Saturday, January 23, 2010

Democracy Dies Yet Another Death

Today the US Supreme Court hammered another nail in the coffin of the Constitution, as if sanctioning the theft of the presidency in 2000 wasn’t enough for this corrupt ‘conservative’ court.  Though not apparently as monumental as the murder of JFK and the afore-mentioned theft (including the follow-up theft of the 2004 presidential election), the decision by this activist ‘conservative’ court to grant to corporations the same rights as individuals has effectively granted them the power to buy and sell politicians like NFL team owners buy and sell ball-players.  There is no single individual (with Bill Gates and a handful of billionaires the obvious exceptions) who can effectively compete with that kind of power, and it would be a sure bet that if the present Congress does nothing to thwart the intent of this ominous ruling, it will be the last Congress that can walk the halls without his or her’s sponsors’ corporate names so much as tattooed on their backsides.  The senator from IBM will address the junior senator from Apple, and pending bills will be sent to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 to make sure they meet with approval.

Surprisingly, little seems to have been made of this.  How did we get to such a state of affairs, that so many seem to accept the argument “it’s only a question of free speech; why shouldn’t corporations have the same rights as individuals?”  Because they have interests at ODDS with the average citizen, are often owned and controlled by foreign interests who don’t have to be subjected to US laws, and their corporate interests are at odds even with the majority of their labor force, not to mention their shareholders.  Even their shareholders are often large institutions that have impersonal interests at odds with the many penny-investors and stockholders that comprise their ownership.  The truth is plain and evident:  corporations are NOT individuals and should never be treated as such.

There’s some hope in that the current Congress, which may be the last Congress that has a fighting chance to enact some genuine and permanent reform, may yet remember who their real constituents are, and they aren’t the corporate giants that may have given generously to their campaigns.  All the money in the world still can’t buy you the election if you can’t sell the public at least the illusion that you’re ‘fighting for the people’.  At least corporate giveaways to their numbered puppets can supply the best image-makers, rumor mongers and whisper campaigns that money can buy.

Who are the criminals who have committed this new attempt to throttle the will of the People, in deference to the corporate powers that entice or otherwise enslave them just to earn their daily bread?  The five-vote majority on the US Supreme Court that have so ruled are led by the alleged “Chief Justice”, one John Roberts, aided and abetted by the usual Scalia-Thomas dastardly duo and fellow Bush-appointed newbie Samuel Alito, rounded out by Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy (who, it should be noted, was one of the majority votes that approved the suppression of the Florida vote recount  for Al Gore). 

Speaking metaphorically of course, this group needs the metaphoric equivalent of being taken out and soundly flogged in public, tarred and feathered and quickly dispatched to the pastures of their childhood dreams.  The Republic has died another death, and democracy with it.


["What's he talking about?" - http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf ]


© 2010 by Don Deppeller.  Reprint freely with attribution.

Monday, January 18, 2010

If Martha Coakley Loses the Massachusetts US Senate Race, Here’s Why

With the special election in Massachusetts to fill Teddy Kennedy's Senate seat only days away, President Obama flew into Boston in a last-minute endeavor to ‘fire-up the base’ and prevent an electoral debacle that would jeopardize all the work that’s been done on the so-called “health-care reform” bill. Normally one would expect an incumbent president to put in at least one appearance for the candidate of his party during a special senatorial election, but part of the problem is this recurring disease of arrogance that seems to have afflicted this White House – which originally hadn’t felt the need to go to Massachusetts at all, thinking that Ted Kennedy’s seat was certain to go to his Democratic replacement. Suddenly, within the last week, in that bluest of blue states, one of the most reliable of Democratic strongholds, the Republican is now pulling ahead in most state-wide polls. Unbelievable, right?


