddaughter, and Expotera, your loving memory, your incredible spirit, and your lasting legacy, will always live, on and on and on.
Happy Valentines Day, Mom!!
Love You Always and Forever,
Tony
Friday, February 11, 2011
Can We Swap Obama for Chavez?
Can We Swap Obama for Chavez?
By Mike Whitney
February 11, 2011
On Monday, while Barack Obama was hob-nobbing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hugo Chavez was busy handing out laptop computers to second graders at a school in Caracas.
After that, the Venezuelan president rushed off to a meeting at a food distribution plant which is providing $110 million in prepared meals for Venezuela’s poor.
Finally, he ended his afternoon by making an appearance at one of the many construction sites where new homes are being built for the victims of January’s massive floods.
It’s all in day’s work for Hugo Chavez.
While Obama has turned out to be the most disappointing president in the last century, Chavez continues to impress with his resolve to improve the lives of ordinary working people.
For example, in just 12 years, Chavez has created a thriving
national public health care system with 533 diagnostic centers
and medical facilities spread throughout the capital.
Health care is free and there have been over over 55 million
medical consultations since Chavez launched the Misión Barrio
Adentro program.
Compare that to Obama’s wretched cash-giveaway to the giant
US HMO’s which he has tried to promote as universal health care.
What a joke!
Chavez has also led the way to greater political engagement and activism by establishing over 30,000 communal councils and 236 communes, all focused on entering more people into the political process and empowering them to bring about change.
In the US, grassroots organizations are shrugged off by party leaders who take their marching orders from the deep-pocket elites who control both parties.
And, as far as Obama is concerned, he could care less what his
supporters think, which is why he went groveling to the Chamber
of Commerce.
And what has Chavez done to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have on media?
Here’s what Gregory Wilpert says in his article titled “An Assessment of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years”:
"With regard to the media, ordinary Venezuelans now participate in the creation of hundreds of new and independent community radio and television stations across the country.
Previous governments persecuted community media, but state institutions now actively support them – not with ongoing financing, but with training and start-up equipment.
The combination of greater inclusion and greater participation has
led to a greater acceptance of Venezuela’s democratic political
system, according to the annual Latinobarometro opinion polls,
which allow for comparisons with other democracies in Latin America.
That is, more Venezuelans believe in democracy than citizens of any other country in Latin America. Eighty-four percent of Venezuelans say, democracy is preferable to any other system of government."
Last week, Chavez joined the battle against Coca-Cola by attending
a rally of striking workers in the city of Valencia, home to the main
Coca-Cola bottling plant in Venezuela.
Chavez blasted Coke saying that if they didn’t want to follow “the
constitution and the laws” then Venezuela could “live without Coca-
Cola."
Right on, Hugo! Tell Coke to pack sand!
The 1,300 striking workers are only asking for a meager raise
to meet their growing expenses, but, of course, that cuts into
corporate profits, so Coke is fighting their demands tooth-and-nail.
Try to imagine a scenario in which “business-friendly” Obama would take-on a major corporation?
Last week, Chavez announced that his government would spend another $700 million to fight homelessness and build another 40,000 houses.
The president has stepped up his efforts since floods ravaged the country earlier in the year leaving tens of thousands without shelter.
Chavez is determined not to make the same mistakes George Bush made following Katrina, when disaster victims were left to fend for themselves forcing a third of the New Orleans population to flee to other parts of the country.
And what effect has Chavez had on the Venezuelan economy? Here’s Wilpert again:
“Just as the Chavez government has democratized Venezuela’s political system over the past 12 years; it has done the same with its economic system, both on a macro-economic level and on a micro-economic level.
On a macro-economic level this has been achieved by increasing state control over the economy and by dismantling neo-liberalism in Venezuela. The Chavez government has regained state control over the previously quasi-independent national oil industry.
The government nationalized private sub-contractors of the oil industry and incorporated them into the state oil company, giving workers full benefits and better pay. It also partially nationalized transnational oil company operations so that they control no more than 40% of any given oil production site.
Then, the government eliminated the practice of “service agreements,” whereby transnational oil companies enjoyed lucrative concessions for oil production. Perhaps most importantly, the government increased royalties from oil production from as low as 1% to a minimum of 33%.
In the non-oil sector the government nationalized key (previously privatized) industries, such as: steel production (Sidor), telecommunications (Cantv), electricity distribution (production was already in state hands), cement production (Cemex), banking (Banco de Venezuela), and food distribution (Éxito).”
