Print the Legend: The Official Death of Osama bin Laden

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell

 H. L. Mencken

I would have to say that in my opinion the greatest thing about the officially announced death of our very own Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden is the sheer joy of watching the Republicans having to eat their own shit. There is something wonderful about the super-sized helping of humble pie served up with one of those nice little toothpick American flaggie things planted in the middle of their slab now that the rotten fascist fifth columnists and neocons have been robbed of the most kick ass club in the bag, their shameless exploitation of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11/01 for political gain. The GOP has utterly terrorized the rubes, suckers and suburban Sally soccer moms for nearly a decade now, fundamentally altering the country in the process. You can bet the house on it that the fear and terror cards along with the inevitable Obama is a secret Muslim who along with buddies Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan attended wild drug fueled orgies where satanic ritual sacrifices were held were key components of their 2012 strategy. Remember the wild rumors about Hillary's secret lesbian trysts in the White House and the Christmas tree adorned with crackpipes and dildos? That one was a children's bedtime story compared to the volcanic eruption of lies, filth and toxic spew that the Koch Brothers money was funding this time around. The narratives were already well under way and likely were very costly, direct mailings, whisper campaigns, retainers for think tank scum like Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk for their libelous bulk purchased books all are going to have to be scrapped because in  less than a week it is all gone, it went up like a bag of flaming dogshit. To all those who have been justifiably revolted by this all too predictable heinous tactic of assassination though black propaganda and a corrupt media that amplifies and disseminates it just enjoy the sweet schadenfreude along with a side of delicious irony. 

Bin Laden is dead! The release of this week's latest edition of Time Magazine, the official 'news' magazine for the establishment with the evil one's stock picture with the traditional red X though it ensures that despite the caterwauling of the squealing little swine birthers, degenerate America hating pigs like Orly Taitz, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the neocon propagandists the official account is now locked down by the impenetrable firewall of conventional wisdom. Sure they can warble about having to see the pictures like the hilariously desperate Sarah Palin (perhaps she can finagle some sort of trade bartering beaver shots of Bristol for the pics of the now dead bin Laden) who still doesn't understand that her political career is over and that she is well into her next phase of being a gross parody of herself, not that she wasn't always a parody from the git go. Yes, they are going totally batshit over in the big carnival tent of the Republican party, barker in chief Donald T.Rump can now focus on selling tickets to the feces eating contest in the geek section. It is astonishing to behold, the party of shoot first ask questions later is bemoaning the capping of the unarmed uber terrorist and in what is the most hilarious thing of all the corporate media is now suddenly concerned about international law and did the execution of Osama violate it. Hell, that one is hilarious, nearly spit coffee on the keyboard when I read that. Just where in the fuck was the corporate media and the concern for international law when George W. Bush launched his illegal wars, bombed the shit out of civilians, presided over a vile and sadistic regime that made torture an official U.S. policy or for that matter when Obama continued to endorse predator drone strikes on civilian weddings? Double standards and it shows just how rotten to the core that the consolidated and interlocking media in this country has become. Oh, and now here's a real knee-slapper, the Republican whiners, continuing with their well-established culture of victimhood are pissy that none of the credit for taking out bin Laden is being given to Dubya or to his immoral and illegal torture programs. But at least it's consistent since they never saw fit that there should have been any of the blame  assigned to him despite the damned inconvenient fact that the 9/11 events occurred during his watch. Perhaps there can be a commemorative edition of My Pet Goat issued in order to honor Bush for his heroism on that morning. 

God Dammit, they cut into Celebrity Apprentice!

It is pretty obvious that the story of bin Laden's assassination by Seal Team 6 is the official story of the state and it is already being reinforced with the same type of groupthink promulgated by the corporate media that followed the original attacks. While the release of any actual photos of the body have been nixed by Obama on the grounds of national security the government has released bin Laden home videos that are making their way about the internet and media megaphones today. The post death storyline goes to great lengths to play down the mythic capacity of the man once built up to be the baddest motherfucker in the valley of the shadow of death. There have been stories describing bin Laden as "unkempt", "bored", "shabby", "frail" and "weary". There have been stories on the contents of his medicine cabinet, did he have eczema or some other skin condition? Was he using a form of Viagra? Xanax? Interestingly enough nothing seems to have been found that would indicate treatments for kidney failure. The official propaganda gains new layers by the day, this from an article in Time's Special Report issue:

Living the Good Live

So he wasn't in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a background, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his troubled sleep.

Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and the glory of the islamic caliphate, bin laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.

The deconstruction of the uber-fiend, peddled for years, most relentlessly by the insidious Bush regime to hold political power and justify their wars and associated criminality was well under way. The Republican party owned 9/11, wielded it as a trusty bludgeon and used it without mercy as they eviscerated the United States Constitution, turned torture into the guiding principle of national policy, looted the treasury and doled out ever more lucrative contracts to mercenaries and private war profiteers on the taxpayer dime. Whenever it was questioned one of those timely bin Laden videos or tapes just happened to pop up, up went the color-coded terror alert and the nuisance of having to come up with answers went away. For example when Osama bin Laden just happened to pop up on a video four days or so before the 2004 elections it provided a ringing endorsement for the terrorism of Bush and Cheney and with a bit of help in Ohio courtesy of Karl Rove's election stealing machine the king was coronated anew for four more years of hell. The Republicans seized bin Laden and along with him the mythic menace of the destroyer of worlds, it was as though George W. Bush had pulled the magical sword Excalibur from the stone of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center and the use of the tragedy for political expedience was already official policy while the rotting flesh of the victims still hung heavy in the lower Manhattan air.

Later in the Time piece there is this:

No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy. It was necessary then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity - not just as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense. 

And it has been done, Barack Hussein Obama has stolen away the mighty sword while at the same time the Mighty Wurlitzer of the pocket media not only ensures that the truth of the death of the evil one will be that of the official story of the state but that the original dogma of the attacks themselves would be reinforced for all time. With the establishment of the official historical account (which as the maxim goes, written by the victors and sanitized to omit the dirt) not only does the questioning of any part of the 9/11 story become intolerable by bin Laden himself is being body scrubbed with his past CIA association being denied by think tank hacks like Peter Bergen in his prominent WaPo piece entitled Five Myths about Osama bin Laden. The usual gaggle of reliable neocon stooges like Charles Kraüthammer patting themselves on the back while trumpeting the great success of the phony war on terror, the sadists and authoritarian freaks on the right-wing decrying any criticism of torture, in Time's case making apologies for the ugly Americans celebrating the demise of the bogeyman with their idiot "USA,USA,USA" chants and viciously cracking down on those who happen to wander off the star spangled lemming farm. Take for example Pittsburgh Steelers running back whose most recent claim to fame was a key fumble during the Super Bowl that pretty much sealed his team's doom. Both barrels were turned on Mendenhall this week for his daring to use TWITter to weigh in on the orgy of glee during the national barbecuing of bin Laden's ass - "those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn in hell and piss on his ashes, I ask how would God feel about your heart?... What kind of person celebrates death?". For this the man was descended upon as if by a biblical plague of flesh-eating bats by the pocket media kingmakers, flag-sucking drones and assorted other imbecilic dwellers of the most befouled gutters of the mind. Were this a more primitive (or in our case futuristic) society, Mendenhall would have been quickly an ruthlessly hunted down, his tongue ripped out with fire heated iron tongs and his wayward fingers chopped off so as to never again engage in such heresy as well as to sent an example for others. 


