Some awake people..

[notaslave]

Benjamin Zephaniah British poet.

Rong Radio

My ears are battered and burned and I've just learned
I've been listening to the rong radio station
My mind has been brutalised
now the pain cant be disguised
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I was beginning to believe that all black men were bad men
and white men would reign again
I was beginning to believe that I was a mindless drug freak
who couldnt control my sanity or my sexuality.
I was beginning to beleive that I couldnt believe in nothing
except nothing and al I ever wanted to do was get you
and do you
I've been listening to the rong radio station
My future has been blighted I am so so excited
I've been listening to the rong radio station.
I was beginning to not trust me
infact I wanted to arrest me
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I've been dancing to music that I can't stand
I've been reciting commericals to my girlfriend
I've been trying to convince myself that what I really need
Is a sunbed and a mortgage and some hairspray, the kind of hairspray
that will wash my grey-blues away.
I've been trying to convince myself that I shouldnt care
about anyone else but myself
I've been trying to convince myself that I could ease my conscience
if I gave a few pence or a few cents to a starving baby in Africa
Because African babies need me so
because African babaies need my favours
because Africa is full of dictators
And oh yeah, globalisation
will bring salvation
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I thought my neighbours were the Axis of Evil
I wanna go kill people
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I was sure I didnt inhale, so why is my mind going stale?
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I was beginning to believe that all muslims were terrorists
and Christian terrorists didnt exist
I really did believe that terrorism couldn't be done by governments
not our governments
not white governments
I just could not see what was wrong with me
I gave hungry people hamburgers you see
I was beginning to believe that our children were better than their children
their children were dying from terrorism
but I couldnt hear their children call
and a child from Palestine
simply didnt count at all
walk this way
no children I was not aware
I've been listening to the rong radio station
For years I've been sedated now I think Im educated
I've been listening to the rong radio station
And everytime I got ill
I took the same little white pill
I've been listening to the rong radio station
When it started I was curious
but then it got so serious
It was cool when it began
but now I really hate Iran
And look at me now I want to make friends with Pakistan
I want to bomb Afghanistan
and I need someone to tell me
Where the hell is Kurdhistan
Yeah you can be me ally for a while
Until I come to bomb your child
And Im sure there is a continent called the Middle East
and I think that I can
Bomb my way to peace
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I've been listening to the wrong chants
I've been listening to the rong beats
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I've been listening to the rong tones
from the rong zones
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I've been listening to the rong voices
I've made mad choices
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I've been listening to lies,
I've been listening to spies
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I needed to know what some popstar somewhere
was having for breakfast
I needed to know that I was no longer working class
I needed to know if the stock market rose 1%
I needed to know that I had a ruler to give me confidence
I needed to know that my life would improve loads
if I had an operation on my nose
I needed to hear that DJ say
Good morning, Good morning
I felt that he was there just for me
I loved the way that he would say
This show is sponsored by
Oh buy, oh buy - he made me cry
I've been listening to the rong radio station
Can you dig this?
I put myself on a hit list
I've been listening to the rong radio station
I used to take myself for granted
Now I believe I'm wanted
I'm laughing and I'm crying cos I'm watching myself dying
I've been listening to the rong radio station
Can you hear?
Listen to me
Keep this frequency clear!!



It can be heard on You tube
RongRadio - YouTube

[notaslave]

Major General Smedley Butler "war is a racket" (http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm)and the attempted coup .....

In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt's "First 100 Days," America's richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to conduct a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs.

The answer was a military coup. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires. This included some of America's richest and most famous names of the time:

* Irenee Du Pont - Right-wing chemical industrialist, founder, American Liberty League, assigned to execute plot.
* Grayson Murphy - Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks.
* William Doyle - Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup.
* John Davis - Former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan.
* Al Smith - Roosevelt's political foe, former governor New York, codirector of the American Liberty League.
* John J. Raskob* - A high-ranking Du Pont officer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party.
* Robert Clark - One of Wall Street's richest bankers and stockbrokers.
* Gerald MacGuire - Bond salesman for Clark, former commander of the Connecticut American Legion.

*In later decades, Raskob would become a "Knight of Malta," a Roman Catholic Religious Order with a high percentage of CIA spies, including CIA Directors William Casey, William Colby and John McCone.

The plotters attempted to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead the coup.

They selected him because he was a war hero who was popular with the troops. The plotters felt his good reputation was important to make the troops feel confident that they were doing the right thing by overthrowing a democratically elected president.

