Thomas Friedman has a message for "the grunts" fighting the long, bloody war of attrition in Iraq:
"Thanks, suckers, for fighting and dying on shoestring pay scales as the Republican war department SLASHES supplies to combat troops, outsources American jobs, Slashes health care and benefits for your families, and as the Republican Congress shifts the burden of paying off America's huge deficits from the wealthy to the middle-class and working-class; and that Republican Congress even slashed COMBAT PAY for those stuck in MANDATORY REPEAT second, third and fourth tours in the war that Don Rumsfeld got a 15-gun salute for leaving in a mess." "Your sacrifice, while UNAPPRECIATED in Republican big-donor and neo-con circles, continues to add to my millions in earnings in book and syndication sales for advocating OUTSOURCING ***MORE*** American jobs, as the war also continues to add millions to the profits of the SULZBERGER FAMILY and NEW YORK TIMES company, and continues to add to the billion-dollar wealth of my wife's family."
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OK, we apologize at the start of this post for taking on the racist stereotypes of "the Jewish Controlled Media" on Christmas Day, much less linking our rather dour post to such a good, lighthearted, understated op-ed by Nina Burleigh over at HuffingtonPost.com
But MUST WE here at mwUSA be the ones to point out how completely the "Jewish controlled media" accusation IS TRULY falling into the STEREOTYPES of "THE JEWISH CONTROLLED MEDIA AND EVIL FINANCIERS CONSPIRACY!" as harangued by at least a century of anti-Jewish scapegoating of the past century (centuries)??
Those "anti-Jewish racists" who at one time of course included Henry Ford, along with Hitler, Goebbels, the Nazis, and countless others?
(Note: We use "anti-Jewish" instead of "anti-Semitic", because the term "anti-Semitic" as it is commonly used EXCLUDES, devalues, and thus DEHUMANIZES the non-Jewish Semitic races, including millions 0f Arabs, in the very same manner that Jewish writers complain that "anti-Semitic writers" try to dehumanize Jews. Indeed, according to genographic human migration studies, many modern Jewish families have ZERO Semitic genealogy in them!) But we digress.
What is important is that, as the Bush administration and Rethuglican Party spend BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars digging America DEEPER into the murderous, corruption, torture, blood, and ****-stained quagmire that is the Iraq war, the Robber Barons of Wall Street CHEER as Mr. Bush gives TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES and NO BID CONTRACTS to WAR PROFITEERS, while average Americans can no longer afford health insurance, much less higher education and other basic goals that were once considered an integral part of "the American dream."
And WHO are the HEAD CHEERLEADERS of this American NIGHTMARE?
Why, the NEO-CONS who designed, packaged, and sold Mr. Bush's dreams of war - the Wolfowitzs and Perles and Feiths and Kristols and Krauthammers and Safires and Sulzbergers and Kurtzs, and even the so-called "moderates" like Koppel and Cohen and Wolf Blitzer have been unabashed apologists for the invasion of Iraq and the LIES leading to it. (And none of them put up much of a fuss for reporting on the recounting of votes in the Florida 2000 disenfranchisement debacle.)
Which brings us to TOM FRIEDMAN, who once held the chair of the token liberal/progressive/moderate of the New York Times editorial columns. We have saved a clipping from the early 1990s of a Friedman op-ed, published in a syndicated paper, under a photo of a Liberian militia "soldier" walking down a devastated bombed-out street in that country, holding by the hair severed heads, one in each hand. The Friedman article explained that when you have NO government you have CHAOS, of which the Liberia ruled by gun battles and murderous warlords was a perfect example. In the early 1990s - the era when convicted Republican Watergate burglar and former CIA operative G. GORDON LIDDY actually broadcast on his Right-Wing radio talk-show "when shooting at jackbooted federal government agents, AIM AT THE HEAD to avoid hitting their body-armor" - Thomas Friedman actually felt compelled to write an editorial DEFENDING THE BASIC NEED for and goodness of AMERICAN GOVERNMENT!