We have been here before, any dissent from the Bush administration's blatant usage of the 9/11 event for reasons of politics and settling an old score with Saddam Hussein were affixed with the scarlet letters of traitor and anti-American. This is just the reverse form of the same primitive defense of the official religions. When it comes to doubts about the ceremonies, false idols and totems any who dare to utter the blasphemies must be dealt with summarily and with extreme prejudice. Any really serious examination of the scaly underbelly of the angry beast with millions of electronic eyes that is the Homeland in the new American century must be taken with a familiarity of the allegory of Plato's cave. Once you have been outside don't even bother to venture back to try to enlighten the other slaves for ye shalt be damned for your efforts if not drawn and quartered by a team of Clydesdales. 

Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

Maybe the real truth of the bin Laden story is that his former sponsors and associates within the American establishment finally just wanted to write the end to his story, tie up that last loose end because to do anything else would ensure a demise, sucked under in the quicksand bog of the wars without end. Obviously spooked by the recent Standard and Poor downgrade of the U.S. debt perhaps it was just an acknowledgement of that which is obvious in that the wars, especially the bottomless money pit in Afghanistan are destroying the country in ways that bin Laden or any other foreign enemy ever could. The bin Laden execution brings to mind the scene from the classic film Apocalypse Now when finally reaching the river's end Captain Willard is delivered to the compound of Colonel Kurtz who had gone rogue and was as a result marked for death by his own country's military leadership in order to terminate his command:

Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.

Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? What did they tell you?

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?

Willard: I'm a soldier.

Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Osama bin Laden was never going to stand trial, not in this Empire, not with what he knew. Despite the best efforts of the professional propagandists and spin doctors to downplay his longtime involvement as a valuable instrument of U.S. policy, most notably with the Mujahadeen in the proxy war against the Soviets back in the Reagan years in Afghanistan. What is now existent in popular culture as a noble effort, Charlie Wilson's War for example with the all-American Tom Hanks playing the flamboyant Texan Republican who used his seat in the U.S. Congress to promote arming Islamic radicals, a Reagan pet project right up there with letting good ole Ollie North run guns and drugs to fund arming the Latin American death squads. Were bin Laden to have a forum the potential revealing of such a duplicitous history could prove to be immensely embarrassing and in our sugar-coated, sanitized and flag-draped narrative we couldn't possibly admit to colluding with criminals, dictators, Nazi war criminals or Muslim fanatics in order to further an agenda largely dictated by corporations and plutocrats. Best to just send in the hit squad and be done with it, if that's what actually happened. 

Media analyst Danny Schecter puts it well in his piece Nailing Osama Bin Laden: Was it a military or amedia operation? Why now?

They could have captured him, but that would lead to the hassle of putting him on trial. Besides, what if he revealed his long connection with the CIA and US officials? Can't have that. So the kill order was given, along with a quick disposal of the body, mafia-style (as in “sleeping with the fishes)."

But we will never really know will we?

I have always personally believed that he was dead, at least since shortly after the towers fell and I have never been convinced that he played anything more than an ancillary role in the 9/11 attacks. The attacks as they occurred couldn’t have been carried out by anything less than a multi-national alliance of serious and I mean stone cold professional military personnel, intelligence pros, mole networks largely compartmentalized to provide plausible denial and government officials with the clout to influence both the behind the scenes preparatory work as well as the following cover-up. The weakest part of the entire story to me has always been Osama bin Laden and his flight-simulator trained Islamic fundamentalist fanatics like Mohammad Atta, Ninjas with box-cutters who could overwhelm a multi-trillion dollar intelligence colossus, circumvent the entire national air defense command, dupe U.S. allies and their intelligence services and then pull off with crackerjack precision three daredevil direct hits on U.S. buildings with such damage being done to the structures as to defy the basic laws of physics. Americans are stupid though and swallowed it all, rolled over and gave up their rights and begged for more tyrannical enslavement as their tax dollars were funneled to private military contractors (mercenaries) and private   intelligence firms operating with impunity, zero oversight and no loyalty except to the bottom line. Maybe in the movies Bruce Willis can assemble a crew of losers, party freaks, misunderstood geniuses and hard-assed oil patch roughnecks who could be trained by NASA in less than two weeks to go into space and destroy a killer asteroid but this is reality and when something smells like bullshit there is a 99.9 % chance that it IS bullshit.

The entire official story of 9/11 is one big lie but it is now a lie that like the assassination of President Kennedy will live on while any naysayers will be stigmatized and ghettoized in the predictable manner that "conspiracy theorists" are always treated by a corrupt state seeking to keep its skeletons in the closet with the doors nailed shut. What is now occurring is the death of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as the national wound that was ripped open on that Tuesday morning in 2001 begins to scab over there will be no tolerance for those who continue to pick at it. Already in the days after the big announcement there is a real chill in the air and the establishment is in all likelihood implement the Cass Sunstein plan to "cognitively infiltrate" groups that question the official government fairy tale of 9/11. Personalities who had previously done much good work in investigating 9/11, for example alternative media firebrand Alex Jones has essentially discredited himself through his willingness to feast upon the fruit of the poisoned tree that was the finally and hopefully permanently discredited Birther movement (which smelled like an Israeli black propaganda campaign from the get go) and as a result of this been immersed in a vat of horseshit. While playing fast and loose with themes friendly to the Council For National Policy like global warming denial and pandering to bigots for ratings by demonizing Meskins any of Jones' skepticism at the serendipitous death of bin Laden is easily mocked despite the legitimacy of such questions. There are others as well calling bullshit on the bin Laden murder and they will surely face immense difficulty and much scorn in pursuing this line of skepticism. My personal advice is that it just isn't worth it, there are too many other areas that are in more need of serious attention than wailing away at the tar baby that is Osama bin Laden. Again, where is the body? Why the changes of story? Why now? I defer to recent work by Paul Craig Roberts The Agendas Behind the bin Laden News Event and Russ Baker More Questions on bin Laden for provocative reading and unlike Alex Jones they have not self-immolated. 

This may sound like a cop out but as far as I am concerned an official admission that the man is dead works fine for me, whether it happened last weekend or nine years ago is at this point moot to me. In the end what is most important is that we are able to exit the bizarre, down the rabbit hole because it just may end up being a grave, parallel universe that we were catapulted into when the planes hit the building on September 11, 2001. That will have to suffice right now for nothing will ever have even the remotest chance of returning to a state of semi-normality or what is going to pass for that unless we are able to get some closure and an escape from the neocon Republican fear mongering that has mired us in unwinnable, bankrupting and immoral wars of occupation based on lies. Barring a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks, which by the way is NEVER going to happen, I personally think that it is best to just accept the official story of Osama bin Laden’s death as it has been put forth by the state and it’s organs. Face it, the story may have that now familiar rottenness about it but it’s just time to move on beyond the horrors of the last decade. 

I recall that one great line from the famous western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance :

“when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”

So it goes....

Andrew Rice and Wired's Sleazy Yellow Journalism

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander”


-Abraham Lincoln



As I have done a good bit of writing on the Danny Casolaro ‘suicide', the Octopus Murders and the PROMIS software story I was encouraged when earlier this week I was sent a link to a major piece that Wired did on the topic. Being that Wired was the source of the excellent article from back in 1993 entitled The INSLAW Octopus I was expecting a breakthrough in a renewed interest in this ugly story that reached into the highest levels of the Reagan government. Jesus Christ, was I disappointed. The article which is entitled The Octopus Conspiracy: One Woman's Search for Her Father's Killer by an ambitions sleazeball hack named Andrew Rice (his first piece for Wired) was not as much a serious piece of journalism but a diabolical and shameful character assassination on Rachel Begley whose father, Ralph Borger was one of the three people murdered on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in 1981. It is an old story that has in the past years been resurrected thanks to the excellent work of investigative journalist Nathan Baca whose Emmy Award winning series for California TV station KESQ "The Octopus Murders" led to a reexamination of a nearly three decades old triple execution. The cold case murdere of Fred Alvarez, Ralph Borger and Patty Castro were at the center of a shady conclave of black ops specialists, organized crime figures, intelligence community assets and the clandestine operations taking place on sovereign Indian land in order to avoid government oversight. Baca, who has now moved onto a gig with a larger audience in Las Vegas and his series was instrumental in the arrest of Jimmy Hughes, an admitted former hitman now running a ministry in Honduras. At the time of the senselessly brutal triple slayings, Hughes was running security at the reservation casino at the time and in a 1985 television interview admitted that the murders were“an authorized, government backed covert action". Hughes also admitted as much when secretly filmed by Begley during a 2008 confrontation at a Fresno, California convention where Hughes was speaking.