So, dear reader, are people better off with the telecommunications and electric companies privately owned by cutthroats like Enron (and the other Wall Street pirates) or should they be turned into public utilities?
How about oil? Are BP and Exxon better suited for the task than the public sector?
And what about banking: Would you feel safer with Uncle Sam or Goldman Sachs?
Chavez has slashed the poverty rate in half, lowered unemployment from 15% in 1999 to 7% today, and shrunk inequality to the lowest level in Latin America.
In Venezuela people are getting healthier and living longer. They’re better paid and more politically engaged. “84% of Venezuelans say that they are satisfied with life, which is the second highest level in Latin America.”
And guess what? Chavez is strengthening social security and
retirement programs, not trying to destroy them by handing
them over to Wall Street in the form of private accounts.
And Chavez’s generosity has not been limited to Venezuela either.
In fact, he was the first world leader to offer medical and food aid
to Katrina victims. (Although you won’t read that in an American newspaper!)
And he still provides free heating fuel to poor people in the
northeast United States.
Venezuela-owned Citgo joined with Citizens Energy “to provide
hundreds of thousands of gallons of free and low-cost heating oil
to needy American families and homeless shelters across the US.”
According to Citizens Energy President Joseph P. Kennedy, “Every
year, we ask major oil companies and oil-producing nations to help
our senior citizens and the poor make it through winter, and only
one company, CITGO, and one country, Venezuela, has responded
to our appeals.”
That’s right; no other oil company has given even one stinking
dime to the charity. Chavez has provided over 170 million gallons
of heating oil since 2005.
In contrast, Barack Obama has done nothing for the poor, the homeless, ordinary workers, or the middle class. Zilch.
He’s been a dead-loss for everyone except the richest of the rich.
Maybe we should swap him for Chavez?
It's worth a try.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/02/can-we-swap-obama-for-
chavez/
By Mike Whitney
February 11, 2011
On Monday, while Barack Obama was hob-nobbing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hugo Chavez was busy handing out laptop computers to second graders at a school in Caracas.
After that, the Venezuelan president rushed off to a meeting at a food distribution plant which is providing $110 million in prepared meals for Venezuela’s poor.
Finally, he ended his afternoon by making an appearance at one of the many construction sites where new homes are being built for the victims of January’s massive floods.
It’s all in day’s work for Hugo Chavez.
While Obama has turned out to be the most disappointing president in the last century, Chavez continues to impress with his resolve to improve the lives of ordinary working people.
For example, in just 12 years, Chavez has created a thriving
national public health care system with 533 diagnostic centers
and medical facilities spread throughout the capital.
Health care is free and there have been over over 55 million
medical consultations since Chavez launched the Misión Barrio
Adentro program.
Compare that to Obama’s wretched cash-giveaway to the giant
US HMO’s which he has tried to promote as universal health care.
What a joke!
Chavez has also led the way to greater political engagement and activism by establishing over 30,000 communal councils and 236 communes, all focused on entering more people into the political process and empowering them to bring about change.
In the US, grassroots organizations are shrugged off by party leaders who take their marching orders from the deep-pocket elites who control both parties.
And, as far as Obama is concerned, he could care less what his
supporters think, which is why he went groveling to the Chamber
of Commerce.
And what has Chavez done to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have on media?
Here’s what Gregory Wilpert says in his article titled “An Assessment of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years”:
"With regard to the media, ordinary Venezuelans now participate in the creation of hundreds of new and independent community radio and television stations across the country.
Previous governments persecuted community media, but state institutions now actively support them – not with ongoing financing, but with training and start-up equipment.
The combination of greater inclusion and greater participation has
led to a greater acceptance of Venezuela’s democratic political
system, according to the annual Latinobarometro opinion polls,
which allow for comparisons with other democracies in Latin America.
That is, more Venezuelans believe in democracy than citizens of any other country in Latin America. Eighty-four percent of Venezuelans say, democracy is preferable to any other system of government."
Last week, Chavez joined the battle against Coca-Cola by attending
a rally of striking workers in the city of Valencia, home to the main
Coca-Cola bottling plant in Venezuela.
Chavez blasted Coke saying that if they didn’t want to follow “the
constitution and the laws” then Venezuela could “live without Coca-
Cola."
Right on, Hugo! Tell Coke to pack sand!
The 1,300 striking workers are only asking for a meager raise
to meet their growing expenses, but, of course, that cuts into
corporate profits, so Coke is fighting their demands tooth-and-nail.
