We are living the vision of Orwell's 1984
Peace means War and Big Brother is out of control

"1.4 trillion dollars for weapons development has already been allocated in the USA Budget."-Jeff Halper Founder and Coordinator of ICHAD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions on 11/1/06


The following is excerpted from November 2, 2006
WAWA BLOG

"I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it. What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues. Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel.

After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address."-Mohammad Alatar, film producer of "The Ironwall" on Nov. 1, 2006 during the coordinating and strategizing meeting at BEIT ARABIYA Peace Center.


eileen fleming,
reporting from the Occupied Palestinin Territories thru 11/13/06 for WAWA BLOG

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has penetrated every aspect of American society and culture.

In 2005:
- The US military spending was almost two-fifths of the world total.

- The US military spending was almost 7 times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender.

- The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion.

- It was more than the combined spending of the next 14 nations.

- The United States and its close allies accounted for some two thirds to three-quarters of all military spending, depending on who you count as close allies (typically NATO countries, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea)

- The six potential “enemies,” Russia, and China together spent $139 billion, 30% of the U.S. military budget.

For more on this I highly recommend:

The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson

The New American Militarism by Andrew J. Bacevich

House of War by James Carroll

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

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We should perhaps call it the Gross Excess Profits From Mass Murder Complex. We could end all war simply by making it illegal for anyone to make any profit at all from any warmaking product. Of course this law would not be created by Congress because almost all members of Congress are criminal mass-murders who themselves profit from mass murder. Morality is dead in the House, Senate and Presidency.

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Douglas MacArthur: "Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind..."

Fear sells. It sells tanks, bombs, insurance policies, massive anthrax & smallpox vaccine programs and a whole host of other products, but as long as the terrified public feels like they're being kept safe, they won't complain about the bill (especially if they never get to see the details). Notice how little you hear about the 'initiatives' after they're signed and delivered? No corporate media outlet has any dedicated reporters covering the endless stories of bloated contracts handed out in Iraq, Afghanistan, and also inside the US.

Who was it who got the whole ball rolling for this latest round of military expenditures in the Middle East? Was it Congress, who performed a yes-man routine to Bush's Roman Emperor after 9/11? Was it the media outlets, who promoted the war with swooshy graphic designs and parrot-like 'coverage'? Was it Bush and his team of professional perception managers, who cooked up the lies about Iraq's WMD's in the first place? Was it oil and finance companies with visions of new oilfields and high petroleum prices jumping onboard behind arms manufacturers and neoconservative empire builders? What about the push to build numerous 'biodefense' labs all over the country and the planned expansion of nuclear weapons production? All of the above?

The complete name would have to include the media-congressional-military-industrial-executive complex, at the least. You've got media executives and ex-generals side-by-side on the corporate boards of arm companies, ex-congressmen who become lobbyists and talk show pundits, FDA chiefs who are soon-to-be pharmaceutical executives, and on and on.

Government contracting and the long-term bribery of public officials with cushy corporate jobs are both out of control. More and more contracts are deemed 'proprietary' or 'classified' so the public can't even see what the financial terms are! You've got companies writing legislation for senators, contractors hired as consultants to write the contracts that they will later bid on - contracts that are designed to go over budget, because profits are tied to costs - the more you waste the more you make.

(Note - the GDP is a largely meaningless number, something cooked up by economists so they'd have something to talk about. You get cancer, you spend a lot of money in the hospital, the GDP goes up. The distribution of wealth in a society has as many practical effects as the total 'amount of wealth'. Government contracting tends to involve taking money from many middle class households and funneling it to a few politically connected firms with billionaire owners. How is that described by the GDP?)

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...and it's widely known that Weldon is Boeing's bestest friend. That being said, many people in Delaware County work for Boeing. Unfortunately, it would not surprise me to see Weldon win next Tuesday. Sad but true. Hopefully, my fellow citizens are fed up enough with Republican corruption to kick this guy out.

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in the equation. They make money off the wars and love to prmote them, make the population scared of 'crime', and take attention off the major, real issues. An example is the Kerry 'incident' yesterday and their promotion of the Iraq war in the beginning. They make movies showing how violence is the only solution. They use thier t.v. shows to make the 'police state' and torture become acceptable to the masses (ever seen "24" for just one example), and they use other tv shows to dull our minds and take our attention away from real issues. Most of the media is corporate-owned and serve the bidding of their masters.

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The root of corruption stems from America’s love affair with private wealth and conquest. We are a culturally shallow and spiritually deprived people who seem incapable of discerning truth from fairy tales. This may be a matter of convenience for some and a survival mechanism to others.

There are three primary cultural pillars that are the underpinning of our society: government, media, and religion. It is widely assumed that these institutions exist to serve the people. Whatever their intent when they were birthed in the minds and hearts of their creators, these institutions were subverted and used to subdue and control the masses; to make them subservient to power. Virtually everything we believe about America is contradicted by the evidence, but too many of us are unwilling to come to grips with reality, which thus assures the continuation of a brutal and tortuous history of murder and conquest.

Those on the far right of the political spectrum are fond of saying that America is a Christian nation, when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The framers of the Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson, took great pains to keep America from evolving into a Theocracy. Even so, religion should provide a moral compass that steers its participants away from corruption and moral morass. Yet with only a comparatively few exceptions, religion is used against its followers. It serves wealth and power, and keeps the masses ignorant, and subservient to the hierarchy of the church, which is in collusion with the money changers in government.

Organized religion, like the mainstream media and the government, is controlled by the wealthy and powerful. It serves the high priests of capitalism and is little more than an enabler of corruption and conquest. Let us not forget that Manifest Destiny was driven by a puritanical zealotry that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of a continent. The collusion of religion with material wealth lends a false aura of moral authority to disingenuous and misguided human behaviors that follow immoral government into war after war.

Similarly, the naïve among us broadly assume that the mainstream media exists to inform the people, and thus serves as a countervailing force against corruption and malfeasance. In truth the corporate media serves those in power rather than holding them accountable to the people. While it was not always so, the mainstream media, like organized religion, is used to program public perceptions—to steer us away from truth and to perpetuate fairy tales that extol the virtues of bribery, violence, and greed. It makes useful idiots of those who cannot think for themselves and persuades them to act like fools in the eyes of the world.

From the days of Tom Paine we have regressed to an era in which news anchors are rewarded for their loyalty to political regimes by being awarded positions in government. Tom Paine and the spirit of public service have given way to Tony Snow and Katie Couric, and the creation of media celebrities. The boundary between government and media, between church and state and corporate power, no longer exists. They are all interchangeable parts in a machine that makes a mockery of social justice and human freedoms.

Gone are the days of radical, revolutionary religion in America. Gone are the days of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, when a just and Democratic Republic seemed possible. Gone are the days of Tom Paine and the militant press that challenged corrupt power. The hands of time are no longer moving forward; we have reversed them. Once again the dark ages loom large on the horizon before us like an unseen iceberg in the chill dark of an Atlantic night.

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Former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet has joined the British research firm thought to have provided the inspiration for 'Q', the character who creates spy gadgets for James Bond. Tenet has been appointed an independent non-executive director of QinetiQ, the company said on Tuesday. -- Critics blamed the CIA during his reign for shortcomings in intelligence gathered in the run-up to war in Iraq and questioned whether more could have been done to predict the September 11 hijackings. -- QinetiQ is partly owned by U.S. private equity firm Carlyle Group, whose advisers have included former U.S. President George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major. Once a secretive part of Britain's Ministry of Defense, the firm was listed on the London Stock Exchange in February

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yanks seem to have this knack of making themselves the laughing stock of the world,

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