Despite a somewhat benign opening it is obvious that the true intent of the Wired piece is to undermine the credibility of Rachel Begley and therefore make her radioactive to any serious mainstream writers as well as to discredit her case against Jimmy Hughes to discourage any future legal action. Really, it always works this way when one of the little people doesn't just do the obedient thing and shut the hell up about matters of great criminality and systemic corruption. Wired's intent is blatant, given the already ugly blight on the mag's reputation for Wired's role in the setup of Private Bradley Manning over the Wikileaks story and his subsequent imprisonment and torture by the U.S. government. When a so-called reputable media outlet like Wired crossed the line from reportage into propadandizing and acting as a de facto arm of the National Security State in participating in manipulation and entrapment as in the Manning case it ceases to be any more of a reputable source than many of the websites and blogs that Rice will go on to condemn in his attack piece. After the beginning we get to the meat, and therefore true intent of the article. It begins with Andy Rice’s insensitive and callous treatment of Begley is disgraceful, describing her dead father as “a bearded mechanic who liked to drink, smoke pot and ride motorcycles”, plays into the most trite and tired of stereotypes to somehow discredit the man, and his abysmal lack of knowledge about the subject is fully befitting of a corporate media toady. That Rice exploits Begley's crusade to investigate and bring the killer of her father to justice right off the bat by insulting the dead man is an indication of the descent into the sewer that follows.


Andrew Rice, at least from the picture on his bio page appears to be a run of the mill smarmy little yuppie prick. He proudly lists at the end of his article, in addition to his email address (andrewrice75@yahoo.com) that he is the author of a book entitled The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. Jesus, now THAT is one goddamned stupid title; I’ll bet that motherfucker’s just flying off the shelves and rocketing up the best seller lists with an interest grabber like that. It more fittingly sounds like some sort of cheesy discount dentistry ad that comes in the weekly ValPak pouch in the junk mail along with all the other shit. The Rice book, from the reviews that I read seems to be some sort of examination of the psyches of the victims of Ugandan atrocities, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect that one who is capable of writing compassionately about the human costs of a such tragedy could then be so cruel and dishonest to also produce the rank and vile Wired hit piece. Perhaps Andrew Rice is just another cynical corpse-fucker, peddling bleeding heart drivel to weepy liberal types while calculatingly using such work as nothing more than a springboard. After reading the Wired piece I tend to believe the latter so Andy, why don’t you just go back to Uganda and use your own smiling teeth to chew on the naugahyde tough skin on the ass of Idi Amin’s corpse?


Now Before I get into any sort of serious commentary I would like to present some of Rice’s more ugly lies and smears of this relentlessly remorseless character assassination of Rachel Begley. I am pretty certain that Andrew Rice falsely presented himself as a man of integrity and honor in order to get cooperation to write his article which is a complete bunch of crap, with that in mind the ugliness of this stuff only further embellishes Rice as nothing more than a malicious scoundrel and another corporate media mockingbird.

After the murders, Begley went through a rebellious phase and fell in with a bad crowd. By the time she was 15, she was pregnant and had dropped out of high school. Eventually she got her GED and moved to Iowa. She says she would periodically wonder about the case and check in with the police, who never seemed to have any new information. Beyond that, she didn’t have time or tools to delve too deeply.

Setting the table for the onslaught Rice begins his mugging by painting Rachel Begley as an under-aged, pregnant high school dropout who ran with the wrong crowd and horror of horrors got her GED rather than a pass into a drone mill like Georgetown. According to his bio the author graduated from the prestigious Georgetown University. I strongly suspect that like so with many with a privileged and pampered background quite obviously sees people who are struggling economically and have had a rough time in a life where the deck is stacked against critical thinkers and those without the clout brought by schmoozing with the right people in the phony ritual formerly known as “networking” as nothing more than lower life forms and human rubbish.

Her work, she says, has placed her own life in danger and made her a target of the same forces that killed her father. And yet she cannot stop. She keeps following the siren song of the conspiracy theory, the same beguiling cognitive path that lures others to the JFK assassination and Area 51. What was once a family tragedy has blossomed into something else entirely, a vast puzzle whose solution promises to illuminate not only her father’s death but the dark forces behind the world’s apparent chaos

Here we go with the old "siren song of conspiracy theory” canard, this is the bread and butter of the winged monkeys and their establishment benefactors in that only the OFFICIAL conspiracy theories are allowed. Official conspiracy theories like the Warren Commission whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination and the Kean Commission coverup report on the ‘terrorist’ attacks of September 11, 2001 that was such a mockery largely through ommission that it didn’t even see fit to mention the collapse of the 47 story WTC7, the U.S. Special Operations Command program Able Danger or the now heavily censored testimony of Turkish FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. There was no recording of the questioning of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney under oath and severe restrictions were placed on the review of documents. That the Kean Commission was originally to have been chaired by Henry Kissinger and that the Warren Commission included not only hated Kennedy nemesis Alan Dulles but also coverup artists Gerald Ford and Arlen Specter (the magic bullet) is supposed to be above questioning. Rice also begins his linkage with UFOs with the inclusion of Area 51, he will continue down this path as he paints his libelous picture. The UFO association is a slam bang proven technique to induce mockery and discredit those dangerous to the establishment. Note that Democrat Dennis Kucinich was neutralized during the 2008 presidential debates when he was baited into answering a UFO question.

Begley lives and works in a rickety house at the end of a gravel road, next to a small pond and a rotting wood barn in a rural town outside Louisville, Kentucky, that she doesn’t want named for security reasons. Out front, her “guard dog,” an aging flat-coated retriever named Lucky, lazes beneath her porch. Begley is 43 and heavyset, with piercing blue eyes. On this day, her air conditioner is broken, and her round face glistens with sweat. She has four children, and for the moment she is collecting unemployment and selling a line of weight-loss shakes to make money on the side.



and -


At the time, Begley was working in customer service for an Internet service provider, which was moving its back-office operations to another state, and she was spending her days sitting idly at her computer, waiting to get laid off. Begley had once worked for a collections agency, and she knew how to track people down. “I went into it with a mindset, I guess, almost like a police officer would,” she says.

Now this is the money paragraph for Andy Rice. Now not only does he arrogantly describe the condition of the rural Kentucky home of Rachel Begley in the mocking tone of Big Apple holier than thou snobbery but he goes on to describe her appearance in very nasty and immature terms, more befitting to a middle-school playground than in a 'reputable' publication. He refers to her as "heavyset" with "her round face glistening with sweat" or translated into layman's terms - her story is bullshit because she is FAT. The picture of Begley in the piece is certainly not flattering as it only emphasizes that she is a large figured woman. Now, let's be honest here because Christ certainly knows that being FAT is one very serious taboo in our glorious culture of media fantasy, glitzy models and the wonderful lives that the beautiful people on our televisions live. Such is the American mindset that such superficial horseshit carries the clout that it does, it is more indicative of a diseased and debauched society gone to seed and systematically dumbed down than anything but he taps directly into this like a veteran propagndist. Rice also sneeringly refers to Begley’s former job working in customer service for an Internet service provider with the sort of deeply ingrained loathing that social climbing little pricks like him have for ordinary working Americans. Not to mischaracterize you Andy, and this may be a bit presumptous on my part, but in looking at the picture on your profile page you just come across as a smug and conniving little asshole to me, a real four-flushing douchebag with a tongue like a whip and a backbone made of jelly but at least you aren't FAT.