Try to imagine a scenario in which “business-friendly” Obama would take-on a major corporation?
Last week, Chavez announced that his government would spend another $700 million to fight homelessness and build another 40,000 houses.
The president has stepped up his efforts since floods ravaged the country earlier in the year leaving tens of thousands without shelter.
Chavez is determined not to make the same mistakes George Bush made following Katrina, when disaster victims were left to fend for themselves forcing a third of the New Orleans population to flee to other parts of the country.
And what effect has Chavez had on the Venezuelan economy? Here’s Wilpert again:
“Just as the Chavez government has democratized Venezuela’s political system over the past 12 years; it has done the same with its economic system, both on a macro-economic level and on a micro-economic level.
On a macro-economic level this has been achieved by increasing state control over the economy and by dismantling neo-liberalism in Venezuela. The Chavez government has regained state control over the previously quasi-independent national oil industry.
The government nationalized private sub-contractors of the oil industry and incorporated them into the state oil company, giving workers full benefits and better pay. It also partially nationalized transnational oil company operations so that they control no more than 40% of any given oil production site.
Then, the government eliminated the practice of “service agreements,” whereby transnational oil companies enjoyed lucrative concessions for oil production. Perhaps most importantly, the government increased royalties from oil production from as low as 1% to a minimum of 33%.
In the non-oil sector the government nationalized key (previously privatized) industries, such as: steel production (Sidor), telecommunications (Cantv), electricity distribution (production was already in state hands), cement production (Cemex), banking (Banco de Venezuela), and food distribution (Éxito).”
So, dear reader, are people better off with the telecommunications and electric companies privately owned by cutthroats like Enron (and the other Wall Street pirates) or should they be turned into public utilities?
How about oil? Are BP and Exxon better suited for the task than the public sector?
And what about banking: Would you feel safer with Uncle Sam or Goldman Sachs?
Chavez has slashed the poverty rate in half, lowered unemployment from 15% in 1999 to 7% today, and shrunk inequality to the lowest level in Latin America.
In Venezuela people are getting healthier and living longer. They’re better paid and more politically engaged. “84% of Venezuelans say that they are satisfied with life, which is the second highest level in Latin America.”
And guess what? Chavez is strengthening social security and
retirement programs, not trying to destroy them by handing
them over to Wall Street in the form of private accounts.
And Chavez’s generosity has not been limited to Venezuela either.
In fact, he was the first world leader to offer medical and food aid
to Katrina victims. (Although you won’t read that in an American newspaper!)
And he still provides free heating fuel to poor people in the
northeast United States.
Venezuela-owned Citgo joined with Citizens Energy “to provide
hundreds of thousands of gallons of free and low-cost heating oil
to needy American families and homeless shelters across the US.”
According to Citizens Energy President Joseph P. Kennedy, “Every
year, we ask major oil companies and oil-producing nations to help
our senior citizens and the poor make it through winter, and only
one company, CITGO, and one country, Venezuela, has responded
to our appeals.”
That’s right; no other oil company has given even one stinking
dime to the charity. Chavez has provided over 170 million gallons
of heating oil since 2005.
In contrast, Barack Obama has done nothing for the poor, the homeless, ordinary workers, or the middle class. Zilch.
He’s been a dead-loss for everyone except the richest of the rich.
Maybe we should swap him for Chavez?
It's worth a try.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/02/can-we-swap-obama-for-
chavez/
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
Recognizing the Language of Tyranny
By Chris Hedges
February 07, 2011 "Truthdig" -- -Empires communicate in two languages.
One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands.
It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes.
The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent.
The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators.
The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.
This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately.
But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those
in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and
economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent
of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency.
The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the
corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage
the country without the threat of rebellion.
Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to.
Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment.
No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.
The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British.
Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire
see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited
are ignored or demonized.
The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-
delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of
empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of
Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.”
These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host.
Look around you.
The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.”
These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes.
And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—
become the enemy.
Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers
generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda
—become very wealthy.
They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment.
They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused.
But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power.
The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force.
It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once
unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available
comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no
longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves.
At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power.
The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.
The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885.
It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq.
Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—
not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and
rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to
8 million Congolese had been slaughtered.
It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust.
Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe
for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq
and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about.
But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.
The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of
plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two
methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps.
If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight.
The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers.
The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back.
When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics.
Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards.
The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder.
The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs.
It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the
comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity
and electoral democracy.
It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.
Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all.
So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands.
Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer.
Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks.
The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power.
And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot
handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at
the “negativity.”
Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in
the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.
All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another.
There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself.
The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator.
American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the
Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of
power are in the hands of corporations.
But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history.
It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.
Please visit Truthdig
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27433.htm
By Chris Hedges
February 07, 2011 "Truthdig" -- -Empires communicate in two languages.
One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands.
It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes.
The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent.
The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators.
The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.
This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately.
But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those
in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and
economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent
of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency.
The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the
corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage
the country without the threat of rebellion.
Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to.
Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment.
No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.
The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British.
Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire
see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited
are ignored or demonized.
The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-
delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of
empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of
Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.”
These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host.
Look around you.
The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.”
These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes.
And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—
become the enemy.
Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers
generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda
—become very wealthy.
They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment.
They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused.
But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power.
The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force.
It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once
unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available
comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no
longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves.
At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power.
The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.
The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885.
It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq.
Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—
not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and
rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to
8 million Congolese had been slaughtered.
It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust.
Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe
for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq
and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about.
But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.
The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of
plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two
methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps.
If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight.
The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers.
The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back.
When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics.
Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards.
The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder.
The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs.
It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the
comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity
and electoral democracy.
It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.
Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all.
So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands.
Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer.
Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks.
The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power.
And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot
handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at
the “negativity.”
Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in
the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.
All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another.
There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself.
The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator.
American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the
Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of
power are in the hands of corporations.
But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history.
It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.
Please visit Truthdig
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27433.htm
Friday, February 4, 2011
A Prophet is Despised in His own Country
A Prophet is Despised in His own Country
And Jesus said to them: "A prophet is despised in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kindred." (Mark 6:4)
Inspiration of the Holy Spirit - From the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Year B - 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
It was very disconcerting for Me, to see how many people would marvel temporarily about my Miracles, about the words of wisdom they listened to and how even then they would not realize that God, was doing wonders among them.
All the prophets demonstrated that they were bringing a divine message and they deserved to be listened to, however they all perished because of the hypocrisy of those who heard them with doubts and contempt, they sinned by underestimating the gift of God, together with those who didn’t listen to Me, and don’t even listen now but reject my Word.
Who can have words like God, who can unite power to his word the way God, does, who can speak perfectly without error, expressing himself directly from Wisdom, the way God, does?
There is only one who has been able to do that, and He, is the same Word of God, He, who is the Incarnate Word, the Wisdom of God, that has come to the earth, Jesus, your friend, your heavenly doctor, the true way, the truth and the life.
How difficult it was for Me, to convince the humanity that listened to Me, even demonstrating my Power, so that they would see that the Holy Scriptures were being fulfilled before their eyes, many were called, but few were chosen.
Many expected the Messiah, but few recognized Him, when he came, many sought Him, but few found Him, and even after finding Him, and listening to his testimony, they rejected his teachings, and preferred to put Him, aside.
For this reason, their hearts were filled with jealousy and evil,
beginning with those who knew Me, since my childhood and could
not accept what their eyes were seeing, those who studied the law
of Moses, and had been filled with human precepts that had nothing
to do with the divine teachings.
Finding something new, something unconventional, those people rejected Me, totally, they despised the gift that God, had sent them and they closed their eyes so that they would not see the Light, that descended from above.
For many souls who look for God, it is very difficult to recognize
the spiritual encounter that I have with each one, many think, “I
am not worthy to receive the Lord” then, closed in their almost
noble concepts, they don’t realize about my Presence, they reject
the inspirations of my Holy Spirit, they despise the opportunities
to do good, without knowing that I am providing them with ways
to get close to Me.
Eventually they become cold in the faith, they come to the point
of even forgetting that I am really Present in the Church, just as
I promised; doubts run through their minds, especially about my Sacramental Presence.
Many Christians ask themselves, who is this, of flesh and blood,
who wears a robe, who is claiming to consecrate bread and wine
and brings Jesus, to the altar, how is it, that a man has the power
to forgive sins and unite me to God?
Well, these are doing exactly the same they did to Me, in my own land; they are despising Me, in those that I have anointed with my Divine Word, which is capable of doing anything.
Those who reject my priests are rejecting Me, those who don’t open their spiritual ears because they are bound to their material world, are missing out on the gift that God, is offering for the healing of all their evils.
If there was not faith before my Corporal Presence, here on earth, it is more difficult to believe in Me, now, when minds are saturating themselves daily with the rubbish of the world, this is why I have destined throughout all generations faithful instruments to my Word, who are the means of reaching out to those who are about to be lost forever.
