Friday, August 28, 2009
YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND AMERICANS.
You have this illusion that Americans CRITICALLY THINK. We do NOT. You think we give a fuck about people dying every day because of wars we support and fund. We do NOT. You think we have a clue about PLAN COLOMBIA, the details of the wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. We do NOT. And we do NOT CARE. You assume we know Venezuela's president is Hugo Chavez, who is responsible for a $48billion surplus. We do NOT. But we do know he is a "communist."
See, this is what Dr. Stephens repeatedly tried to explain to you on the RDB radio show on Obama's Wars on August 27, 2009. You talked about how single payer healthcare is good for the economy, people, healthcare providers and such. You are assuming we know what single payer is. Most have never heard of it. So how can we support Kucinich. Most of us do not know Kucinich. You said that the only losers in a single payer system are the gangster cartel. THE GANGSTER CARTEL OWNS THE MEDIA!!! This is why we do not know of any alternative to Obama's healthcare plan! CNN and FOX tell us what we WILL believe. We don't know that Venezuela has a successful economy. The mainstream media tell us they are "communist." WE DO NOT QUESTION THIS.
What is peace, Kelso? All we know is people with turbans will destroy us if we do not extinguish them first! If that is the cost for our privilege to shop in safe malls without worrying about a bomb exploding, so be it! This is our peace. Babz summed it up beautifully... "Peace has to be the prevailing thing, but until people are prepared to be outraged about that, then it won't be." The people getting rich from war control what we know and believe.
Why is it like this in America? Nothing other than the most powerful, successful, brainwashing campaign ever carried out on a populace in world history.
We are the victims of a massive campaign to dumb us down. This campaign can be considered complete and wildly successful. Through the use of toxins in our water supply and poisons in our food, along with constant entertainment on tv, and lack of critical thinking emphasis in schools, we do not have any drive to find out what we might not know. We are demoralized. There is no ability left in us to assess and form logical conclusions driven by curiosity.
Instead, we rush home to watch the newest reality show on tv. We lust for material goods without putting in the work to acquire them. We laugh at those who know and use "big words" in conversation. We give billions of dollars to Wall Street Banks and then defend them after they use it to give out record bonuses to themselves.
Yea, this is what it is. And you must accept that it is too late to reverse the calamity America is leading the world towards.
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Very fine work. Very depressing. I'm going to write a long piece on Colombia and Venezuela and how Americans of both political parties are causing needless death when peace, cooperation and mutually-profitable business relationships is the EASY WAY TO HANDLE it. I'll do that for Ishmael Reed's KONCH AND VINES and cross-post but I need some time to wind down first and write with a clear head because these issues are so important and really only him and his daughter, the folks at THE BLACK AGENDA REPORT, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are semi well-known names who are serious about peace.
There are times I get scared that there are fakers all over the place intentionally deceiving even the handful of critical thinkers who do the homework and can see past labels and skin-suits and trivia like whether a brown-skinned person of African features in Barranquilla thinks Barack Obama is "better" than Sarah Palin. Hint: he or she is scared of the former and has never heard of the latter.
You impress me, buddy. I told you Chavez was the opposite of a communist, that he was a budget hawk and you went to the source material and confirmed it for yourself. What can I say? Your talent may have given you more of a burden then you really want to carry! But you'll get rich in the process. Of that, I have no doubt.
Now I have to deal with the video.
I am an ethnic Russian Jew. My great-grandfather and great-great uncles fought with the Bolsheviks in the Revolution. Unlike the Sheeple, they realized very quickly that they were still 3rd class citizens because they were Jews. So, instead of any chance of going to Komsomol and Moscow State University, their choices were to fight in the Red Army (like they had to fight in the Tsar's Army) or crime.
They left first chance they could because THAT WAS NOT WHAT THEY FOUGHT THAT WAR FOR. Some went to England, some to Mexico, some to the USA.
Maybe I'm just genetically lucky to be a questioner of authority.
This doesn't depress me anymore. The one's who are smart enough and not afraid of the truth will have a good chance of surviving this next decade...
It's crazy. On top of that we're the most drugged nation on Earth. Anti-depressants, basically legalized ecstacy is the shit here.