Not exactly. I’m not surprised in the least, and despite what the pundits are saying on cable news to try to explain it, they’re dancing around what some must privately acknowledge is the problem: the constant, almost gleeful insulting of the ‘base’ that this White House has engaged in almost from the day they walked in a year ago. While there is still hope that this president will remember that constant injunction of humility he would often remind us of during the 2008 campaign, he seemed to have mysteriously lost it sometime after the August 2009 recess when the words “public option” stopped crossing his lips and Rahm Emmanuel was discovered to have been strong-arming Senate Majority Leader Reid to cave in to Lieberman’s demands, rather than the other way around. Maybe he lost it even earlier, when he was awaiting his keys to the Oval Office and voted against allowing lawsuits to take place against the telecoms that had aided and abetted the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of ordinary American citizens (such as this writer). That should have been the first sign, since he had come out strongly in favor of civil liberties and the rights of citizens over corporate interests. In fact, that is the essence of the problem that now plagues Martha Coakley, one which she isn’t really responsible for but one for which she will suffer: President Obama, since taking office, has seemingly tended to side with the corporate interests over the rights and well-being of the average citizen. Whereas he once was adamantly against mandates, even excoriating his opponents for embracing them, here he’s gone and done just that, without a word. No words explaining why he feels he has to accept them, nothing. Nada. Same with the so-called “public option”, which is the keystone of the current Democratic discontent though pundits are loathe to mention it. For a constitutional scholar such as this president is, it should be ingrained emotively in the psyche of the citizenry that you can NOT mandate that the entire population be forced to purchase a product or service from a protected class of private citizens, especially one that not only has a protected monopoly but one that trades in something everyone has a right to: their HEALTH. This isn’t auto insurance, where many people don’t ever drive a car and it’s still considered a luxury (though not in some parts of the country, mainly out West where the population density is so low). This is LIFE OR DEATH.


The public showed in poll after poll that they were for a “public option” in the effort to overhaul and reform health-care. Even a slight majority of Republicans (53% of them, if memory serves me correctly) felt that a “public option” was important. Certainly a huge majority of Democrats (nearly 90% in some polls) and between 56% and 79% of independents (we’ll call them ‘non-aligned’ for purposes of this discussion). It was more than clear – in fact, painfully clear – that the public WANTED the public option, especially if they were going to be forced to purchase health-insurance. At least they would be able to get it NOT from the parasitic number-crunchers, who were worse about interfering with a doctor’s prognosis than any “government bureaucrat” ever could be, but within a public program that was based on the central idea of providing HEALTH, not maximizing profits, which the private health-insurance industry is geared towards, like any non-public field of endeavor is. For them the bottom-line is the bottom line: i.e. the profit they make when playing their number games of actuaries and statistics.


To put it in constitutional terms: one of the central tenets of the US constitution is in the preamble, where it clearly states that the purpose of the document is to “promote the general welfare”, not “promote the welfare of those corporate interests upon which the health and welfare of the People must rely”. Now we heard time and again our president railing against the “special interests”, but what we have seen belies that claim. While the president portrayed himself as being against those special interests, he was simultaneously stocking his administration with figures who could only be called operatives of “special interests”. During his campaign he had proclaimed he was not only against mandates, he was against raising taxes on the middle class, yet we know that he has put pressure on congressmen and the labor bosses to accept a huge excise tax on so-called “Cadillac health-care plans”, which are often those plans held by union workers – plans they gained by collective bargaining, often in lieu of pay raises. This is in contrast to the House plan, which calls for taxing the earnings of the uppermost percentile of the wealthy, whose tax cuts under Bush rescinded the Clinton-era taxes that helped to balance the budget and eradicate the deficit. Taxing the wealthiest to help pay for the health-care subsidies that offset the more onerous effects of the mandate could be balanced later by continuing the Bush tax cuts, so as to avoid additional taxation for that most privileged class, but that logic seems to have escaped the Senate finance committee which showed itself to be obeisant to the corporate interests first and foremost.