Finally he viciously runs her down as an unemployed mother of four on the government dole, you see, being down on your luck and jobless in the economically eviscerted Homeland it is only the rich that can be propped up by the government. Somehow I doubt that Mr. Rice has any sort of angry words for the wealthy tax chiselers, corporate cheats and other sucklers on the upper class end of the handout line. Also note the dirty little bastard's reference to selling weight-loss products on the side to further run Begley down. I don’t know if Rice has ever heard of the DeVos family but they made billions of dollars selling similar products and not only own professional sports teams, huge real estate portfolios and the sort of serious political clout reserved for the ultra-rich here in our rotting empire but they also have their very own mercenary army courtesy of DeVos family member Erik Prince and Blackwater (now Xe thanks to too much bad PR due to murdering civilians in Iraq). But they aren't FAT now are they? Rice also mocks the little inspirational prayer that Begley has near her computer about being protected from "evil spirits who prowl about the world". Not to break the author's little bubble or throw water on the bonfire of Wired's burning at the stake of Rachel Begley but doesn't the entire fucking religion of Christianity sort of operate along that rationale?

As Begley plunged into the world of the conspiracy theorists, she found more than facts and assertions—she found a community with its own rules, ethics, and currency. And it was a difficult one to penetrate; the cluster of people devoted to studying the Octopus tended not to throw their arms open to newcomers. Over the years, they had built a kind of gnostic society, a belief system that was both all-encompassing—a grand unified theory of everything sinister—and exclusionary, open only to the select few who could accept the devastating truth. They were suspicious of outsiders and divided into factions that warred over arcane points, often accusing one another of being double agents.

Again, there is the reference to the dreaded pejorative “conspiracy theorists” (also see "tin foil hatters", only a deliberate idiot, or an intellectually lazy mental masturbator or a payrolled protector of the criminal elite benefits from throwing this one around. A better term would be “conspiracy researcher” or “geopolitical analyst” or “investigative reporter”, the very definition of “conspiracy” at least according to the Meriam-Webster dictionary is:


Definition of CONSPIRACY


1: the act of conspiring together


2a : an agreement among conspirators


b : a group of conspirators


Not that THIS would ever happen in daily life. I mean who on our great star-spangled lemming farm that is America would ever be silly enough to believe that people would engage in any sort of scheming and conniving while conducting ordinary daily commerce, engaging in infidelity and conspiring to keep it secret or anything other than being completely honest in the true apple pie loving way. As for political assassination “conspiracy theories” you would think that someone with a culturally valuable Georgetown education might have at some point in school heard about the assassination of Julius Caesar. Maybe Andy Rice spent more time smoking dope than attending history classes.

There were many competing interpretations of the Octopus—Seymour was particularly interested in the alleged role of entertainment company MCA—and they were infinitely adaptable, able to accommodate the Patriot Act or the financial crisis. Devotees found and fought one another on sites like Above Top Secret, conspiracy clearinghouses that host every conceivable thread of discussion. Begley forged an alliance with a retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults. She did battle with a prominent UFO enthusiast who thought the Octopus was hiding the government’s collaboration with a colonizing alien force. (In January, online sleuths discovered that alleged Arizona assassin Jared Lee Loughner was a regular poster on Above Top Secret, but his bizarre ramblings about currency and space travel, widely disdained by other contributors, never touched on the Octopus threads.) Begley also developed a venomous rivalry with Virginia McCullough, a California writer who accused her of being an enemy impostor, not really Ralph Boger’s daughter. When Begley posted a copy of her birth certificate online, McCullough called it “a cut-and-paste job.”


“I do not believe that Desertfae is a ‘victim,’ and she has not posted any information that she is who she claims to be,” McCullough wrote on one message board. “She is a low-stage puppet reporting to the puppet master and two or three of his minions.”

Now, this paragraph is my absolutely favorite one in the entire sordid piece. Andy Rice emphatically mentions the website Above Top Secret which any conspiracy researcher with any credibility avoids like the bubonic plague as it is so full of disinformation, real nutcases, government sanctioned operatives, hopheads, seriously deranged paranoids and completely unfiltered craziness that is so unreadable that it is laughable. Personally, I view it as a vacuum cleaner operation set up to sow disinformation, I would reference Obama administration figure Cass Sunstein’s theory on how to cognitively infiltrate and break up serious research groups through use of plants and agent provocateurs, I doubt that Rice knows very much at all about COINTELPRO (God knows if they don't teach the assassination of Julius Caesar at fucking Georgtown why would they bother with that?) or any of the other historically documented government efforts to discredit or otherwise silence those who ask the inconvenient questions of power.


The truth is that Andy Rice invokes this website largely for the reason of making a bizarre, ludicrous and libelous linkage between  Rachel Begley and that murderous little fiend Jared Loughner whose recent Arizona killing spree shocked the nation. Hey Andy, why don’t you explain just what the fuck that Jared (Lee) Loughner has to do with the price of rice in China regarding anything that you are supposedly writing about in this piece? Regarding the “bizarre ramblings” about currency if you would bother to pull your head out of your pampered asshole and take a look around – a REAL look around you will find that we are currently in the midst of a global economic crisis largely generated by the manipulation of currency, rampant commodities speculation and a Federal Reserve system that exists only to serve the needs of degenerate Wall Street gamblers. If you are going to indict that little fruitbag Loughner for his views on the grand scale financial scam that is “free market” capitalism then you indict millions more who are catching on to this long-running systemic fraud. I don't know if you are aware of it but one of the most consistently vocal critics of the Federal Reserve, Texas Representative and former presidential candidate Ron Paul is now Chairman of the Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee and holding legitimate hearings on monetary policy abuse in his official capacity right now. Of course any mention of THAT inconvenient fact would kind of undermine your entire bullshit guilt by association between Begley and Loughner now wouldn't it?  Hey Andy, a guy named Hosni Mubarak was just brought down due to the reverberations of currency speculation and spiraling food costs, you might want to note that when the shit was really starting to hit the fan in Cairo a few weeks back that the person sent to talk to our former Egyptian puppet dictator wasn’t from the State Department but was a guy named Frank G. Wisner, the voice of the real power in this country and the son of infamous Wall Steet power broker and OSS/CIA uberspook Frank Wisner. Now Andy, I hate to come across as being it a know it all but it is increasingly apparent that you don't know jack shit about fucking anything! Oh and Andy... Frank Wisner Sr. had a little pet project over at CIA, it was called Operation Mockingbird, I damn sure know that you aren't familiar with this because to quote the late great muckraker Upton Sinclair who once famously stated: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"


But I digress...