However, this was a mistake: Butler was popular with the troops because he identified with them. That is, he was a man of the people, not the elite.

When the plotters approached General Butler with their proposal to lead the coup, he pretended to go along with the plan at first, secretly deciding to betray it to Congress at the right moment.

What the businessmen proposed was dramatic. They wanted General Butler to deliver an ultimatum to Roosevelt. Roosevelt would pretend to become sick and incapacitated from his polio, and allow a newly created cabinet officer, a "Secretary of General Affairs," to run things in his stead. The secretary, of course, would be carrying out the orders of Wall Street. If Roosevelt refused, then General Butler would force him out with an army of 500,000 war veterans from the American Legion.

But MacGuire assured Butler the cover story would work: "You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second."

The businessmen also promised that money was no object: Clark told Butler that he would spend half his $60 million fortune to save the other half.

And what type of government would replace Roosevelt's New Deal?

MacGuire was perfectly candid to Paul French, a reporter friend of General Butler's: "We need a fascist government in this country… to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight."

Indeed, it turns out that MacGuire travelled to Italy to study Mussolini's fascist state, and came away mightily impressed. He wrote glowing reports back to his boss, Robert Clark, suggesting that they implement the same thing.

If this sounds too fantastic to believe, we should remember that by 1933, the crimes of fascism were still mostly in the future, and its dangers were largely unknown, even to its supporters. But in the early days, many businessmen openly admired Mussolini because he had used a strong hand to deal with labor unions, put out social unrest, and get the economy working again, if only at the point of a gun.

Americans today would be appalled to learn of the many famous millionaires back then who initially admired Hitler and Mussolini: Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, John and Allen Dulles, who, besides being millionaires, would later become Eisenhower's Secretary of State and CIA Director, respectively, and, of course, everyone on the above list. They disavowed Hitler and Mussolini only after their atrocities grew to indefensible levels.

The plot fell apart when Butler went public.

The general revealed the details of the coup before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which would later become the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. The Committee heard the testimony of Butler and French, but failed to call in any of the coup plotters for questioning, other than MacGuire. In fact, the Committee whitewashed the public version of its final report, deleting the names of powerful businessmen whose reputations they sought to protect. The most likely reason for this response is that Wall Street had undue influence in Congress also.

Even more alarming, the elite controlled media failed to pick up on the story, and even today the incident remains little known. The elite managed to spin the story as nothing more than the rumors and hearsay of Butler and French, even though Butler was a Quaker of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. Butler, appalled by the cover-up, went on national radio to denounce it, but with little success. Butler was finally vindicated in 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the Committee's internal, secret report.

MacGuire denied [Butler's] allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made to General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principle, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various form of veterans' organizations of Fascist character.

further sources ... http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/generalsources.html

[notaslave]

Thomas Sowell
MY FELLOW-ECONOMIST WALTER WILLIAMS has for years kept track of how much money it would take to lift every American man, woman and child in poverty above the official poverty level. That sum has consistently been some fraction of the money actually spent in "anti-poverty" programs. In other words, if you gave every poor person enough money to stop being poor, that would cost a fraction of what our welfare state programs and bureaucracies cost.

Obviously, a lot of anti-poverty money is going to people who are not poor. There are whole classes of people who live off the poor -- or rather, off the vast sums of money that are poured out from the public treasury and private philanthropy, in hopes of helping the poor.

Those who intercept the money intended for the poor have been aptly called "poverty pimps." The poor are a commodity to these people, who include not only local politicians, community activists and small-time hustlers, but also people with impressive titles and academic credentials, who likewise milk the larger society, in the name of the poor.

At the top of the food chain, as it were, are Ivy League professors who rake in big-time research grants to support themselves and their cronies while they are studying, romanticizing or otherwise exploiting the poor. The poem below is about such people, who are as much poverty pimps as politicians who simply pocket graft from poverty programs or collect votes for promoting lucrative boondoggles.

THE POVERTY PIMPS' POEM

Let us celebrate the poor,
Let us hawk them door to door.
There's a market for their pain,
Votes and glory and money to gain.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Their ills, their sins, their faulty diction
Flavor our songs and spice our fiction.
Their hopes and struggles and agonies
Get us grants and consulting fees.
Celebrate thugs and clowns,
Give their ignorance all renown.
Celebrate what holds them down,
In our academic gowns.
Let us celebrate the poor.