How times have changed. Now Mr. Friedman is the very exemplar of a LAISSEZ FAIRE "government's sole function is as loan enforcer, tax collector, and military-industrial-complex warlord" Right-Wing Republican.
Far from OPPOSING COMMUNIST CHINA's draconian FORCED LABOR CAMPS, Mr. Friedman now believes that CHEAP LABOR, even FORCED LABOR with zero-to-no human rights, is the wave of the future. What in the old days was called SLAVE labor, whether in Hitler's death camps, Stalin's death camps, of in the slave states of America. (Which, during colonial times, did indeed include most colonies.)
We don't know if they realize it, but today the NEW YORK TIMES is fulfilling, in spades, the caricature stereotype of the "RUTHLESS JEWISH FINANCIERS and MEDIA OWNERS" who would "promulgate ANY LIE to justify HOARDING their wealth and profits at the expense of society."
It doesn't help that GOLDMAN SACHS just posted a THIRTEEN BILLION DOLLAR profit QUARTER, in a year when the vast majority of Americans have seen a GROSS DECLINE in their actual (adjusted) incomes. For example, in the early 1990s tradesmen earned typically $15-20/hour in many American cities. Fifteen years later, they are often lucky to earn $20/hour... WHILE GAS, INSURANCE, HEALTH CARE, education, and almost all other expenses HAVE MORE THAN DOUBLED in that 15 years. Wages up 33% (IF you are lucky), while expenses are DOUBLE or even TRIPLE what they were in the early 1990s!
(These statistics are even easier to compile, and more dire, for MINIMUM WAGE earners, who haven't seen an increase in wages in years due to the Rethuglican majority in Congress under Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and the Cheney-Bush White House.)
***THOMAS FRIEDMAN is the self-annointed LEADING APOLOGIST in all of America for advocating this GROSS DECLINE in America's standard of living***
although of course he has plenty of company in the ranks of the Right-Wing, corporate & robber-baron funded think-tanks, media, press, and universities.
The era most Right-Wing Americans look back on as the "glory years" of American power and prestige were during the two terms of President Eisenhower; the years after the Korean War ended when America still had a commanding edge in technology and strategic military (nuclear) power if not in raw numbers vs. the Warsaw Pact and Communist China. The USA was also then the undisputed lead of the "free world" and the global economy in those years. Yet the post-WWII 1950s also saw THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE of the American workforce as UNION employees, over 30% of the American workforce were union members, and in that era the US government was also taking SOCIAL SECURITY, the GI bill, and OTHER ***LIBERAL SOCIAL WELFARE PROGRAMS*** to levels far higher than where they had been in the pre-WWII depression era.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN and THE NEW YORK TIMES are constantly and continually TRYING TO UNDERCUT that "liberal" agenda of a HALF CENTURY OF AMERICAN PROGRESS.
They constantly argue that AMERICA should follow the EXAMPLE OF COMMUNIST CHINA and other "third-world nations" in THE RACE to GUT worker's rights, SLASH environmental protections, DISCARD the social safety net, and indeed SHRINK ALL forms of corporate responsibility to the public welfare and common good.
In doing so, they are making HONEST men of those demagogues of the past century who shouted about the abusive, dehumanizing, merciless attributes attributed to "the scheming Jew."
Again, we apologize to Nina Burleigh & Huffpost for linking to their post, and for writing an "anti-semitic" post here on Christmas Day, and to all those Jewish writers and activists we admire for fighting for social justice and American progress. But, again, so many fighting the good fight are being DROWNED OUT by the Friedmans, Safires, and Sulzbergers of the NEW YORK TIMES, and by the Kristols, Krauthammers, Kurtzs, and Finemans of the FOX 'news' network and WASHINGTON POST group, etc.
Are we the ONLY ones noticing how much the New York Times, Goldman Sachs, the "don't count the votes" neo-cons and so many other influential, entrenched writers of "the chosen faith" seem to be FULFILLING the racist, pejorative STEREOTYPES laid out by Henry Ford and so many other demagogues and race-baiters of the past century?