It don't look to good for us.
*ecstasy*
YOU MAKE ME FEEL PROUD FOLK - nice know critical thinking aint dead and add to that i have a synonymn now for oligarchy = cartell
Jay -
Kelso sent me.
Nice post. I've tried to tell Kelso for as long as I have known him through the 'nets that Most Americans do not know where South America is, let alone any country in South America, and for the most part we do not care.
He rants and rails about Plan Columbia, but I think it is safe to say that Most Americans not only do not know what this is, or where Columbia is, we pretty much don't care. Is American Idol on?
I blame the media -- and I think media reform is the most important thing we can attempt to do before we can worry about campaign reform. Without having the media, we cannot have the message (distributed).
Anyway, nice post, nice blog, nice message.
Regards,
Tengrain
Thanks for visiting, Tengrain. I bet it would be hard for most to adjust to REAL news if the media even was reformed!
Jay, I don't know where you are, but you might try to seek out a Pacifica Radio Station in your area -- it is like public radio without the extended corporate sponsorship, and hence they do real reporting, very aggressive stuff.
Amy Goodman runs Democracy Now! on Pacifica stations, and if you have not heard her, you really should.
Regards,
Tengrain
I usually watch Democracy Now on the public channel here in Denver. She does a good job shedding light on world news that I wouldn't ever know about if all I could watch was CNN and FOX
Democracy Now is OK. I'll give them credit for a lot of things, not the least of which is covering a lot of ground. They pay attention to the whole world, not just the USA. Personally, I prefer Juan Gonzalez to Amy Goodman, because his years as a tabloid city-side reporter give him the know-how to ask a lot of the key questions and really get to the point.
Amy Goodman is a bit caught up in sort of a fantasy-Revolution-Landia and as a result when she covers Latin American issues she sees everything through the lens of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Communism just is NOT part of the largely apolitical modern Latin governments.
She likes to cast Chavez and Correa as modern day Castro and Che, when their strength lies in their having delivered instrumentally on their political promises and via sound economic management. Chavez especially has allowed for new wealth creation but not concentration, just by allowing the normal rules of corporate finance to play out.
When crooked elites run a business into the ground with an outstanding pension debt to its workers, those workers get first call on all the assets of the business including any "goodwill" or "brand equity," should they want to take possession and try to run it.
That's not radical. That's just following the rules which seem to apply everywhere but the U.S.A. Via this route, many working Venezuelans have become wealthy and worker-ownership if by right and not by decree works very well in a social democracy.
1000 new millionaires is way better than another billion dollars to one guy who already has a billion dollars to start with.
Amy Goodman's problem is that she can't stand the idea of even a heretofore broke factory worker making a million dollars in a COLLECTIVE WORKER-OWNED COMPANY.
In other words, Jay, she Is the example of what the KGB guy was talking about in the video, whereas Chomsky and Herman are not. Chomsky's not a communist or fantasist. He's an anarco-sindicalist and anti-imperialist. He also analyzes geo-politics very well and in a series of lectures in May 2007 at the Sloan Business School at MIT, he predicted a lot of what would be the ongoing success of Chavez even in a time of lower oil prices, plus the success of Bachelet's social democratic republic in Chile. He also cited Rafael Correa of Ecuador for being a sound ecnomic president while having fully delivered on his promises to get the USA and the IMF out of Ecuador.
To her credit, Amy Goodman gives Chomsky a full hour usually once every three months. Anybody who's interested making money in world markets is a fool not to listen to Noam Chomsky because he'll pick up on unconventional contrarian goings-on (like Chavez's inflation obsession), likk Morales's mutually good deals with Gazprom of Russia, etc.
jay midnyte,
The word of the day is "solipsism".
You are it.
Regarding American ignorance, well, one's degree of ignorance on any topic is a function of his own effort or lack of effort to peel it back.
With respect to Chavez, he is the latest example of a strutting Latin-American dictator who is guiding the Venezuelan economy toward the same end as Cuba. He's a nitwit who believes he's smarter than the market forces of the world. Because he is handling the Venezuelan oil industry with dictatorial ineptitude, the country's economy will crumble.
