Date: Monday, July 31, 2006

Dateline: Brussels, Belgium

Back in June I was sniffing around Green, Ohio, one hot afternoon trying to penetrate the perimeter of the Diebold Corporation which was not easy considering that it makes security systems. It also makes the voting machines that deprived Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry of election victories. On record is Diebold’s director, Walden O’Dell, promising George W. Bush that he would win the 2000 election and I’m guessing maybe even the 2004 election because he knew something about his fraudulent voting machines. O’Dell resigned in December, 2005 but that corporation deserves to be shaken down before the 2008 election if there is one. Why? Well we know that Bush won Ohio from John Kerry by 51% to 48% but Kerry won all hand counted ballots by 54.46 % and, here’s a good one, ‘in Cuyahoga County, the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.’ Bush won Cuyahoga county.

Anyway I got to the front desk at Diebold by passing myself off as an American Medical Association representative interested in pacemakers because Diebold also makes them. Vice President Dick Cheney happens to have one, embedded, and I was keen on finding the registration number with the idea that with a black box it could be turned off. Alas, I was in the pacemaker library when the security check came in and I was asked to leave with my hidden little camera. A car followed me back to Akron but I gave it the slip and rented another car before driving to Columbus where I took an international flight to Brussels, arriving on July 7th.

Noting that I wasn’t being observed on a terrace café I used a landline to phone an operative with a Deep Throat and he arrived within the hour. Over a beer he told me the precise date for the installation of Cheney’s heart pacemaker in 2001 and over the table I passed him a pre- written napkin with a list of registration numbers corresponding to the model that year.

Before leaving he passed me a copy of the Herald Tribune which contained photocopies on the editorial page of Jack Anderson’s notes linking Diebold with the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas which taught torture techniques and psychological warfare. That school is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

On extended leave in Grenoble, Switzerland, for a brain tumor I picked up in the States I was wondering, if your vote doesn’t count unless you are a Republican then what alternatives are available? The Bush administration has dug a hole for itself so deep that it can’t get out and if Diebold doesn’t deliver another victory in 2008 the Democrats will surely be clear winners. Then you think back to the Nixon administration and what the U.S. Congress was worried about--that Nixon would declare Martial Law so he couldn’t be impeached. Fortunately he resigned but he probably did so with assurances that he would be pardoned for his crimes.

It was in the radiation room, seeing a blue light through a green mask with closed eyes and smelling a chemical cesspool that I became convinced that the Bush administration would declare martial law. When the Supreme Court slapped him on the hand for overstepping the law of the land and the Geneva convention there was a of moment rejoicing, the spirit of freedom was back but the administration replied that it was already complying with the court’s decision. So nothing changed. Then Congress finally got its act together to pass legislation permitting stem cell research. Bush vetoed it, his first veto since becoming president and that was like telling the U.S. Congress they were irrelevant. In other words he really doesn’t care about the health of Americans. And because he thinks he his the law his vision probably extends no further than World War IV and Armageddon.

So what are Americans up against if Martial Law is declared? They’ll discover that the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been trashed and they have no rights at all. The administration will, in theory, be backed up by Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.S. military. Another barrier is the 33% rise in the number (800) of racist groups since Bush’s election in 2000. I don’t have all the stats but FBI personnel is put at 12,000 and the police, local, state and tribal is 700,000 according to a U.S. News & World Report. You may subtract tribal and figure that most of Homeland is already in uniform. In 1979 there were 20,000 employees working for the NSA, mostly suits, with a budget of .5 billion. Located in Maryland it’s described as the largest and most secretive U.S. government agency.

However there is a ray of light, a new field manual has been issued by the U.S. Army on how to deal with an insurrection. It’s too late for Iraq but not the United States and claims that a loss of moral legitimacy means losing the war. The French, says the manual, lost Algeria because they employed torture. The manual also implies that revolutions don’t last long enough. Incidently, the Army has 470,000 troops but they are spread around the world.

Could it happen? Could American citizens rise up to declare war on its government? And will the military step in to support them?

Could George W. Bush be deported to Texas to stand trial for crimes against humanity and nature? Remember, this is the former Governor of Texas who was responsible for 252 executions in the Lone Star State. The same governor who was overheard making jokes about Karla Faye Tucker’s letters begging him to no avail for clemency. Naturally the disposed president would receive a fair trial, Texas justice, by a jury of his peers which shouldn’t be too hard to find in Texas as his IQ of 91 is about the norm there. Ah, Lonesome George, a cowboy without cows. He would be strung up under a leafless dead oak astride a donkey to ponder his fate. Will it occur to him that it’s the only time in his life that he’s riding a Democratic ticket? Also remember that in the 1993 film, Geronimo–An American legend, Robert Duvall said ‘Texans are the lowest form of white man there is.’

