Highlander said:
Riddlewire said:
Apparently they stopped the Phillies game last night so all 50,000 in attendance could engage in the "USA! USA!" chant for several minutes.
I guess Obama can go ahead and count Pennsylvania's electoral votes in his favor.
The Military Industrial Entertainment Complex has long since taken control of the MSM, whether it be print, television, or radio (outside of a few, mostly obscure, "Patriot" radio stations.) We are only given the
illusion that we have a choice amongst ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc. These institutions are all now just a Corporatized version of Pravda of the former USSR, solely serving and propagating the interests of our Multi-National Corporatist Government.
Now they are extending their control well into the world of sports whether it be the latest draft, as Don mentioned, that showcased and worshiped the military, or directly into stadiums. Who better to easily condition than the gullible and sheeplized masses known here as the DWFs that do no critical thinking or research of their own?
This is pure conditioning for what is to come...a full-out, full bore, WWIII and absolute police state, predicated and "justified" by some impending disaster ("false flag") in the United States that will make 9/11 look like a harmless mugging in the park. We are headed towards $10/gallon gas, ever skyrocketing commodities and most likely a default on our debt. The country will be broke and bankrupt, so they will be coming after your pensions to fund this war and pay off the International Banksters...and they'll get it. You'll be considered "unpatriotic" by the media if you protest this theft. The TSA will be patrolling the streets to make sure any mass uprising are quickly quelled. You'll have a choice between living in poverty, going to prison, or "serving your country" abroad.
George Carlin nailed it in a segment on one of his stand-up performances not long before he died, and about six months prior to the financial meltdown in September 2008. At this time, his awareness as to what was going on and what will happen in the future was crystal clear:
[TUBE]acLW1vFO-2Q[/TUBE]
The PTB are fat and happy and feel unthreatened by whatever unrest the Tea Party and other movements have been able to generate to this point. Sadly, as many figured would happen, the Tea Party was co-opted by the GOP after starting off as a non-partisan grassroots movement that was equally angry at both permanent monopoly parties.
This article by Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., Lt. Col. (USAF Ret.), is pretty much spot on. It was written before bin Laden's alleged assassination, but that event changes nothing found in this assessment.
A Crack Team in Washington
With Petraeus slated to rule the massive and mysteriously budgeted CIA, and Panetta poised for the Pentagon, one cannot help but admire the Washington elite's audacity of hope.
Bush 41 family friend and
cohort in crime,
Robert Gates has overseen the astounding over- and under-the-table money churn called the Pentagon for over four years now. Under Gates' leadership, two wars and two nation-builds have blossomed and continued to waste billions of US tax dollars, grow the debt,
create uncertainty and shortages in global oil markets, and sow hatred, and a third oil and regional basing occupation effort has been launched â€" as usual, with neither a plan nor an exit strategy. As the great men in America are measured,
in death and destruction, we can count several million displaced, and tens of thousands murdered on Gates' watch. Gates was a 27-year intelligence "professional" in the CIA prior to his current position. The new Prince of Pentagonia will be former CIA Chief, Leon Panetta, whose most recent claim to fame is his enthusiastic cheerleading of CIA military-style operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.
We don't yet have a definitive investigative guide to CIA budgets and intelligence community funding along the lines of Winslow Wheeler's new book
The Pentagon Labyrinth. But the appointment of these insider-bureaucrat front-men tell us that the power elite in Washington is not really worried about growing domestic anti-war sentiment, nor are they concerned that the growing outcries opposing out-of-control federal spending overseas and at home will have any impact. Instead, it tells us that the power elite is fat and happy, hauling in the rewards of the American corporate-political
kleptocracy hand over fist, with the boot firmly planted on the throat of average Americans who can't seem to get a straight answer
from anyone except Ron Paul.
Panetta offers nothing new. He represents and embraces the chronic spending addiction, the chronic stupidity, and the chronic misunderstanding of the Constitution that characterizes both his predecessor at the Pentagon, and his successor at CIA.
Look at this interview he gave last summer. Panetta denies the Executive Branch maintains an assassination list that includes US citizens, defends drone attacks everywhere, and expresses great concern over both Iran's [nonexistent] capabilities to threaten the US while exaggerating the risk that cybercrime poses for the U.S. proper. Panetta is hugely on board with the latest Pentagon bureaucratic cancer called
USCYBERCOM, co-located with the National Security Agency Headquarters in Fort Meade, MD. The NSA is a massive sector of the U.S. intelligence community, reporting operationally to the DoD rather than directly to the CIA. Traditionally, NSA has been prohibited from collecting information and intelligence on US citizens when they are within US territory. But the co-location of Cybercom (with its domestic defense mission) with "born fighting for any new mission" NSA is a sign of things to come.
The selection of Petraeus for CIA chief is not unprecedented.
For 50 years now, we've known how important it is for a President to have reliable yes-men running the CIA. This talent was certainly the key to the great career success of George Tenet, and Petraeus brings not only three bags full to the Executive suite, but provides a kind of military "reliability" to "managing" the massive CIA bureaucracy and keeping a lid on its potential to cause transparency malfunctions that could publicly embarrass the president or the power elite.
Petraeus' knowledge of the "secrets" of the Afghanistan, Iraqi, Pakistan and Yemen operations, his culpability in the torture of Afghan prisoners (and their prisonbreaks!) and the official lies about incremental success in the various U.S. outposts in the Middle East makes
Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea scandal appear innocent and mild. His connection, through his hiring of past and present theater commanders, to the whole strange but true story of our
Knights of Malta foreign policy in the Middle East will be very useful to him as CIA Director.
There is a bright side to these pending appointments, of which the power elite is well aware. Panetta, at age 72, may not be long for his California walnut ranch, and Petraeus' health history of prostate cancer, and the odd fainting spell during Congressional testimony frontload both of the bureaucrats for a public sacrifice, whenever needed.
For the moment, there is no hope for a rational and rapid contraction of the metastasizing U.S. empire. There is no hope for a serious reduction in debt accumulation, pointless and costly military spending, or any kind of fiscal sanity in Washington. Eighteen months from another big presidential election, in which Obama has declared himself a candidate and shifted smoothly into electoral mode, we are witnessing the final days of the empire â€" but all signs indicate it will not go gracefully.
Instead of wisdom, rationality and grace in Washington in this time of substantial governmental and constitutional crisis, these two appointments tell us exactly what we the people should expect from the political elite over the next few years. We can look forward to an increased police state at home, and a new wave of Washington-generated media implemented fear-fests (hysteria levels and color-coding to be determined). We can expect an increasingly nationally-directed economy, where public welfare crushes private production, driving the smart and lucky ones overseas or to Galt's Gulch, and everyone else into the ground. The only acknowledged "good" jobs will remain in public education, or in one of the military, law enforcement, and prison industrial complexes. Wars and occupations, current and future will continue to consume our domestic wealth and our international credibility. Inflationary pressures will cause the people to rise up and demand a new kind of "Hope," and "Change" they can believe in. And, shortly before the election, as a sign of this hope and change, Panetta and Petraeus will be thrown under the Obama bus.
It will seem audacious, assertive, finally a real sign that things will get better. The news cycle will consume and digest the significance for the useful idiots, while the political elite sucks the last bits of depleted marrow from what was once a prosperous republic, stopping only to check on the communications upgrades, helopads and security fences around their second homes in South America.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski266.html
Edited by: Don Wassall