Blessed are those who believe in Me, without seeing, those who without experiencing my Miracles, have faith, because they recognize the dignity of my Person, and the unique value of my Word.
I have many blessings in store for those who have faith in Me.
My Peace, and my Grace, flow into their lives like rivers of Heavenly Light, their joy is continuous and secure, because they are walking firmly on my Way.
Author: Joseph of Jesus and Mary
http://www.theworkofgod.org/Devotns/Euchrist/HolyMass/gospels
.asp?key=16
And Jesus said to them: "A prophet is despised in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kindred." (Mark 6:4)
Inspiration of the Holy Spirit - From the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Year B - 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
It was very disconcerting for Me, to see how many people would marvel temporarily about my Miracles, about the words of wisdom they listened to and how even then they would not realize that God, was doing wonders among them.
All the prophets demonstrated that they were bringing a divine message and they deserved to be listened to, however they all perished because of the hypocrisy of those who heard them with doubts and contempt, they sinned by underestimating the gift of God, together with those who didn’t listen to Me, and don’t even listen now but reject my Word.
Who can have words like God, who can unite power to his word the way God, does, who can speak perfectly without error, expressing himself directly from Wisdom, the way God, does?
There is only one who has been able to do that, and He, is the same Word of God, He, who is the Incarnate Word, the Wisdom of God, that has come to the earth, Jesus, your friend, your heavenly doctor, the true way, the truth and the life.
How difficult it was for Me, to convince the humanity that listened to Me, even demonstrating my Power, so that they would see that the Holy Scriptures were being fulfilled before their eyes, many were called, but few were chosen.
Many expected the Messiah, but few recognized Him, when he came, many sought Him, but few found Him, and even after finding Him, and listening to his testimony, they rejected his teachings, and preferred to put Him, aside.
For this reason, their hearts were filled with jealousy and evil,
beginning with those who knew Me, since my childhood and could
not accept what their eyes were seeing, those who studied the law
of Moses, and had been filled with human precepts that had nothing
to do with the divine teachings.
Finding something new, something unconventional, those people rejected Me, totally, they despised the gift that God, had sent them and they closed their eyes so that they would not see the Light, that descended from above.
For many souls who look for God, it is very difficult to recognize
the spiritual encounter that I have with each one, many think, “I
am not worthy to receive the Lord” then, closed in their almost
noble concepts, they don’t realize about my Presence, they reject
the inspirations of my Holy Spirit, they despise the opportunities
to do good, without knowing that I am providing them with ways
to get close to Me.
Eventually they become cold in the faith, they come to the point
of even forgetting that I am really Present in the Church, just as
I promised; doubts run through their minds, especially about my Sacramental Presence.
Many Christians ask themselves, who is this, of flesh and blood,
who wears a robe, who is claiming to consecrate bread and wine
and brings Jesus, to the altar, how is it, that a man has the power
to forgive sins and unite me to God?
Well, these are doing exactly the same they did to Me, in my own land; they are despising Me, in those that I have anointed with my Divine Word, which is capable of doing anything.
Those who reject my priests are rejecting Me, those who don’t open their spiritual ears because they are bound to their material world, are missing out on the gift that God, is offering for the healing of all their evils.
If there was not faith before my Corporal Presence, here on earth, it is more difficult to believe in Me, now, when minds are saturating themselves daily with the rubbish of the world, this is why I have destined throughout all generations faithful instruments to my Word, who are the means of reaching out to those who are about to be lost forever.
Blessed are those who believe in Me, without seeing, those who without experiencing my Miracles, have faith, because they recognize the dignity of my Person, and the unique value of my Word.
I have many blessings in store for those who have faith in Me.
My Peace, and my Grace, flow into their lives like rivers of Heavenly Light, their joy is continuous and secure, because they are walking firmly on my Way.
Author: Joseph of Jesus and Mary
http://www.theworkofgod.org/Devotns/Euchrist/HolyMass/gospels
.asp?key=16
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
A Virtual Reality
In the Summer of 1996, three humble guys from Fargo, North
Dakota, one humble guy from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and over
20,000 of our closes Family Members, Friends, Colleagues, and
Neighbors, all came together to create the very short-lived, yet
truly incredible story and company written about below called,
AdverWorld.
Now some 8 years later, after the very sudden rise and fall of
our little Internet start-up called AdverWorld, the one humble
guy from Minneapolis, while working for this gentlemen, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/devaan/ presented
our humble story of very brief success to Mr. DeVaan, and to
his Technology Group.
