July 4, 2013: Uncle Sam Is Watching You!

Old Glory is looking awfully tattered these days!

As we approach our national day of celebration, aren’t you glad to know that the National Security Agency (NSA) cares so much about you and your opinions that it’s vacuuming up and saving (and sometimes reading) all of your electronic communications? That’s right! No American left behind—no citizen is too inconsequential to have his or her phone calls and emails monitored! That’s why the NSA is building the world’s largest data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah at a cost of $2 billion—because it wants to know what’s on your mind—everything! Think of it as a more intimate form of democracy—the NSA keeping its fingers on the “pulse of America”! And not only does the NSA want to know what you think (what you really think, not the crap you tell pollsters), but it also wants to know which websites you visit and who you talk to, and who they talk to and what they think, and so on for hundreds of millions of Americans! Makes you feel very wanted and very safe, doesn’t it? We’re one big happy family! Why keep secrets?!

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War Criminals Gather for Mass Murderer’s Ninetieth Birthday

Few American political figures have generated as much popular revulsion as Henry Kissinger, whose role during the Vietnam War places him in the major league of 20th century mass murderers. Nevertheless, America’s political and media elites simply adore a mass murderer if he’s one of “ours”—and thus it was that Kissinger, who recently turned 90, was feted and celebrated at a lavish birthday party June 4 at New York’s St. Regis Hotel. As reported in Newsweek’s Daily Beast blog, the theme of the party, wittily tweeted by veteran editor Tina Brown, was “90 is the new 30”; and if you needed to know, “Kissinger’s adored wife, Nancy, was resplendent in a purple taffeta mermaid ensemble.”

Aside from Henry Kissinger’s role in prosecuting the Vietnam War, where, as Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, he bears responsibility for some 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian deaths, the nonagenarian war criminal also was instrumental in facilitating, with CIA help, the 1973 Chilean military coup that killed democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, and led to the brutal 17-year reign of General Augusto Pinochet, notorious for torturing and murdering his opponents; then, in 1975, as Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford, Kissinger gave U.S. support and weapons to the Indonesian dictator Suharto for his invasion and genocide in East Timor, which killed up to 200,000 East Timorese; finally, Kissinger also gave U.S. support to the 1970’s “dirty war” in Argentina, in which the military junta “disappeared” thousands of dissidents.

But should any of this put a damper on a good party? Not for our American politicos and their media lapdogs! According to the Daily Beast’s Nina Strochlic, it was a celebrity-studded, magical night:

Teresa Heinz Kerry, in a white blazer, got out of a black sedan, and her husband, Secretary of State John Kerry, came around from the other side. The two walked in together with a gaggle of security and miscellaneous entourage. Just a little earlier, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who once vied for the secretary-of-State gig in her own right, had arrived. Nancy Kissinger had sent the word out through her girlfriends over the weekend, “If you have jewelry, this is the night to get it out of the bank.” And they did. The Alfalfa Club dinner crowd in tiaras was the order of the night…

At nearly 9 p.m., Hillary Clinton was the last bigwig to pull up. (Wendi Murdoch also arrived late.) Clinton and Oscar de la Renta had rushed over from the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards at Lincoln Center, where she presented him with the Founders Award (“I was then, as I am now, such a fashion icon,” she had joked, clad in a sleek blue pantsuit)…

Inside, guests reported, a mariachi band played, and Kissinger was regaled with a slew of speeches. Kerry called him an “indispensable statesman,” and David and Elizabeth Kissinger separately paid tribute to their dad in front of an audience that included Gen. David Petraeus, former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Fox News president Roger Ailes, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Add to this list of notables Condoleeza Rice, Bill Clinton, John McCain, David Rockefeller, and Diane von Furstenberg, and you have a veritable petri dish of the American parasite class, stewing in self-congratulation, so much blood on their hands.

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But all the above notwithstanding, I found it incredibly encouraging to stumble upon the speech below delivered by Clare Daly, representing North Dublin, who had the refreshing audacity to question the adulation (“slobbering” was the word she used) over the Obama family’s visit to Ireland on the occasion of the recent G-8 meeting of imperialist crime syndicates. The first three minutes, when Daly speaks, is brilliant, devastating, and refreshing in its bluntness:

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As we approach Independence Day 2013, it would seem that many people around the world are asking, “What is the United States of America?” What is this strange and monstrous political entity with:
An economic system based on extravagant, almost unimaginable waste…
A class system based on extravagant, almost unimaginable inequality…
A political system based on deceit, trickery, and fear-mongering, overseen by gangsters, con-men, and thieves…
A “free press” almost totally enslaved to corporate and state power…
A “public” enamored of celebrity, mindless entertainment, and shopping—astonishingly unaware of what it’s government is doing, both in the “homeland” and abroad…