Date: Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Dateline: Brussels

Presume that after all the hole digging they couldn’t get out of it so the Bush administration declared martial law. What then would Bush have left as his presidential legacy? Nothing. As he said himself, ‘We’re all going to be dead.’ That’s probably why he has done nothing on environmental issues, ‘he’s determined,’ as American columnist Tom Teepen observed, ‘not to let Mother Nature outlive him.’ Oh, he did cede an enormous chunk of Hawaiian islands as a national nature reserve on June 6 but that chunk was nearly a no-go area established by Hawaiians. I can’t trust Bush anymore, he has lied too much so I can only conclude that he had ulterior motives in establishing that reserve and it must have something to do with government control of a potential financial fortune under Hawaiian waters. Other than that his legacy is the savaging of the land, air, and waterways of America, factory farming, toxic dumping, the savaging of the constitution and its amendments, two bungled wars, the .4 trillion national debt, the loss of America’s respect in the world, the destruction of the cultural and constitutional order in America, his repression of the media and suppression of documents previously in the public domain, illegal spying and wire tapping, book banning, re-editing American literature, intimidating librarians, violating human rights while talking about democracy and freedom, and more you can just call hypocrisy as he defies international and historical law relating to the rights of all humans. the environmental pollution and the legislation to make industry less culpable for the damage. Did you know that almost 50% of Americans have no health insurance and since Bush took office in 2000 the numbers living in poverty have risen by one million a year? Do you recall what his first piece of legislation was? He forbid the federal government from distributing contraceptives to poor countries around the world. Couple this was the 2005 Human Development Report comparing the United States infant mortality rate with Malaysia--a country with a quarter of the U.S. income. Then consider that 10 per cent of the world’s richest receive about 50 percent of the world’s income. In the U.S. it’s about 54 percent.

Now even his own party and the military are showing signs of turning against him. This regime, the Bush administration, has all the hallmarks of Stalinism and Naziism and this son of a bitch, this ‘swaggering mediocrity’ must pay for his crimes. It’s time for Bobby Seal fans to put on their combat boots. It’s time for highschool shooters to move to D.C.

P.G.

Date: Monday, September 25, 2006

Brussels, Belgium

Leftists will call me a softy for not wanting to trash the White House but there are some fine works of art in there that I rather like and we should remember the lesson of Baghdad and a culture far older and more refined than the American one. So persuading gun happy high school students to move to D.C. has its ups and downs. Like what’s more fun, taking out your classmates or politicians?

Remember Joseph Wilson, the diplomat and ambassador who served both Republican and Democratic presidents during a distinguished career? Coming out of retirement in 2002 Wilson was sent by the Bush administration to Niger to investigate the selling of yellow cake to Iraq. Wilson had once served as the ambassador to the African country and Bush was keen on linking Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, to weapons of mass destruction. Uranium is made from yellow cake and there were documents circulating that allegedly incriminated Saddam. However, Wilson didn’t find any evidence and returned to the States.

In his 2003 state of the union address, Bush suggested that Saddam may have purchased yellow cake from Niger as he prepared the American people for war. He was always pressing the fear button. Wilson accused the administration of exaggeration. Then the documents appeared in the press and were declared to be fake. Originally those documents were reported by the London Sunday Times to have been fabricated by Israeli intelligence which made sense but some months later Italian intelligence was fingered which didn’t make any sense unless you suppose the neocons thought the Israeli connection was a Jew too far.

Little did Wilson know that his report would be spun upside down. Now the liars were calling him a liar. Dick Cheney was pissed off and the mean bastard had his revenge by leaking illegal information to neocon journalist, Robert Novak, that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. That ruined her career too. Once you are exposed you’re out. Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby took the fall and was charged with five counts of alleged felonious misconduct, one count of obstruction of justice, and two counts of perjury. The case has lingered in the courts but was scheduled to be heard in 20007. Odds are that this neocon will get pardoned for crimes his boss committed. However, Cheney and Bush aid in charge of dirty tricks, Karl Rove, may still face questioning before a congressional committee. Cheney too. 20061020-0.wog dateline: London, England

What’s wrong with London? A banker collects a hundred million pound bonus for the year. And, there are millions more for other bankers. How did they manage that? They ripped off their customers. The Labour party has become so right wing you might as well call it Old Tories. Following the American model established by the Bush government hasn’t helped much either. The prisons are full and now they want to jail journalists who spy on the government.

If you have 5-10 million pounds in a London bank you can’t even make the Sunday Times Rich List. Ordinary investors in insurance and pension funds don’t see profits because fund managers are hoarding all the cash. Trickle down doesn’t work, never did when the profits aren’t shared and the last time that happened was two centuries ago. The parasites take it all, the Thatcher legacy left no sense of community sharing.

Russian oil barons are in town too. At the Movida nightclub, jeroboams of Crystal champagne are going for 4,500 pounds a pop. Loose change for the Ruskies.

Education? Its difficult to justify the American liberal view that the English have made quantum strides in education and economic reform when they have adopted American models. College tuition costs continued to rise and the rich continue to get richer at the expense of the poor. Only in 1999 did the Labour party pass a minimum wage law and since then they have been promoting faith based education and a policy of dumbing down. Really, when you watch a BBC program on TV it is like listening to reality illiteracy. They are presumably speaking English but you can’t understand it. Some foreign lingo. Grammar when it is understood sounds like me and them. As for news presenters, they are readers, not journalists and their incredible dumbness is clearly audible. Program hosts too, dumber than door nails. At least three of them, BBC personalities, were dumped before dumbing down. Now they have been re-hired. Gloria had a weekly religious program and I recalled that she had a racist streak in her. Bill mumbled on about nature like a creaky old gate and Jonathan stammered arrogantly like Elmer Fudd. And while the BBC was complaining about being underfunded, they gave Jonathan an 18 million pound pay packet.

The English kitchen used to be awful, probably still is except for desserts but now there are fabulous and expensive foreign restaurants in the county. Rich bankers drive the prices up. There is even a posh restaurant called Bank. How many fish will be left in the seas before the Brits are back to eating beans on toast with an egg? Ask a cod. Meanwhile, a UNICEF table of the world’s richest countries in the world placed Britain last as a place for children to grow up.

Did you know that Britain spies on more of its people than any other county in the world? They have 4.2 million cameras on the streets and they must have several thousand photos of a lone walking tourist looking around town for five days.

Now get me outa this country before I catch a rainy day cold