And our president has had nothing to say publicly about any of this. Which brings us to yet another broken promise that has rubbed salt in the wound of those in his base that are normally relied upon to “get out the vote”: transparency. Despite Speaker Pelosi’s words to the contrary, things said “in the heat of the campaign” DO mean something: they are what sells a voter on his or her vote. That flippant remark, about how “many things are said on the campaign trail”, seems to frame this season of Democratic discontent. What, are we as stupid and ignorant as our Republican brethren (no offense to my friends who have more of a brain than many of their party), who seemed to have forgotten they were once the party of fiscal discipline and responsibility? Sure, the reality of the political landscape can change a candidate’s approach to problem-solving, but we certainly didn’t expect this new president to have sided with the likes of Joe Lieberman and strong-armed the 52+ senators who were solidly behind a public option; we seriously believed it would be the other way around, that if he wanted to keep his seat as chair of the Homeland Security committee, he would support the bill the majority wanted. Instead, we were treated to the spectacle of having Traitor Joe dictate the terms by which the entire health-care bill would be enacted, in effect gutting it and making any future attempt to free the People from the parasitic grip of the insurance industry a permanent unlikelihood. Future Republican administrations will undoubtedly do away with any subsidies that this Democratic congress would put in the bill as a salve for the naïve sheeple who actually believed the campaign rhetoric, and then we will be left with the naked entrée of this entire effort, which is a mandate by which the health-care mess will be cleaned up on the backs of the People who already suffer under the heavy hand of bankrupting premiums that cost more than their average mortgage or monthly rent. The Senate bill that has emerged, with the president’s blessing, is a fecal mess, through and through, and will permanently enslave the People to a parasitic class of special interests that had enough foresight to buy the votes of the most key senators (and we now know are major supporters of Martha Coakley, let’s not forget the subject of this screed) years ago. They have the best win-win situation they could hope for. If the Republicans, who are their natural champions, couldn’t stop the effort to reform the health-care nightmare, the corporate toadies within the ranks of Democratic (and allied) senators could be counted on in the final analysis to deliver the entire remaining population of the US into their hands. Sure, they smarted from the Feingold-Franken amendment that limits their profits to 20% of their total intake, but we all know how that works. The cost of maintaining that army of bean-counters that second-guess every doctor’s decision isn’t considered “profit”, but “overhead”. This is one major issue that a public option would deal with, but sadly we won’t ever know what having a “public health-care option” in America would be like, since even the Democratic champions of the common man have proven themselves capable of being led pied-piper-like by the likes of Traitor Joe Lieberman and……President Barack Obama. Shrugging their shoulders all the way. “What could I do? I’m not Joe Lieberman, and I’m expected to toe the line, even if it’s not the party line now.” That’s right; Joe Lieberman, once rejected by the primary voters of his party, ran hard as an independent on his dedication to true universal health care, and despite having sold himself that way, has decided since then to sell his vote to his home-state corporate constituents, which are (surprise, surprise!) INSURANCE COMPANIES. Some of the same ones that have funded Ms. Coakley.


And you wonder why Ms. Coakley might lose?!? It really should come as no surprise by now. Yes, there are explanations for all those huge campaign donations by the likes of Big Pharma and the health-insurance industry; here’s an excerpt from a column by Timothy P. Carney in the Jan. 9th edition of the Washington Examiner:



With Democrat Martha Coakley in trouble in the Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat, Democrats could lose vote No. 60 for President Obama's health-care bill. In response, an army of lobbyists for drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals has teamed up to throw a high-dollar Capitol Hill fundraiser for Coakley next Tuesday night. The invitation is here.


Of the 22 names on the host committee--meaning they raised $10,000 or more for Coakley--17 are federally registered lobbyists, 15 of whom have health-care clients. Of the other five hosts, one is married to a lobbyist, one was a lobbyist in Pennsylvania, another is a lawyer at a lobbying firm, and another is a corporate CEO. Oh, and of course, there's also the political action commitee for Boston Scientific Corporation.