Andy Rice continues with Loughner’s obsession with “space travel” without bothering to mention that millions of other Americans who don’t go on a kill crazy rampage are also obsessed with space travel (see Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and thousands of other sci-fi franchises), why not call out the Trekkies as dangerous cultists as well? There is also the reference to a “retired FBI agent who was exploring a link between the Octopus and Satanic cults”. This would be a certain Ted Gunderson, a man whose work is as prolific as it is often totally batshit but Rice lacks the guts to even mention Gunderson by name lest anyone actually go and look at his work. Though far too much of it is questionable and to be charitable, pretty far out there into the REAL tin-foil hatter stuff there are a few small tidbits of worthwhile information there. Things like the Franklin Credit Uinion scandal where a once prominent black and up and coming Republican named Lawrence King, who sang the national anthem at the 1988 GOP Convention before allegations emerged (and a cover-up operation flew into action) that King was running an underage prostitution ring for the D.C elite and that some of the poor abused kids were given White House tours. This alas is a seriously ugly story far worse than anything that Rachel Begley was investigating so I will leave it for another time. And as far as the satanism goes, there have long been dark stories of satanism and mind control within army and intelligence spheres of influence, this too will have to wait for another time as it is nauseating enough to deal with Andy Rice's torrent of bile. Rice also has an odd double standard in calling out serious researchers like Begley as basically loony tunes while then lavishing his implied approval on longtime conspiracy maven and batshit crazy gatekeeper Virginia McCullough. He treats her as though she is the Alien queen whose eggs by nature of her preferential place in the establishment food chain all are pre-approved for entry into the lucky sperm club.


Rice then goes on to take on the Jimmy Hughes travesty of justice, of course he is sympathetic to the poor minister victimized by the FAT crazy lady. Not to go into much of this other than the bullshit double standards pimped by Rice but he implies that Hughes is a retired and reformed man, just wanting to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, our lord and savior. This despite the fact that Hughes openly admits his past criminality as a part of his Elmer Gantry schtick, and that the group that sponsors him ministry, The Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International or FGBMFI is a  haven for hard core right-wing fascists and has long served as a front for U.S. imperialist oppression in Latin America. Jimmy Hughes himself was allegedly involved in helping to plot the 2009 Honduran coup d'etat against president Manuel Zelaya who had to be deposed for being an ally of Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez. So much for that retired and reformed horseshit. Then just to get in yet another nasty dig at Rachel Begley, Rice mocks her for justifiable celebrating the Hughes arrest:


Begley posted a celebratory video, scored to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It flashed up an image of Hughes’ mug shot, across which she had scrawled: “Gotcha.”

Now here, I can’t completely disagree that it was a bit of a silly thing for her to do. Me, were the man involved in the long unsolved murder of my father finally arrested, I would have rapidly Photoshopped a picture of Hughes’ fucking fat, ugly, burr-cut head sawed off, dripping blood and mounted on a pike while playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the background. In addition to being a completely servile ass-kisser, Rice seems to have a particular fondness for “The Minister” that would belie the reality that Hughes is a stone-cold, old school killer.Lastly, Rice lovingly describes Michael Murphy, the prosecutor who may or may not have commited an act of obstruction of justice in dropping the charges against Hughes as "dapper", for some reason that just conjures up visions of Rice with Murphy's cock deeply embedded in his mouth. Jesus fucking Christ, even reading this nonstop eruption of shitty sleaze is just making me feel dirty about everything, I think that I am just going to feed the whole rotten article into the shredder after I wrap this up.

I suppose that the Wired hit piece is just the requisite thirty pieces of silver that it takes to get a big time gig these days. In these ugly economic times one can hardly blame a careerist like Rice for coveting a cushy and well paid regular gig at Condé Nast. After all, Matt Taibbi who writes for Rolling Stone and has done by far some of the best writing on the ruinous greed of Wall Street criminals (especially Goldman Sachs) once wrote an article entitled “God Can Suck My Dick” and earned the condemnation of Hillary Clinton and others for his mocking piece on the death of the Pope, either of which would normally make one radioactive to the mainstream media. Tiabbi, a witty writer and personable guy disemboweled the 9/11 Truth Movement in a series of masterful pieces that hit all the right pejorative notes “conspiracy theorists” etc while completely ignoring any of the serious researchers of our American Reichstag Fire. Now Taibbi writes books, articles and when I was watching it, he even had a regular gig on another left gatekeeper, Bill Maher’s HBO show. Maher was booted off of television entirely in the ugliness post 9/11 when he dared to say that the alleged hijackers weren’t cowards for their kamizee runs into buildings but rather that the real cowards were the ones launching cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. Maher of course redeemed himself for his mockery of any who questioned the official government conspiracy theory on 9/11 and at one point wading into the audience to point out members of the activist group We Are Change to the police after they engaged in a bit of guerilla theatre. Now Maher is making millions and bragging about smoking dope and banging porn stars, Andy Rice could only dream over a gig like that but Maher had more name recogniton than a suckling bottom feeder like Rice. Not that Andrew Rice gives a rat’s ass about the truth but the story of the Octopus is one that would provide a decent and honorable writer enough material to build a career as a very serious investigative journalist. Instead, he resorts to the dismissive idiocy that those with either a vested interest in the existing system or the need to enshroud themselves in a deflective cocoon of denial that there really ARE very bad people running the system.



Hey, I love Taibbi’s work, but rest assured, Andrew Rice is NO Matt Taibbi but real journalism isn’t about placating power, cutting deals and engaging in character assassinations that serve the needs of the oligarchy. I recall when there was a national outpouring of grief over the premature death of celebrity host Tim Russert, a reputed journalist of great honor. Bob Woodward of Watergate fame churns out books on a regular basis thanks to his favorable status within the D.C. elite inner circles that provide him access. A real investigative journalist, a serious muckraker, draws nothing but contempt from the establishment, is scorned and mocked as a nuisance and a “conspiracy theorist” by elitist snobs in the pocket media and in some cases, if his work is really good he ends up dead in a bathtub in a lonely hotel room with his wrists slashed to the bone like “fringe freelance journalist” Danny Casolaro.


Real investigative journalism doesn’t pay, better to become a dreck peddler, secure a nice regular paycheck from Condé Nast and take a place as just another low level water carrier to ensure that the firewall between the real ugly shit that is the truth from ever being discovered by the smelly masses. In his savage destruction of poor Rachel Begley. It was when Rice mocked her as a former “customer service” worker with condescension and elitism just dripping from his poison pen it was just more evidence that there are two Americas, one for the connected and the other for the poor and fucked over schmucks. It is this complete contempt by those who control the American system and have systematically eradicated the middle class, destroyed the public education system and poisoned the minds of the young with televised sexual perversion, dumbness and thousands of simulated murders passed off as entertainment that has brought this country low. The old war criminal Henry Kissinger and Rockefeller Family operative once famously referred to the little people as nothing more than “useless eaters”. Pity that guys like Andy Rice and his ilk, despite their willingness to lie and engage in ugly character assassinations just don’t get it that the same elite holds them in just as much contempt, it’s only that they are pliant and useful idiots.


Maybe the Rachel Begley takedown will vault Andy Rice onto the varsity team where he can participate with other politically motivated Wired hacks in jacking off Adrian Lamo and engaging in a vendetta against blogger Glenn Greenwald who called them out for their bullshit. I doubt it though, Rice is a punk and bereft of any courage when it comes to engaging anyone with an established reputation. After his filthy piece of crap attack on Begley he has zero credibility as well.


Rachel Begley should just sue this lying little cocksucker.I sure as hell would.
 
Just my two cents
 
EE

Joe Stack, a Rising Tide and a Restless Oligarchy

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

There is something in the air in America, something very big is happening. With the already lame duck Barack Obama administration having done more to delegitimize the myth that the government is there to serve the people and that the Bush years were but an aberration. Now after the Wall Street bailouts and the continuing exporting of American jobs to juice corporate profits, the undermining of serious health care reform and the escalation of both wars and the police state an extremely ominous undercurrent is rippling through the land and while still in the early stages it has the establishment terrified and circling the wagons.

