The Koch Brothers, Charles & David from Wichita, Kansas, are each worth more than $21.5 billion. Charles has come right out and admitted that their major goal is to eliminate 90% of all laws and government regulations, so as to further the "culture of prosperity." The Kochs are the biggest funder of right-wing front groups in the country.
Twice a year they bring together all the wealthy donors to talk about their game plan. A website called ThinkProgress somehow got hold of a memo that outlines what happened the last time Koch and company got together for a secret election-planning meeting, in June 2010.
It's time we faced facts: fighting the Taliban over there is at the same time propping up the biggest drug-based regime in the world.
The World Bank issued a report in 2006 on "Afghanistan's Opium Economy." Isn't it interesting that we're fighting a "war on drugs," yet over there we have no problem with this? Certainly those drugs are going to get here eventually, again just follow the money. But obviously the Afghans involved can buy protection and continue their business.
I find it very chilling that the U.S. military would recognize this situation and begin preparations for us how to deal with it, when many of our elected officials are still prepared to think climate change is some kind of hoax! We're like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand.
It almost seems to me that the Cold War was staged so the weapons manufacturers and others could make money off it. Otherwise, how could we go from being allies with the Russians all through the war to their becoming our bitter enemies almost overnight?
And I find it outrageous that some of the leading Nazis were brought over here because it was apparently more important to fight the Cold War than to hold them responsible for what they'd done.
There should have been a thorough vetting done by this country--and not secretly but in public--so American people knew which Nazis were coming and why.
A great deal of the CIA's job seems to be to "spin" whatever happens. And for the most part, spinning is done to cover up the truth: If we've done it, then it has to be right.
We know about the horrifying Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment when the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) "observed" and experimented on 399 poor African-American men in the late stages of syphilis--basically watching them die over a forty-year period starting in 1932. This came to light in 1972.
Yet another study has been uncovered in 2010. The USPHS was also busy in Guatemala from 1946-1948, infecting nearly 1,000 Guatemalan citizens with venereal diseases. Why? To test antibiotics. Don't believe me--it was published as "Findings from a CDC Report on the 1946-1948 U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Inoculation Study."
The conditions by which our food is being supplied to us are very dangerous. Consider that more than half a billion eggs were recalled last year and a salmonella outbreak in August made about 1,700 people sick. Preventable food-borne illness hits about 76 million Americans every year--325,000 became hospitalized and 5,000 die from eating tainted food!
It all comes back to the same old thing: this is what happens when corporations, in this case agribusiness, take over. It simply becomes bottom line, money, and profits--everything else is damned.
You'd think that the federal regulators would want to keep tabs on this, but for years the FDA looked the other way.
The thought of taking out another country's leadership is so despicable, it makes me ashamed that I'm an American. During the Cold War, the CIA plotted against 8 foreign leaders, and 5 of them died violent deaths. The CIA was involved for years in planning to murder Fidel Castro.
One paragraph in particular gives me pause, when I think back to what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. "Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion," the manual instructed.
Let's look at how the government has been intent on keeping us safe. First, did you know that the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) already had detention centers in place since it was established in March 2003 Second, the Army went on to establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program back in 2005. "This regulation provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations."
Where does it say that, if you call something "terrorism," the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be made null and void? All they've got to do is say the word and they can put you under surveillance without a warrant. To me, this smacks of an attack on the foundations of democracy that plays right into the HANDS of terrorists. It also sets a precedent for the kinds of tactics we went to see at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.
To me, this shows the continuing influence of those "experts" we brought here from Germany after WWII. Here you have doctors stating that you need to know complete background of the patient before using this substance--and they're injecting these people with this drug as soon as they're checked in!
A document from 2002 shows that "standard inprocessing orders for detainees" included 1,250 mg of mefloquine, five times higher than the dose given to people as preventative. And it's being given not for its intended purpose, but to study its intended side effects! I'm speechless. What ever happened to the physician's oath to "do no harm"?
The CIA decided that these videos had to be wiped out--even though the many redactions made by the Agency make you wonder what else is being covered up. The first memo is from Oct. 2002, when the CIA began discussing the sensitivity of "interrogation sessions."
Clearly they could never allow the American people to see what they're doing to these detainees so you destroy the evidence. But what looms even larger is that there WAS evidence, and of such a nature that required it to be destroyed. That tells you how bad it must have been.
Their findings apparently weren't too heartening to our policy-makers, if they bothered to read the study. The whole war on terror notion needs to be rethought, according to Rand, because in simple terms "countering al Qa'ida has focused far too much on the use of military forces."
If the government follows Rand on other matters, why not give them due consideration on this? Supposedly this is their job and they're the experts.
It's time to end these "phony wars on terror" and get down to the serious business of rebuilding our own democracy from the ground up.
Here are a few things we've learned from WikiLeaks' document releases that we didn't know before: The CIA has a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan.In Iraq, there are another 15,000 civilian casualties that haven't been brought into the light, and our troops were instructed not to look into torture tactics that our Iraqi allies were using. US Special Operations forces are in Pakistan without any public knowledge, and our Pakistani "allies" are the main protectors if the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I mean: Let's face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven't done their job. Instead of holding government accountable as the "fourth branch" the founders intended, I guess corporate media's role today is to protect the government from embassassment.
I cry out to stop the electronic ballots, because any computer can be hacked into, as evidence shows. I say, stick with handwritten ballots. If you can't fill in the blank circle with a pencil, then you shouldn't be voting because we've been doing that since the first grade! Maybe the ballots still need to be hand-counted, but at least you'd have a paper trail.
It's just appalling to know that we have this capability to use as we so desire. It is truly survive-at-any-cost, where we have no moral high ground on anything? That seems to be the mind-set here: we have every weapon imaginary at our disposal but nobody else is allowed to be that way. I find it kind of ironic that the very thing we attacked Saddam Hussein over, we'd maintained in our arsenal for many years! The hypocrisy would be laughable if this weren't such a serious matter.
Abstract of the Rand report: How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa'ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a "war on terrorism" approach that relies heavily on military force.
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The above quotations are from 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want To Read by Gov. Jesse Ventura. Click here for other excerpts from 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want To Read by Gov. Jesse Ventura. Click here for other excerpts by Jesse Ventura. Click here for a profile of Jesse Ventura.
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