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Henry Ford INVENTS a Jewish Conspiracy
http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=275
Sociopaths Have Taken Over the Op-Ed Pages
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/11/29/the-sociopaths-that-have-taken-over-the-op-ed-pages/
[Including the Sulzberger-owned New York Times, with all apolgies to Mr. Krugman]
[note: When the NY Times hired Paul Krugman for the economist slot on the NYT editorial page, they thought they were getting someone with expertise in the "economic hit-man" model of extorting a third-world nation's wealth by bribing its wealthiest families with insider deals and sweetheart loans, because Mr. Krugman had written several academic papers on the bankruptcy and debt of those "debtor nations." Little did the NYT owners realize that Krugman would become reknown worldwide as an economist with a conscience and an encyclopedia of economic statistics of userous loan terms and predatory financing for the editors at the news desk to IGNORE every single damn day of the year.]
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Dear Santa: It's Been Awhile
by Nina Burleigh
Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-burleigh/dear-santa-its-been-awh_b_36905.html
To: Santa Claus
North Pole
Dear Santa,
Forgive me for not writing to you in almost 40 years. I'd been mis-led to believe that we live in a reality-based world, and that you didn't exist. Shame on me! Please put some extra candy canes in the White House stockings to reward the occupants for helping me understand that the world of make-believe never had to end.
I know you've been watching, but I'll remind you that I've been a nice girl most years since you last heard from me. I show up on time, share malicious gossip, and have two cute little kids, who, as you know, do believe in you whole-heartedly.
I pretty much have everything I want right now, so I'm hard to shop for. I hope you won't mind this little existential wish list instead. If you can deliver even one of these gifts, I'll never forget to leave out cookies for you and the reindeer again.
I'll start with the easy ones first.
In L.A., please drop an Oscar down Clint Eastwood's chimney for his utterly amazing, transgressively anti-war film, Letters from Iwo Jima.
Could you please alight on the roof of the Washington office of the New York Times and hustle down the heat vent and onto Thomas L. Friedman's desk. Once there, please remove his passport and press pass and replace them with a lifetime entrance ticket to Disney World or someplace fun where he can do less harm. It's really awful, Santa, to see a pundit who claims expertise on the Middle East, slurring, as he did the other day, the entire Arab race with generalities only some overpaid, overachieving, parachuting hack would conceive. There are a lot of warring, tribal, conspiracy theorists on the Arab "street" - there are also sane, educated, decent people, Tom, who want peace and democracy. Santa, help Tom step outside the embassy parties and think tank seminars and listen to them for a change.
While you're over at the Times, Santa, drop in on the copy desk and remove the words "fight terror" from the headline copy-writers' lexicon. In fact, if you could do the same at CNN, Gannett, the AP and the rest of the mainstream media you visit, that would be great. Then we'll stop seeing headlines like this, explaining why the president wants more soldiers in Iraq: "A Long-Term Plan to Fight Terror." If headlines must contain the word "Terror" in relation to any of Mr. Bush's plans, please give them accuracy, i.e.: "A Long-Term Plan to CREATE Terror."
I'm guessing you generally bring lumps of coal to Congressional offices, at least before the anthrax scare, when a sooty fat man in a furry red suit could still get into the hallowed halls with a bulging pack on his back, but if you do feel like visiting Nancy Pelosi's office this year, could you drop off a teeny-tiny, nicely-wrapped Articles of Impeachment?
As you cross the United States, could you sweep up the X-boxes and Playstations from under all the trees and replace them with books? That would help our democracy a lot, and, I know it sounds selfish, but it also ensures a future living for me and mine.
When you and your reindeer get over to the Middle East, please give the radical mullahs and the al Qaeda boys what they really want, lifetime subscriptions to Playboy Magazine. Give their women drivers' licenses. No, give them cars too, and visas to the West.
I suppose IED's don't affect you and the reindeer, but do be extra-careful in Iraq, and Santa, if you don't get me anything else on this list, please try to deliver this: bring those miserable people, whose only crime was being born on a crust of earth atop a sea of oil, some peace.
Cookies and milk are on the counter.
Thank you and Merry Christmas!
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