And in the Fall of 2006, AdverWorld was reborn and renamed,
Expotera.
And in the Spring of 2008, Expotera, it's Private Investors, and
it's Founding Members, were all quite suddenly, "HIGHJACKED" by
Mr. DeVaan, and by his Technology Group.
And now in the Winter of 2011, Expotera is currently still being
held, "HOSTAGE" by Mr. DeVaan, and by his Technology Group.
But the one humble guy from Minneapolis, knows that help will soon
be on the way, and all of us, and our baby called Expotera, shall all
live to see, yet another very bright, and incredibly beautiful day.
Power To The People!!
Northscape/Business/Local
Sunday March 02, 1997
12:05 AM (CST)
AdverWorld a Rising Internet Star
Three young Fargo businessmen have been successful beyond
their dreams with online advertising company
By Matt Cory
Herald Staff Writer
FARGO -- When Mike Marcil and Chad Herring were teen-agers,
they used to sit on the pool table in the Herring's basement in
Fargo and daydream about one day owning their own business
and making a ton of dough.
That dream came true.
Marcil, Herring and Sean Kramer, all in their mid-20s, are co-owners
of AdverWorld, an Internet-based advertising company in Fargo.
What's rare about AdverWorld is the speed at which it has risen to
the top of the Internet ranks.
In only six months, AdverWorld has moved from Kramer's two-
bedroom Fargo apartment to the Broadway building offices
downtown with sales averaging $2 million a month.
With more than 100 full- and part-time employees and 20,000
customers nationwide, AdverWorld is the fastest growing company
in North Dakota. It recently received visits from both North Dakota
Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad.
In a nutshell, AdverWorld does four things for its customers. It
designs and puts a web page online for a business and is the host
site for the web page. AdverWorld also will update the web page
and promote it through other users of its site.
"We go after the mom-and-pop operation," Marcil, a UND graduate,
said. "We create something affordable for smaller businesses. We
offer turn-key solutions to small business."
Many small businesses don't have the knowledge or money to invest
to build their own pages, Marcil said. For a monthly fee, about $80,
AdverWorld will do the work for the business.
While providing that service to advertisers on the Internet isn't
exactly a new idea, the way in which AdverWorld went about it is.
After the idea came to the trio, they needed a way to get the ball
rolling.
While they had some capital to start with, the high cost of computer
equipment needed for the operation required a lot more money.
What they did was sell the product before the product was online.
"We premarketed it," Marcil said.
They did that by the network marketing approach. By utilizing the
direct selling method, Marcil said, they were able to attract a larger
number of customers right away.
AdverWorld enlisted independent representatives in the field to
sell their concept to small businesses wanting a web page. Those
independent representatives can also recruit other independent
representatives to go out to other businesses to sell the service.
AdverWorld's owners say the organization is not a pyramid scheme,
which is illegal, because independent representatives do not have to
pay a fee to work for AdverWorld.
And independent representatives do not have to recruit other
members to maintain employment, Marcil said.
While independent representatives get an "override" fee for signing
up other representatives, it doesn't mean the person enrolling others
will make more money.
AdverWorld hired Gerald Nehra, an attorney specializing in direct
selling and multilevel marketing, to set the parameters of its
independent representatives.
He said a pyramid "has no bottom. Each person is required to find
more (people) for income."
At AdverWorld, representatives can make money simply by selling
the web pages, said Nehra, who was the legal division director for
Amway for nine years.
"It is based on products sold," Marcil said.
According to documents sent to the Herald by the North Dakota
Attorney General's Consumer Protection and Antitrust Division,
pyramid schemes "depend on making money from the participants
rather than sales to those outside the company."
As a matter of policy, officials at the Attorney General's office could
not comment on AdverWorld.
Greg Mattson is part owner of Century Electric in Grand Forks. He's
also an independent representative for AdverWorld. He said before
he got into AdverWorld, he did his homework.
"We toured the site and we were very comfortable with what we
saw," he said. "A lot of things hit my desk, but one of the big things
that concerns me is the integrity.
"The word pyramid is not in my vocabulary."
The response of multilevel marketing was "phenomenal," Marcil said.
By the end of October, they had more than 10,000 customers signed
up to go online by Nov. 1. The floor at their first office was covered
with web page orders and only three web page developers, Marcil
said. To create those web pages, AdverWorld started hiring at a
frenzied pace.