The weekly column by Frank Rich of the damned librul [sic] New York Times is one of the first things that I read every Sunday morning and today's offering is a mish-mash of conflation, myths and propaganda designed of course to protect the establishment. The piece, mockingly entitled The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged starts off with the foreboding two paragraphs which I excerpt:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

First off, I don't really think that you can fairly lump all of the teabaggers into one group quite so easily, for example Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Ron Paul is a consistently principled man who has done more to stand against the imperialist gangster state in the last several years than anyone elso other than maybe Dennis Kucinich who is much easier marginalized than Paul. Glenn Beck is a half batshit crazy multimillionaire former shock jock turned FOX propagandist and the faction of the Tea Party that he represents are largely igoramuses, racists and useful idiots who lack the principles of Ron Paul. Mega-star Sarah Palin is largely a creation of the Weekly Standard/Commentary crowd and has already come out to herd the teabaggers to the GOP and has the allure to reinvigorate the 'Christian' fascists of the Religous Right whose militant shocktroops served the Bush administration and the Republican party so well until the disastrous overreach of the Terry Schaivo debacle followed by the exposure of Ted Haggard's secret life and the death of Jerry Falwell.

Hell, I guess you can count me in with the anti-government types now that the government no longer exists as an entity to maintain infrastructure, act in the common good and maintain a level playing field but instead has been hijacked and weaponized against the people as we can see in the police state that is being built. Any government that has become that poisoned really has to go in my opinion, the path that was taken after JFK's execution has led us here and we can thank the internet for allowing those of use who are awake to rage against the machine. But the internet is soon going bye-bye, at least in its current incarnation and it will as usual be under the guise of protecting the sheeple from those big bad terrorists that are in actuality running our own government and have been doing so for a good long time now. I know of many liberals and progressives who are slowly starting to lose their idea of a big benevolent government and coming to the belated realization that in 2010 the government IS the enemy.

Per Rich’s column I also see the John Birch Society being dragged out again. The JBS has quite often been mentioned these days as a painted up fake devil. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, when not doing his moronic falsetto imitations of his opposite numbers on FOX and horseface Rachel Maddow have both been going after the JBS for months. I would not be understating it in saying the Birchers have been getting more free publicity from the comedians and corporate hacks on what passes for the liberal media than they have in decades, I would not be surprised if their membership numbers are up as well. Now as I have mentioned before, I have worked at times with the JBS in fighting intrusions on civil liberties which seem to scantly bother either the teabaggers who were nowhere to be found during the worst years of the Bushreich or the bleeding heart types whose great crusade in these times of tyranny, endless war and economic devastation seems to be forcing gay marriage initatives down the throats of a populace that just isn’t quite evolved enough to swallow it therefore only feeding the freaks on the extreme right more bloody red meat. But really, the JBS, while there are many things where I disagree with them are actually far more liberal than the Obama administration on civil liberties issues so perhaps therein lies the need to demonize them. God knows that we can’t have what was stripped away in the aftermath of the American Reichstag Fire by Bush and Cheney restored.

As for quoting off of anything from the Southern Poverty Law Center I would take that very warily. It is only natural for skeptics to question the agenda of the institution (just as that of the ADL) as any sort of a really legitimate source of information. They too are masters at conflation and depend on the presence of demons to exist, the more demons the better. The piece by Frank Rich in a prominent paper that builds on a previous New York Times Tea Party story by David Barstow entitled Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right that conjures up the specter of Timothy McVeigh shows that they are going to be conducting a witch hunt across the internet and chances are a good deal of the people who come to this site and many, many others are going to be the prey.

As I recall, the Tea Party actually began with the 9/11 Truth movement and then also the Ron Paul people, it was only after Obama's election that the establishment hacks like Rick Santelli, Wall Street pimp and the insipid multi-millionaire Beck hijacked it with Republican backing. Now I would also suspect a certain level of hard-line Zionist infiltration like the laughably transparent Birthers (leader Orly Taitz is yet another Israeli right-wing shill) to discredit Obama for not nuking Tehran, you could see that when Sarah Palin appeared in Nashville for the high-roller version of the National Tea Party Convention wearing that Israeli flag pin and later said that Obama could be reelected were he to attack Iran. I know the way the Israelis operate and there is no way that they are not stirring the pot with at least the Beckers and Palinazis with lot of assistance from the American neocon propagandists but those useful idiots aren't the ones that scare the bejesus out of the greedy swine who run this place.

Rich and the rest of the elite establishment seem to be extremely scared of the actions of Joe Stack who flew his plane into an IRS office. Now I am neither a right winger nor a teabagger but I did read the Stack 'manifesto' and it had a contempt for the entire rotten system as a whole and could not be easily stuffed into any pre configured cartoon character. I even wrote a piece called In Defense of Joe Stack where I condemned the use of violence but agreed with the anti establishment message. There is undeniably a growing sense of anger in America and with the left being pretty much a non-factor in directing the rage towards serious and constructive change it creates a vacuum which unfortunately has filled up with some of the worst type of miscreant that this country has to offer....along with a lot of others who just have nowhere else to go and are being used as human shields.

The fear of a Joe Stack whose grievances transcend the traditional left vs right paradigm by not only calling out the IRS but the the rancid piece of crap that is the national health care system, the crony capitalist government and closes with a line out of the Communist Manifesto sends shivers up the spines the real rulers of this country. The one thing about what Rich refers to as an inchoate movement is that it could very easily evolve into something that is a serious threat to the looters and blood barters and their tax the hell out of the rest of us to build their police state, fund their illegal wars and enrich their criminal buddies on Wall Street.

The thing about the guy killed in the IRS office, Vernon Hunter is also something that has been making the rounds a good deal lately, kind of reminds me the sort of raw cynicism when during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was trolling the wreckage looking for a corpse that could bolster the case for the estate tax to protect multimillionaire chiselers. I had more than a few of the corpse humpers and ambulance chasers attack my piece on Stack over what was in essence collateral damage.

Maybe it makes me a bad person because I could give a rat's ass about the guy who got killed in the building, just like the people who got blown up in 9/11 (I pretty much share Ward Churchill's sentiment about the Little Eichmanns) whose deaths at the hand of the shadow government justified a new century of raw tyranny because in a way we are all guilty of participation in this monstrous system. Hell, I could get killed in my damned car on the way to or from work every day, I always had this problem with the big contradiction of the average American life being worth more than the brown and non-Christian women and children who have our tax dollar funded bombs dropped on them. Americans have a peculiar reverence for life, the trainer that got killed by the whale at Sea World is practically causing a national outpouring of mourning but how many people were eradicated by U.S. drone strikes, bombs gone off target or people who are dying right here in the good ole US of A due to poverty, starvation and lack of health care?

So basically the IRS is a representative form of a larger tyranny and Joe Stack happened to strike a blow against it , we can argue all day about ideology but when it all comes down to it there are only two life forms in America post 9/11, vampires and cattle. I do find it more than a bit cynical that the 'left' is canonizing poor Vernon as some kind of national victim in order to try to affix the 'terrorist' label that is used so often as a bludgeon against them by the fascist elements of the right. Failed crusades have a way of wearing people down especially when the pigs who run the system only care about who is yoking the slaves and delivering them to the man.

Rich seems to be keeping alive a certain storyline that is going to be used in order to justify Cass Sunstein style infiltrations, more police state measures (maybe even naked boy scanners in shopping malls) and a demonizing of many law abiding American citizens who are inadvertently being sucked into groups of potentially violent individuals including racist white supremacists that the GOP and the neocons have used as shock troops in the Tea Party Movement.

I believe that if it were cleaned up with a lot of the scum sent packing, Glenn Beck turned off and more of an anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-Wall Street and pro-restoration of civil liberties along the lines of a Ron Paul only with an acceptance of angry progressives and liberals who don't drink the FOX fascist Kool Aid that the Tea Party Movement could become a formidable threat to the whole corrupt system.

Which is of course why it must be seen by a populace growing madder by the minute as nothing more than through a lens of demonizing the more ostentatious and vile elements.

