The Big Picture Report is taking an indefinite leave of absence in order for the editor (me) to devote more time to several other projects. A big Thank You to all who have been reading the BPR blog. I expect The Big Picture Report to be back, and will make sure you know it when that happens.
Thanks again,
Arlen
(PoliTalk Sunday, 10-11am PT, on KRXA540AM radio will continue. Info on that here.)
BPR Quote of the Day:
“What is thought to be the responsible public opinion is, at any given time, a reflection of the needs and interests of the corporate technostructure.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
BPR Quote of the Day:
On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela and world leader against imperialism, died. Washington imperialists and their media and think tank whores expressed gleeful sighs of relief as did the brainwashed US population. An “enemy of America” was gone.
Chavez was not an enemy of America. He was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, an enemy of Washington’s alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and deny sustenance. He was an enemy of Washington’s injustice, of Washington’s foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions.
Washington is not America. Washington is Satan’s home town.
Chavez was a friend of truth and justice, and this made him unpopular throughout the Western World where every political leader regards truth and justice as dire threats.
Chavez was a world leader. Unlike US politicians, Chavez was respected throughout the non-western world. He was awarded honorary doctorates from China, Russia, Brazil, and other countries, but not from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.
Chavez was a miracle. He was a miracle, because he did not sell out to the United States and the Venezuelan elites. Had he sold out, Chavez would have become very rich from oil revenues, like the Saudi Royal Family, and he would have been honored by the United States in the way that Washington honors all its puppets: with visits to the White House. He could have become a dictator for life as long as he served Washington.
Each of Washington’s puppets, from Asia to Europe and the Middle East, anxiously awaits the invitation that demonstrates Washington’s appreciation of his or her servitude to the global imperialist power that still occupies Japan and Germany 68 years after World War II and South Korea 60 years after the end of the Korean War and has placed troops and military bases in a large number of other “sovereign” countries.
It would have been politically easy for Chavez to sell out. All he had to do was to continue populist rhetoric, promote his allies in the army, throw more benefits to the underclass than its members had ever previously experienced, and divide the rest of the oil revenues with the corrupt Venezuelan elites.
But Chavez was a real person, like Rafael Correa, the three-term elected president of Ecuador, who stood up to the United States and granted political asylum to the persecuted Julian Assange, and Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia since the Spanish conquest. The majority of Venezuelans understood that Chavez was a real person. They elected him to four terms as president and would have continued electing him as long as he lived. What Washington hates most is a real person who cannot be bought.
The more the corrupt western politicians and media whores demonized Chavez, the more Venezuelans loved him. They understood completely that anyone damned by Washington was God’s gift to the world.
It is costly to stand up to Washington. All who are bold enough to do so are demonized. They risk assassination and being overthrown in a CIA-organized coup, as Chavez was in 2002. When CIA-instructed Venezuelan elites sprung their coup and kidnapped Chavez, the coup was overthrown by the Venezuelan people who took to the streets and by elements of the military before Chavez could be murdered by the CIA-controlled Venezuelan elites, who escaped with their own venal lives only because, unlike them, Chavez was humanitarian. The Venezuelan people rose in instantaneous and massive public defense of Chavez and put the lie to the Bush White House claim that Chavez was a dictator.
Showing its sordid corruption, the New York Times took the side of the undemocratic coup by a handful of elitists against the democratically elected Chavez, and declared that Chavez’s removal by a small group of rich elites and CIA operatives meant that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”
The lies and demonization continue with Chavez’s death. He will never be forgiven for standing up for justice. Neither will Correa and Morales, both of whom are no doubt on assassination lists.
CounterPunch, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and other commentators have collected examples of the venom-spewing obituaries that the western presstitutes have written for Chavez, essentially celebrations that death has silenced the bravest voice on earth. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/08/obituaries-for-hugo-chavez/ [1]
http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/in-death-as-in-life-chavez-target-of-media-scorn/ [2]
Perhaps the most absurd of all was Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson’s judgment that Chavez wasted Venezuela’s oil wealth on “social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs,” a poor use of money that could have been used to build sky scrappers such as “the world’s tallest building in Dubai and branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.”
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/06/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-skyscrapers/ [3]
Among the tens of millions of Washington’s victims in the world–the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, with Iran, Russia, China, and South America waiting in the wings for sanctions, destabilization, conquest or reconquest, Chavez’s September 20, 2006 speech at the UN General Assembly during the George W. Bush regime will stand forever as the greatest speech of the early 21st century.
Chavez beards the lion, or rather Satan, in his own den:
“Yesterday, the devil himself stood right here, at this podium, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.” (see The Big Picture Report, March 8)
“We should call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: ‘the Devil’s Recipe.’”