"We went from seven employees to over 100 in 90 days," Marcil
said. "We lucked out. We got the right people at the right time."
That included traveling to Seattle, the home of computer giants
such as Microsoft, to find Internet experts.
One was Dan Erickson, a 20-year-old intern at Microsoft who is now
AdverWorld's director of technology.
"It was pretty scary," Erickson said of the situation he found when
he arrived in Fargo. "They had two Pentium servers and a handful
of computers."
With more customers coming every day, AdverWorld kept hiring from the student-oriented employment base in the Fargo-Moorhead area -- mainly North Dakota State University, Moorhead State University and Concordia College.
That's left AdverWorld with a distinctly Generation X feel.
"We haven't placed a lot of (employment) ads," Marcil said. "Everybody knows somebody."
And most everybody that knows the Internet is young, Herring said.
"We tried to find the 45-year-old people who knew the Internet," he
said. "There isn't a lot of gray hairs out there that understand the
Internet."
As the company progressed, AdverWorld has brought more
experienced business people into the fold, Herring said. And
the board of directors being formed also will include the older
generation, Marcil said.
And because there was such a backlog of orders, that meant a
lot of long days and nights.
"We were scared to death. There were a lot of sleepless nights,"
Marcil said.
That hectic workload left the core people with some other problems to deal with. Many employees became physically ill from working such long hours.
But they had promised the customers they would have their web
page online at a certain time, Marcil said. That meant around
the clock work.
"I don't know any 45-year-olds with families that could work 120
hours a week," Herring said.
And in the beginning, that workload was too much even for the
youngsters.
"We lost a bunch of them (customers) in the beginning," Marcil said. "We have been going 24/7 (24 hours a day, seven days a week) for a long time."
AdverWorld went online on the target date, but Marcil said they
were grateful many of the customers were patient with them. With
a recent expansion, it is now possible to get a web page online in
10 days, Marcil said.
Next for AdverWorld is to continue to expand its network around
the country and internationally. It plans to introduce the product
in Canada next month.
http://web.archive.org/web/19970719131429/www.gfherald.com
/biz/local/302ad.htm
Dakota, one humble guy from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and over
20,000 of our closes Family Members, Friends, Colleagues, and
Neighbors, all came together to create the very short-lived, yet
truly incredible story and company written about below called,
AdverWorld.
Now some 8 years later, after the very sudden rise and fall of
our little Internet start-up called AdverWorld, the one humble
guy from Minneapolis, while working for this gentlemen, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/devaan/ presented
our humble story of very brief success to Mr. DeVaan, and to
his Technology Group.
And in the Fall of 2006, AdverWorld was reborn and renamed,
Expotera.
And in the Spring of 2008, Expotera, it's Private Investors, and
it's Founding Members, were all quite suddenly, "HIGHJACKED" by
Mr. DeVaan, and by his Technology Group.
And now in the Winter of 2011, Expotera is currently still being
held, "HOSTAGE" by Mr. DeVaan, and by his Technology Group.
But the one humble guy from Minneapolis, knows that help will soon
be on the way, and all of us, and our baby called Expotera, shall all
live to see, yet another very bright, and incredibly beautiful day.
Power To The People!!
Northscape/Business/Local
Sunday March 02, 1997
12:05 AM (CST)
AdverWorld a Rising Internet Star
Three young Fargo businessmen have been successful beyond
their dreams with online advertising company
By Matt Cory
Herald Staff Writer
FARGO -- When Mike Marcil and Chad Herring were teen-agers,
they used to sit on the pool table in the Herring's basement in
Fargo and daydream about one day owning their own business
and making a ton of dough.
That dream came true.
Marcil, Herring and Sean Kramer, all in their mid-20s, are co-owners
of AdverWorld, an Internet-based advertising company in Fargo.
What's rare about AdverWorld is the speed at which it has risen to
the top of the Internet ranks.
In only six months, AdverWorld has moved from Kramer's two-
bedroom Fargo apartment to the Broadway building offices
downtown with sales averaging $2 million a month.
With more than 100 full- and part-time employees and 20,000
customers nationwide, AdverWorld is the fastest growing company
in North Dakota. It recently received visits from both North Dakota
Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad.
In a nutshell, AdverWorld does four things for its customers. It
designs and puts a web page online for a business and is the host
site for the web page. AdverWorld also will update the web page
and promote it through other users of its site.
"We go after the mom-and-pop operation," Marcil, a UND graduate,
said. "We create something affordable for smaller businesses. We
offer turn-key solutions to small business."