Just my two cents

EE

In Defense of Joe Stack

Joe Stack did more than just go to the window and scream “I’m as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore”. He chose to make a statement against a tyrannical government long ago pried loose from any semblance of morality. Not that I would personally recommend flying an airplane into a government building full of people to make a statement but it takes a lot to shake the television lobotomized sheeple these days. Of course since Stack wasn’t one of those dirty Muslim devils, therefore making his ‘terrorist’ attack no asset to the Zionist coddling corporate media to fuel the frenzy for endless wars of imperialism his story was simply flushed down the memory hole in favor of the grand spectacle of Tiger Woods’ press conference the very next day.

Stack’s ‘manifesto’ was pure dynamite, the stuff that would represent a serious threat to the fascist oligarchy were it to get much play because quite frankly I agreed with a majority of it and so would millions of others who have gotten the shaft by this rotten to the core system. The authorized parrots for the establishment, Beck, Olbermann, Maddow, Limbaugh and their ilk did their jobs by spinning their gossamer webs of half-truths, obfuscations and outright balderdash to avoid addressing the real issues. They labeled him as a crank, a dangerous misfit who unbelievably hated our benevolent government and the patriotic and well-intentioned Internal Revenue Service. He was one of those foaming at the mouth rabid dog constitutionalists who dared to question those whose disdain for the Founding Fathers and their document protecting the people of the United States of America from the tyranny of a government that could too easily be subverted by the moneyed interests and used to suppress liberty. The reverence for the Constitution is evident in honorable men like George W. Bush who once referred to the document as “a goddamned piece of paper” or of former constitutional law professor Barack Obama who has failed to hold accountable the torturers, murderers, thieves and war criminals of the Bush administration.

At first some on the ‘left’ were trying to link Joe Stack to the insipid, long co-opted by neocon tea party movement, but Stack’s ‘manifesto’ didn’t fit nicely into the pre-defined cartoon stereotypes of the average Becker or Palinazi. Not to mention that the average ‘tea partier’ useful idiot only spouts talking points about small government and lower taxation, what they represent is just the reallocation of control of the massive government to serve THEIR needs, real or perceived and when outright totalitarian fascism does come to America it will be these shock troops who will be the first ones screaming for the torture and imprisonment of their enemies. Were this type of brutal, uneducated thug to ever gain control of the system then there will be no end to the stinking piles of naked, dead bodies of those that will provide the meat for their Caesar to feast upon.

Nor did the great Rush Limbaugh or the other multi-millionaire demagogues call him out as a ‘Socialist’ for daring to criticize our beautiful and blissful system of American ‘free-market’ capitalism that has eviscerated the free-enterprise system and busted the backs of small businesses. Joe Stack’s ‘manifesto’ could easily have been sold to the knuckle draggers as proof, yes my friends proof that the demon of communism was present in America. The ‘manifesto’ closed with “The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed” and red-baiting neo-McCarthyist scum like Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly would have had no problem rousing their rabble in the same manner that they did after the strange shooting incident at Fort Hood but Stack didn’t fit into their trite cookie-cutter storyline. The fiends in the corporate media and their paymasters understood that in hyping Stack’s ‘manifesto’ that they were playing with fire given the climate of fear, desperation, dread and rage that they have so merrily assisted in creating.

But what did Joe Stack really say?

He had problems with the IRS and the government just like millions of others do but who aren’t driven to violence out of pure desperation. Americans are ripped off by the IRS on a daily basis to provide the money to cover the blown-up schemes of the treasonous financial oligarchs, to finance illegal and immoral wars, CIA terrorism, foreign aid to Israeli to carry out genocide and to metaphorically dig our own graves and pay for the shovels to do so. The IRS and the tyranical government are currently extorting our money to implement a monstrous anti-American high-tech police state that provides food for a massive for profit prison system that any of you who are reading this could one day end up in.The nation’s airports are abominable examples of just how little privacy and the presumption of innocent until proven guilty matter in the new American century. Nude body scanners are now being funded with taxpayer dollars and the same scanners will in the future be coming to shopping malls as well, all under the big lie of fighting terrorism which will soon be defined to include even people with grievances against the IRS, the wars and the government who don’t fly airplanes into buildings.

And there is also Stack’s criticism of the loathsome Catholic Church, we sure as hell can’t have any sort of idea take root questioning the legitimacy of those in the God business to use their tax exempt status to weasel out of paying Caesar. The Catholic Church has for centuries been a murderous conclave of bloodthirsty power whores intent on enforcing their narrow-mindedness on the poor dupes who need religion as a crutch for their fear and innate savagery. Name me one institution with as long a history of slaughter, rape, theft and greed as the Catholic Church. The immorality of their former Nazi Pope and their pedophile priests is only surpassed by their worship of mammon and the tax exempt status pisses on the Ten Commandments rule of ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ as surely as their crusades and inquisitions spat upon ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. Stack’s condemnation of this pox on human history could not be tolerated for it may lead to similar questioning of the filthy ‘Christian’ churches and their like theft while the goat barn megachurches from where pulpits are used as perches where finely clothed charlatans preach political purely right-wing fascist Republican messages of hatred for the fellow man, exhortations to wage war and commit genocide in the name of Zionist Israel and to bastardize the holy book by twisting the message of Jesus Christ to transform him into nothing more than a pimp for the money changers and blood barters.

The right-wing ‘Christian’ churches in America are an obscenity and the blasphemy that is belched forth during the demonic sermons and over tax-exempt propaganda networks of hundreds if not thousands of television and radio stations is an abomination. Not only are these organizations able to benefit from avoiding the I.R.S. while ordinary Americans are taken to the wall over the slightest ‘violation’ they contribute to the foul rottenness of our corrupt political system by laundering and funneling money to demagogic stooges who are then sent to the big Washington D.C. whorehouse to serve corporate interests and stick it to the poor dumb bitches and bastards whose superstition and need for sanctioning of their hate and fear that bought into that swill and send them there. Not only should religious organizations be stripped permanently of their tax-exempt status but the Justice Department should send forth an army of investigators to enforce the RICO act against those found to be unfairly benefiting by acting as de facto arms of the criminal Republican party. But that would be an action of a government that serves the interest of the common good of the many instead of the corrupt few.

Joe Stack also called out the death panels that are the territory of the American insurance parasites and their bean counters who make the call on whether to pay or deny a claim and anyone familiar with the U.S. corporate communist collective knows all too well the hive mentality of boosting the blessed profits for the benefit of CEO pharaohs. Too much money has been spent in the past year by the lobbyists for big Pharma, the health care profiteers and the foulest of all, the insurance racket to upset the applecart. Obama and the DemocRAT party’s foul smelling bailout of the insurance industry marked as some sort of actual reform instead of just another massive fleecing of the American taxpayer to grease the wheels of the finance oligarch’s perpetual scam machine was an atrocity at best from the beginning. There was no chance that any humane form of a single payer system as could be expected in a civilized society was ever going to have a chance in hell, there is too much money to be made in profiting off of the misery of the sick and doomed. Even a piss-warm, watered down bill with some sort of public option was never going to happen and with lucrative post-politics lobbying jobs on the line our cowardly and corrupt Congress people and Senators would surely not dare to go against the financial interests of those who own them. What Obamacare really amounted to at the end is the use of the full force of the state as a threat to forcibly mandate an already beggared by the corporate looting spree populace to buy overpriced, shitty insurance from the same bloodsuckers that have destroyed the system. The teabaggers came in handy during the media circus of the ludicrous town hall meetings during last summer’s recess when they descended en masse like Hitler’s own Sturmabteilung to disrupt and threaten already gutless elected officials. The media of course played this into a full blown lie of some sort of great populist revolt when the elements that receive the most attention were in actuality Astroturf fronts for pigs like the scurrilous Dick Armey and the insipid neocons of Newt Gingrich. Most recently seen uniting behind neocon darling Sarah Palin who is exhorting them to sign up for lifetime membership in the Republican cult.