All the leading drug companies have lobbyists on Coakley's host committee: Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Astra-Zeneca, and more. On the insurance side of things, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, HealthSouth, and United Health all are represented on the host committee.


Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Coakley-in-trouble-Pharma-and-HMO-lobbyists-to-the-rescue-81067542.html#ixzz0cwxBTonT



[A copy of the invitation is posted right there, naming names and dollar amounts, for anyone who doubts the fact.]



In the face of all this, is it any wonder any more why the Democratic base is dispirited? Yes, there is transparency in that the above invitation – and the implications it makes – has come to light, but what of the actual negotiations taking place behind closed doors in the Capital building and the White House? Have we switched one industry writing the law (the oil companies writing the energy bill under the watchful eye and encouraging hand of former Veep ‘Big Dick’ Cheney) for another? From what little we hear coming out of the mouths of the participants, that’s what it sounds like. More shoulder-shrugging and finger-pointing, but no ‘straight talk’ from the president on how he is going to square what’s going on with his campaign pledges. And if I hear another instance of that stale euphemism “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy…..blah-blah” I’ll simply break down and hurl. It’s a euphemism for a cop-out. While it once had some cachet, it’s been employed in defending the indefensible. We not only won’t get a full loaf, we won’t get a half-loaf either; in fact, we won’t even get a slice, more like a handful of crumbs. Yet we’re being asked to like it and embrace it as if it’s the full loaf we’ve been waiting for ever since we got that, er, super-majority in the Senate to go with that brand-spankin’ new president, whose tag line was that he was going to bring “Change you can believe in” to the White House.



To those of us out here in the ‘base’, the ones that got out the vote in ’08, that manned the phones, that drove the votes with our fervor, it’s becoming more of a hollow claim. We met the new boss, thought highly of him, gave him a chance, and are willing to give him even more of a chance, but we’ve become disillusioned. Pole shift or not, we expect politicians to be straight-forward with us, and so far, we have good reason to be disillusioned. Our intelligence continues to be insulted, and we didn’t hear anything in the Sunday speech in Boston to change our minds.



Which is why many ‘progressive’ Democrats in the great Bay State will be sitting on their hands come Tuesday. Maybe the White House will draw an invaluable lesson from this, though I don’t hold out much hope. It will, however, be a teachable moment. When you make a promise, keep it. And if you can’t absolutely can’t, at least give it the good old college try and be upfront with us as to why you can’t.



Last but not least, remember who brought you to this dance and why.



© 2010 by Don Deppeller. Reprint freely with attribution.

Saturday, January 9, 2010



Jan 9, 2010 - Despite my aversion to self-promotion, I recognize by the many emails that come in that I should be doing more to let people know more about me and what I can help them learn about the official Majestic 12 version of "Disclosure" to the human population via the saga of Dan Burisch (who has now reverted to using his original surname Crain since leaving his former wife Deb Burisch and marrying his long-time love Marcia McDowell, his handler and former Operations Director). This I plan to do in the coming weeks, particularly because the pending poleshift draws closer and the public needs to learn as much as possible how they have been bamboozled, how to read the signs, and what to do about it.



In the meantime, I've come across a few pictures from over the years. These are from the Mindshaft files. The one on the left was taken at Jaxx, a Wash. DC-area nightclub, during a show promoting our "Mindshaft Over Matter" CD.


The one on the right and the one below are from 2001, during the "Glimpses from Other Realities" recording sessions, right after the "American Rock Hymns" EP came out - which included remixes of "Into the Light" and "Loving the Human", and "CrumbleDust" w/Perrynoid.


Notice the flag pin; even I was caught up in the gung-ho patriotism of the time. Little did I realize then how our patriotism was being used to help us justify an ominous effort to curb our civil liberties and encroaching martial law, set into motion by 'Big Dick' Cheney, a/k/a MJ-2 or Angler.