Many small businesses don't have the knowledge or money to invest
to build their own pages, Marcil said. For a monthly fee, about $80,
AdverWorld will do the work for the business.
While providing that service to advertisers on the Internet isn't
exactly a new idea, the way in which AdverWorld went about it is.
After the idea came to the trio, they needed a way to get the ball
rolling.
While they had some capital to start with, the high cost of computer
equipment needed for the operation required a lot more money.
What they did was sell the product before the product was online.
"We premarketed it," Marcil said.
They did that by the network marketing approach. By utilizing the
direct selling method, Marcil said, they were able to attract a larger
number of customers right away.
AdverWorld enlisted independent representatives in the field to
sell their concept to small businesses wanting a web page. Those
independent representatives can also recruit other independent
representatives to go out to other businesses to sell the service.
AdverWorld's owners say the organization is not a pyramid scheme,
which is illegal, because independent representatives do not have to
pay a fee to work for AdverWorld.
And independent representatives do not have to recruit other
members to maintain employment, Marcil said.
While independent representatives get an "override" fee for signing
up other representatives, it doesn't mean the person enrolling others
will make more money.
AdverWorld hired Gerald Nehra, an attorney specializing in direct
selling and multilevel marketing, to set the parameters of its
independent representatives.
He said a pyramid "has no bottom. Each person is required to find
more (people) for income."
At AdverWorld, representatives can make money simply by selling
the web pages, said Nehra, who was the legal division director for
Amway for nine years.
"It is based on products sold," Marcil said.
According to documents sent to the Herald by the North Dakota
Attorney General's Consumer Protection and Antitrust Division,
pyramid schemes "depend on making money from the participants
rather than sales to those outside the company."
As a matter of policy, officials at the Attorney General's office could
not comment on AdverWorld.
Greg Mattson is part owner of Century Electric in Grand Forks. He's
also an independent representative for AdverWorld. He said before
he got into AdverWorld, he did his homework.
"We toured the site and we were very comfortable with what we
saw," he said. "A lot of things hit my desk, but one of the big things
that concerns me is the integrity.
"The word pyramid is not in my vocabulary."
The response of multilevel marketing was "phenomenal," Marcil said.
By the end of October, they had more than 10,000 customers signed
up to go online by Nov. 1. The floor at their first office was covered
with web page orders and only three web page developers, Marcil
said. To create those web pages, AdverWorld started hiring at a
frenzied pace.
"We went from seven employees to over 100 in 90 days," Marcil
said. "We lucked out. We got the right people at the right time."
That included traveling to Seattle, the home of computer giants
such as Microsoft, to find Internet experts.
One was Dan Erickson, a 20-year-old intern at Microsoft who is now
AdverWorld's director of technology.
"It was pretty scary," Erickson said of the situation he found when
he arrived in Fargo. "They had two Pentium servers and a handful
of computers."
With more customers coming every day, AdverWorld kept hiring from the student-oriented employment base in the Fargo-Moorhead area -- mainly North Dakota State University, Moorhead State University and Concordia College.
That's left AdverWorld with a distinctly Generation X feel.
"We haven't placed a lot of (employment) ads," Marcil said. "Everybody knows somebody."
And most everybody that knows the Internet is young, Herring said.
"We tried to find the 45-year-old people who knew the Internet," he
said. "There isn't a lot of gray hairs out there that understand the
Internet."
As the company progressed, AdverWorld has brought more
experienced business people into the fold, Herring said. And
the board of directors being formed also will include the older
generation, Marcil said.
And because there was such a backlog of orders, that meant a
lot of long days and nights.
"We were scared to death. There were a lot of sleepless nights,"
Marcil said.
That hectic workload left the core people with some other problems to deal with. Many employees became physically ill from working such long hours.
But they had promised the customers they would have their web
page online at a certain time, Marcil said. That meant around
the clock work.
"I don't know any 45-year-olds with families that could work 120
hours a week," Herring said.
And in the beginning, that workload was too much even for the
youngsters.
"We lost a bunch of them (customers) in the beginning," Marcil said. "We have been going 24/7 (24 hours a day, seven days a week) for a long time."
AdverWorld went online on the target date, but Marcil said they
were grateful many of the customers were patient with them. With
a recent expansion, it is now possible to get a web page online in
10 days, Marcil said.
Next for AdverWorld is to continue to expand its network around
the country and internationally. It plans to introduce the product
in Canada next month.
http://web.archive.org/web/19970719131429/www.gfherald.com
/biz/local/302ad.htm
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