Just so you know, there is NO SUCH THING as SINGLE PAYER HEALTHCARE. The term is a contrivance.
There are 307 million Americans. Thus, in theory there are 307 million payers. However, many are children and many are old. They do not pay into our healthcare system.
Many of them are enrolled in the Medicaid and Medicare programs. There are more than 80 million people enrolled in those programs. There are 23 million military veterans. They have the VA. Hence, about 100 million Americans have their healthcare bills paid by those who are, in fact, tax-payers.
You can estimate the number of people who pay. Maybe 125 million workers pay for the healthcare received by 307 million.
It is your hope that the same 125 million people are forced to pay even more, and you make the ridiculous claim that costs will drop because the government will run the bureaucracy that will oversee this national monster.
Do you have an example of a bureaucracy that is well run by the government? Post Office? Public Schools? Social Service programs? Medicaid?
Is Medicare well run? You have no idea. The VA? The VA was at the edge of collapse until it was completely restructured. The restructuring is still underway. The VA went from being a horrendous in-patient hospital system to a decent operation that is now mainly an out-patient system.
Don't forget to check the dictionary for "solipsism."
slappz
"Regarding American ignorance, well, one's degree of ignorance on any topic is a function of his own effort or lack of effort to peel it back."
I know that thats why I said we (in general) don't make the effort to question what we're told by the TV.
On single payer:
I never gave an opinion on it, I just said Kelso talked about how it is a cheaper more efficient system. The point was a lot of Americans don't know about this style of healthcare because we only know what the media will tell us are our options.
And I'm generally not for government bureaucracy when the private sector can provide cheap, effective service determined by free market enterprise.
jay,
With respect to ignorance, you can only speak for yourself.
As for how people receive information and develop their views, well, that's complicated.
But you concluded that America is filled with know-nothings. And not only are they know-nothings, they are unable to think according to your terms.
What is your definition of "critical thinking?"
Meanwhile, there is nothing in the world of healthcare that suggests a "single-payer" government-run plan is the low-cost alternative.
Obama knows this. He made an extraordinary admission when he compared the Post Office with UPS and FedEx. That said it all.
In that one statement, he promised to deliver a national healthcare program that would operate with the embarrassing inefficiency of the Post Office.
He knows he's right because the inefficient government-run healthcare program already exists.
As I have said, Medicaid in NY State spends $12,500 per person, per year. That's DOUBLE the national average for healthcare.
Consider Lasik surgery, which is not covered by many healthcare plans.
The cost of laser surgery to correct your vision has dropped about 80% over the last few years. Why? Competition.
The cost is down to about $500 per eye. It looks like a bargain compared to a lifetime of wearing glasses, which are covered by many healthcare plans. The cost of new lenses and frames every couple of years will fly past $500 in a hurry.
But a government-run healthcare program is anti-competitive by nature. Medicaid is proof. The near collapse of the VA is more proof.
You wrote:
"THE GANGSTER CARTEL OWNS THE MEDIA!!!"
Please. You're making me laugh.
And:
"This is why we do not know of any alternative to Obama's healthcare plan!"
Hardly. Few people can read financial statements and even fewer know anything about providing healthcare efficiently.
And:
"CNN and FOX tell us what we WILL believe."
What? All Lies All the Time?
And:
"We don't know that Venezuela has a successful economy."
Venezuela is enjoying the good fortune of producing more oil than it can consume, thus giving it a valuable export commodity that it sells to the US -- Citgo is the Venezuelan oil company.
Were it not for its abundance of oil -- it would be just another poor nation in South America. However, with its current strutting twit in charge, a leader who says Fidel Castro is his god, you can be sure that Venezuela will become an economic wreck just like Cuba, if Chavez holds onto his power long enough.
Have you noticed that about the only meaningful export from Venezuela is oil. Does the country build anything that sells in other countries? No.
When Fidel croaks, his brother Raul might shift Cuba to the Chinese model and that will cause problems for Chavez.
And:
"The mainstream media tell us they are "communist." "
So maybe you are learning that journalists are often unreliable. Or that journalists are not responsible for the knowledge or lack of knowledge of readers.
Meanwhile, it's on you to know the difference between "socialism", "communism" and "capitalism."