The UN General Assembly had never heard such words, not even in the days when the militarily powerful Soviet Union was present. Faces broke out in smiles of approval, but no one dared to clap. Too much US money for the home country was at stake. [A reader pointed out that although Chavez's speech was not interrupted with clapping, he received a healthy round of applause at the end.]
The US and UK delegations fled the scene, like vampires confronted with garlic and the Cross or werewolves confronted with silver bullets.
(Continued/ Read Entire Article Here)
BPR Quote of the Day:
“…The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature…the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”
James Madison
BPR Quote of the Day:
Senator Warren is referring to the bank officials at HSBC who helped launder hundreds of millions of dollars to Mexican drug cartels and terrorist groups.
By Andrea Ayres/ Policymic/ March 9, 2013
Daylight Savings Time (DST) begins this Sunday, March 10 at 2 a.m. That means that most of us will lose an hour of sleep as we spring forward an hour. Aside from making Monday particularly difficult, does it actually do any good?
Well, Washington, D.C. likes to think so. That’s why it extended DST by a month in the 2005Energy Policy Act. It turns out, though, that lighting only accounts for 12 percent of our energy consumption. That means that the total energy savings in energy consumption from DST ends up being around 0.03 percent. If that doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s because it isn’t.
Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, two economists at Berkeley, conducted a study about DST in Australia. What they found was that any possible energy savings that might occur at night is offset by the additional energy people must use in the morning darkness.
The U.S. first adopted DST in 1918 as a way to help individuals go to work and school during daylight hours and as a means to save electricity. It actually worked for energy savings at that time because Americans’ primary source of energy came from electricity. That is no longer thecase.
In addition to not actually providing us with any worthwhile energy savings, it also reaps havoc on our bodies.
We rely on circadian rhythm to help regulate our bodies systems; they help determine our sleep patterns. When we are forced out of that 24-hour cyclical rhythm our bodies tend to respond negatively.
To put it another way. Our body is made up of nearly 100 trillion cells. Each of these cells possess a little biological clock. Now, imagine each of those clocks being abruptly disrupted. That’s what DST does to us and it can take weeks for our bodies to recover.
That’s why in the weeks after DST doctors see an influx of heart attacks and many of us experience disruptions in our sleep patterns.
Until it is decided once and for all that DST is arbitrary and that it doesn’t actually save energy, we will be forced to listen to news broadcasters remind us about it every hour until 2:00 a.m. this Sunday, March 10.
By Arlen Grossman/ The Big Picture Report
“All resistance must recognize that the corporate d’etat is complete.” — Chris Hedges
Is Hedges correct? Have we as a nation and a world gone so far overboard into global corporate capitalism that it’s too late to recover?
In his 2010 book The Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges makes a strong case that the once influential “liberal class” has allowed corporations to gain massive influence in all aspects of our society: politics, education, finance, health care, media, etc. Liberalism was at its height during the New Deal, but we have since watched the dismantling of democracy as ordinary citizens have lost their rights and power to ever-expanding corporate control over all aspects of our lives. The liberal class has been bought off by corporate money and cushy jobs. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are examples of “liberal” presidents unable to stand up to the powerful forces of American and multi-national corporations. By allowing unfettered capitalism and globalism to grow so powerful, liberalism has lost power, and true progressives and radicals have been marginalized.
Hedges says that “corporate interests have seized all mechanisms of power, from government to mass propaganda.” Now we have permanent war, broken labor unions, an increasingly concentrated corporate media, a repressive security state, a bought-off Democratic Party, an ultra-conservative Republican Party, staggering income inequality, a decimated environment, and a disappearing middle class.
In his final chapter, Hedges says “all resistance must recognize that the corporate d’etat is complete. We must not waste our energy trying to reform or appeal to systems of power. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance…the economic devastation of global capitalism will soon be matched by ecological devastation.”
He goes on to say “We must direct our energies toward building sustainable, local communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.”
Hedges paints a very bleak picture of our future. He says the corporate coup d’etat we have undergone is beginning to fuel unrest and discontent but that revolt will likely come from the right, not the left. He claims the idea of wide-spread popular revolts and mass movements against the corporate state are just fantasies.
Is Hedges too pessimistic, too radical, too unrealistic? He makes a strong case for his point of view. If he is wrong, if there is still hope of getting this country back on track, then how will it happen and who will do it? How will we find a way to return control of this country to its citizens. President Obama is unable or unwilling to take on the powerful banks or the Military Industrial and Security complex. So scratch him off the list. The Democratic Party is mostly bought off by corporate interests, and the Occupy and other left-wing movements and organizations have weakened as corporate control has strengthened. How can we ever turn it around? Right now the answer eludes me.
Hugo Chavez’s famous 2006 U.N. speech when he called President Bush “the devil.”
