Note to HRC partisans: We welcome any of you who choose to switch sides. It would be nice to have your support, you'd be doing the right thing, but we're not going to beg you or kiss your ass or avoid speaking the truth because it might offend you. Not because we want to hurt your feelings, but simply because you are so wrong and this is too important and the stakes are way too high not to speak up. If you are convinced that we're going to need you if Bernie wins the primary, you're wrong. We need you now, before the primary. If Bernie wins the primary, he'll become the next president, with or without you. It's regrettable that you're going to miss the revolution, but if that's what you want to do, go ahead. I'm not for throwing any votes away but I'm not going to lose any sleep over people who are so seriously mistaken, privileged idiots, one percenters or dead enders. If you, for whatever mysterious reasons, choose to back the Goldman Sachs/Exxon-Mobil/Monsanto/MIC/1% candidate over the 99% candidate, that's on you.
“The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Gloria Steinem
Let's talk about the privileged idiocy of backing the 1%, Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex – particularly the MIC and the great American war machine.
I see many people trying to minimize or trivialize or rationalize the decision to invade the sovereign nation of Iraq, a nation who had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, a nation who had, in fact, done us no harm at all. Some people are willing to forgive and forget or just look past it, like it was a goof, a silly mistake, an 'oopsy' anyone could have made, and not the gravest sort of error in judgment...AT BEST.
This was a decision that should disqualify anyone associated with it from ever holding high office, much less being president. The decision to invade Iraq was a national disgrace and a war crime. The people involved should be held accountable.
And, in the mean time, we need someone of sound judgment at the wheel.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, thousands of dead American GIs, one million seriously wounded young Americans and trillions of tax payer dollars later, let's be decent enough and brave enough to look this horror in the face and own up to it.
We did a horrible thing, a terrible thing. Led by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their little band of neocons, and enabled by Hillary Clinton, among many others. And don't tell me she didn't know what she was doing. That would be almost as great an indictment as if she did, and she did.
Anybody paying attention at the time knew it was bogus. Anybody at all. I remember it well. Many of us do. Casual observers knew damned well that the evidence was shoddy, the excuses manufactured and the motives dishonorable. It was an oil heist and naked war profiteering and every sentient being on the planet knew it.
People keep telling me Bernie is as much a hawk as Hillary but I strongly disagree. I wish he were a more perfect peace candidate but accept and acknowledge that he's not. He is though a highly principled person of superior judgment and not someone likely to go off half-cocked and start invading sovereign nations willy nilly for no good goddamned reason or for a bunch of fake reasons the way we did Iraq. No, he's not the perfect peace candidate but he is so very much better than any of the alternatives that it becomes a no-brainer for peace-loving people. Here's the proof:
Bernie is also an honest person, especially for a politician, and someone who genuinely and passionately cares about other people, all other people, and especially the little guys. I believe that he is strongly inclined to listen when we tell him what we want. If we have a chance of persuading any leader not to rush to war, or to exacerbate existing problems, he's the guy I'm betting on. He knew better than to invade Iraq. That really says it all, doesn't it?
I am going to show you some of the consequences of our heinous and bogus invasion of Iraq.
Though it would seem perfectly fair to hit you with the full blown hideous reality of what the decision to invade Iraq led to, out of kindness and restraint, I will spare you the vision of bloodied Iraqis or wounded, dead or dying children, rivers of blood, shocked and grief-stricken parents, or young American soldiers burned to a cinder or ripped in two. But be advised that the gruesome reality would chill your blood and break your heart. Google it yourself if you doubt it.
So this is a highly sanitized and very narrow snapshot of what we did to this poor country and its poor people for no good goddamned reason – minus the actual blood and guts or profound heart-rending human tragedy. Imagine if this were some giant military bully doing this to our country.
Don't forget it was all for profit. Just ask Dick Cheney's Halliburton. They made $39 Billion off the invasion and occupation of Iraq (so far). Thirty-nine billion dollars! While we taxpayers got robbed by these war profiteering assholes of trillions of dollars. Trillions! And the robbery continues apace.
10 companies profiting the most from war
The business of war is profitable. In 2011, the 100 largest contractors sold $410 billion in arms and military services. Just 10 of those companies sold over $208 billion. Based on a list of the top 100 arms-producing and military services companies in 2011 compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 companies with the most military sales worldwide.