Joe Stack wrote of the rigged game that is American capitalism, anyone who has paid attention to the bailouts of the bankers by Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs moles burrowed deeply into both the Bush and Obama administrations understands that the deck was stacked in favor of the pigs from the get go. You didn’t see any of the teabagger swine marching on Wall Street or reacting in outrage to the militarizing of the city of Pittsburgh to protect the global elite during last year’s G20 summit did you? The massive crimes by the speculators and banksters like AIG, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and the rest of the looters should have been punished, there should have been prison terms and expropriations of pilfered loot to return to the victims who these criminals fleeced to finance their extravagant lifestyles. Again, that is what would have happened in any decent society with a government that wasn’t thoroughly corrupted and hijacked and we poor, fucked-over and fucked-out Americans certainly don’t have the privilege of living in one, at least not anymore. The United States of America is going bankrupt, the choice between Empire and republic has been made and when Generals McChrystal and
Petraeus were given free reign to escalate in Afghanistan the Rubicon was crossed. There cannot be guns and butter and the ploughshares are worth nothing in comparison to the swords that can be sold by the Military Industrial Complex to all sides of any conflict, our top exportable commodity is death and our emperors fiddle while Der Heimat crumbles. Crumbling infrastructure, millions of sick, homeless and jobless, the sad and hollow-eyed diaspora of the zero sum game of ‘fuck you, I got mine’ capitalism and they are pissed off but so many are so easily given illogical scapegoats for their all too logical rage. Where were the teabagger swine when all of this went down, an even bigger question is where were the teabagger swine when Bush and Cheney had the national credit card and the keys to the war machine? The same place where the bleeding heart types were when the Obamessiah escalated the carnage in Afghanistan and were given cover by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink who was down with it all because it was now a war to liberate oppressed women, the myth of liberal pacifism is just another big lie when they are the ones who can bask in the glory of the latest and greatest imperialist war.

The government and the system it serves know all too well how much legitimate anger is currently out there, I can hear it daily whether it be in grocery store checkout lines, gas stations or restaurants, a growing realization that the system itself is the enemy. Joe Stack struck a blow against that system in the way that he hoped would shake it and awaken the zombies from their fitful sleep but sadly it won’t because the ever glowing televisions, the ultimate drug delivery device (the Nazis were in awe of the capabilities of TV and were experimenting with the medium when Berlin fell) for that sweet, narcotic E-crack will ensure that they will continue to shuffle one after another into the steel chute, they may or may not realize what has happened when they reach the end and the captive bolt pistol comes to rest between their thousand yard staring eyes to bring an end to their pathetic excuse for what passes for consciousness. Hell, in a land where any serious comprehensive definition of democracy has come to be exemplified by American Idol and Jack Bauer has become a national icon maybe the coming damnation is deserved. The Founding Fathers knew all too well the dangers of a willfully ignorant and easily duped populace and a perfect example of eugenics American style would be in a call that I heard Friday morning on the Bill Press Show during the morning commute in which some clueless ass proposed eliminating the First Amendment as a remedy to more Joe Stacks deciding that they are as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Now in wrapping up this rant I want to unequivocally state that I do not agree with stack when he stated that violence is the “only” answer for that is NOT the solution. Firstly the government has bigger guns, armies of militarized police goons and a crackerjack high-tech police state that has been put into place using the phony ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11 as justification. If those who choose violence are numerous enough then it would be a simple matter of the president picking up the phone and invoking his powers to declare martial law, the power that the dumb bastard Republicans gave to George W. Bush and his NSPD51 that Barack Obama has not rescinded. If you choose violence you will be crushed, never, ever should you underestimate the ability of a tyrannical state to reciprocate with extreme prejudice and maximum brutality against those that threaten it with violence. The REAL answer is to delegitimize the state, withhold your willing consent, protest against the war machine and debunk the ultimate lie that is faith in this monstrous system. The political system is nothing more than two dueling and largely interlocking criminal parties that will grind your bones to make their bread in order to serve the oligarchs.

The politically connected scum like for example Goldman Sachs and GM get bailouts while regular Americans who have played by the rules get their jobs offshored to India, China or some lousy third world shithole where there are no labor unions nor laws to protect the slave populations. How many jobs have been lost since NAFTA started the ball rolling and the criminal Bush administration cloaked itself in the flag under the phony war on terror and escalated the strip-mining of the American economy in the name of greed? President Obama lied when he campaigned for the presidency by indicating that these rotten trade pacts that screw hard working, decent and honest Americans into lives of privation and strip away their dignity would be re-examined. Globalization has been a disaster for all but the wealthiest Americans and the pigs that run the corporations that are given more human rights by our putrid and corrupted to the core legal system that was long ago bought and paid for and now has sold out those that it was theoretically supposed to protect for pennies on the dollar. The change that Obama promised is chump change and those jobs are NEVER coming back just as the vile moneychangers on Wall Street will NEVER be held accountable for crashing the economy but rather bailed out with the pound of flesh from every American that is extracted by the Big Brother IRS man. That Obama is a liar should be a shock to nobody who is awake, a poison tree produces only poison fruit and in America in 2010 the entire fucking orchard is infected. Obama, like his predecessors is by every definition a war criminal and a tyrant, this is the system, the Empire and it is all wrapped in the flag and sent out carrying a cross to give it legitimacy when it has none. As George Santayana once famously warned “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and anyone who knows anything at all about history understands that power ALWAYS corrupts and tyranny is the norm.

No, I do not agree with Joe Stack about violence, ideas are much more powerful than bullets and bombs or airplanes flown into buildings. To spread the truth, the idea that there is no legitimacy to be found in this monstrous system of greed, murder and a prison industrial complex that rivals that of Joseph Stalin’s gulags and that in America there are really only two life forms – vampires and cattle – is far more dangerous to the system. This is why Joe Stack’s words were washed away immediately by the truly relevant and all-important news of the holy words of Tiger Woods, the Jesus Christ of the American church of wonder-working celebrity crucified and arisen anew while the fires at the Echelon Building were still smoldering. The truth is what the political prostitutes, professional con-artists, schemers, butchers and bankers fear the most for it is the only thing that will end the reign of tyranny and allow the people to regain control over their own destinies, their own government and the future of their children.

Expose the bastards, the time is ripe for a non-violent revolution but it is running out…

EE

Joe Stack’s ‘Manifesto’ fished out of the memory hole.


If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, "Why did this have to happen?" The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn't enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless... especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I'm not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was "no taxation without representation". I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a "crackpot", traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven't had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political "representatives" (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the "terrible health care problem". It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You've got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly "holds accountable" its victims, claiming that they're responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law "requires" a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that's not "duress" than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early '80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having 'tax code' readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful "exemptions" that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the "best", high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the "big boys" were doing (except that we weren't steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two "interpretations" for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us... Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their "freedom"... and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of "paying my dues"), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I'm sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be "healthier" eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn't quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn't trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early '80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a 'wet-behind-the-ears' contract software engineer... and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

· "another person" is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.

· "taxpayer" is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.

· "individual", "employee", or "worker" is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it's not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can't believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my 'pocket change', and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their "freedom". Oh, and don't forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn't bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren't going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.

Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn't need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to "shore up" their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, 'special' facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars ... as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I'm thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I'll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I've never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages... and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn't give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn't have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn't notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I'd never enter another accountant's office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl's unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn't have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is... well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual". Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes... isn't that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn't limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at "big brother" while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won't continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

02/18/2010