These companies have benefited tremendously from the growth in military spending in the U.S., which by far has the largest military budget in the world. In 2000, the U.S. defense budget was approximately $312 billion. By 2011, the figure had grown to $712 billion. Arm sales grew alongside general defense spending growth. SIPRI noted that between 2002 and 2011, arms sales among the top 100 companies grew by 51%.
www.usatoday.com/...
While some of you are figuring out how to spin this as just some forgivable hijinks, or misunderstood 11th dimensional chess, remember that we tortured large numbers of people, actual human beings, unmercifully at Abu Ghraib, among many other places, many of them to death, and brutally raped young children in front of their parents.
Is Hillary responsible for any of this? She's responsible for all of it. Not alone, and maybe not directly, but still responsible. Those who authorized this horrid series of events own the results. It's not like they didn't know that to unleash war on people is to unleash pure hell. They just didn't mind. There's money in that shit.
I will share one very mild iconic image from the shameful and cruel abominations that were committed in your name and mine at Abu Ghraib (among many other places), and again spare you from the actual horror of what we actually did there.
I'll leave it to you and your conscience as to whether or not you can find it within yourself to back someone who is one of those responsible for this horror.
She claims it was all a mistake, and if so it was one gigantic Mount Everest, world class humdinger of a fucking mistake. But she hasn't changed her tune when it comes to respecting human life. Here's what she said about the debacle in Libya that she was also deeply involved in. Qaddafi was a horrible human being, I'm reasonably sure, but he was a human being. It's one thing to argue that a particular person must be killed for some important and good reason (not that it's likely to be true), it's another to laugh giddily about it afterward showing flippant disregard for human life.
Some people are going to support her anyway. Some people don't care what she's done, what her cavalier attitude toward human life and general lack of gravitas might mean for innocent people around the world or what a disaster she would be as president or how she would sustain, protect, preserve and serve the existing government of, by and for the 1%. Some people will vote for her anyway. Go figure. Stockholm Syndrome, I guess. What else could it be?
We need to cut WWIII off at the gap, repurpose the great war machine, direct all those resources and all that energy, genius and money in positive and constructive directions and be done with warmongers and profiteers and stop their hateful and harmful game. They have ruined our country and much of the world and we need to fix and restore what they have destroyed. We need to be done with this depraved and perverse war culture that keeps feeding on itself or it's going to be the end of us. We have serious work to do and that fucked up game of fake wars for profit that keeps sucking up all the oxygen and all the money while defiling and mass murdering our species is keeping us from doing it. No more hawks. And if Bernie is a hawk, he is by far the lesser hawk.
“Give peace a chance.” ~ Bernie Sanders 10/13/15
Yes, Bernie is the lesser hawk by about a million miles. And the greater progressive by a similar margin. If you don't believe it, watch this:
Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department
Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States' oil-rich ally in the Middle East.
Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region's fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.
But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”
These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing -- the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 -- contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.
The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.
Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure -- derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) -- represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
David Sirota
And don't even get me started on the privileged idiocy of backing Wall Street and the 1%.
“There really is no shame. The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.
Our Wall Street friends might also want to show some courage of their own by suggesting that the wealthiest people in this country, like them, start paying their fair share of taxes. They might work to end the outrageous corporate loopholes, tax havens and outsourcing provisions that their lobbyists have littered throughout the tax code – contributing greatly to our deficit.
Many of the CEO’s who signed the deficit-reduction letter run corporations that evaded at least $34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. As a result, at least a dozen of the companies avoided paying any federal income taxes in recent years, and even received more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008.
Several of the companies received a total taxpayer bailout of more than $2.5 trillion from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.
Many of the companies also have outsourced hundreds of thousands of American jobs to China and other low wage countries, forcing their workers to receive unemployment insurance and other federal benefits. In other words, these are some of the same people who have significantly caused the deficit to explode over the last four years.”
Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders Calls Out 18 Corrupt CEOs For Stealing Trillions, Outsourcing Jobs, and Evading Taxes
The 1% are raining down hell on the American people and only a privileged idiot could support it. It's time to get in the fight. And please take care not to be on the wrong side. It's time for the American people to win.
It's not time to surrender to the 1%. It's time to fight back.
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