moderateamericain

So who incited the riots? According to the chairman of the Joint Cheifs of Staff, the Newsweek report had nothing to do with it. It seesm to me that attempts to pin the blame on news week is part of a concentrated effort by the right-wing to cow the so-called liberal media into not reporting any news that could damage the administration. It has nothing to do with how these stories (which hhave been circulating for a long time) damage the credibility of the U.S. aborad. That's already in the shitter. The target of this media crackdown is the domestic population. And, by knuckling under, Newsweek is complicit. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> we are all responsible for are own actions, newsweek didnt kill anyone. rioters killed people.

hersay at best.

you realize that gwynne dyer spent only 2 years teaching military history and war studies, prior to that he was in the navy...... hes now a freelance journalist. id hardly consider him an expert on modern warfare as he stopped teaching in 1973.

Wah wah. Very magnaminous of you. In return, I'll overlook your inability to support any of your points (say, what ever happened to your claim that the Democratic Party is becoming more socialist). I beg to differ. meaning what? That the moderate Americans out there are too busy to pay attention to the erosion of their society? Excellent! That wil make the fascists' and fanatics' job so much easier. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> most of what we talk about is hypothetical so therefore difficult to back up, on concrete evidence stuff such as the thread where we discussed how many people america had actually killed, i did back up what i was saying with data. how i interpet america is an Opinion just as you have yours. And the communist and socialist will have just as much opportunity to sieze this country as the facists. i have no illusions that america is going anywhere but down (economically) which is why ive applied with international corporations for new job oppurtonities. Also nice try to cover up what i said about your post, that post you made was done AFTER i posted the original message in this thread. And also nice job to duck out of your personal insult, when i get you to curse at me, it just shows me how right i am. i know apologizing to me is out of the question so i wont even ask.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> glad you can pick out the most severly demented portions of are society and potray them as the average american. congradulations you are the biggest intolerant i think ive ever seen. (seen as far as thoughts you type out on this website). You obviously have not spent much time in America as you would clearly see that what makes the newspapers is far cry from your average law abiding decent american. Your inability to distiguish between an extremist conservative and the rest of america is unbelievable. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> first of all i will once again be forced to overlook your personal insult, i hope the moderation on this board will do so as well, he obviously cannot control his/her emotions at the time of posting. secondly, every single one of your post for the last week, have been how, who, or what is in your opinion the problem with america. you have made it into your agenda to post every wacko thing that comes out of america. what is one to infer? that you spend ur time looking for excuses to shame the united states? and as far as the people who are denouncing relgious institutions in school, they are at work.

dont flatter yourself 2 much, your one of 4 people that post regularly

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> glad you can pick out the most severly demented portions of are society and potray them as the average american. congradulations you are the biggest intolerant i think ive ever seen. (seen as far as thoughts you type out on this website). You obviously have not spent much time in America as you would clearly see that what makes the newspapers is far cry from your average law abiding decent american. Your inability to distiguish between an extremist conservative and the rest of america is unbelievable.

yep because a bunch of fat southern boys are loading up explosives on kelvar vest and walking into bus-full of women and children and blowing themselves up....

I think she was just enraged that the entire community of scholars saw her and her "philosophical" system as an object of derision, so she decided to get even. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> under BD's interpetation you are either liberal extreme or conservative extreme. yes, if BD's responses were absolute truth then i would be in error in calling myself "moderate", but answer me this, if i prefer a republic with very limited governmental power, but i support abortion, which am i? you could argue i was liberal for supporting abortion, but yet i am extreme conservative for supporting a laissez faire style of government. therefore, i fall into neither category, thus proving Black dog wrong, therefore i must conclude that BD is not Absolute truth. /sarcasm excuse me i quoted the wrong quote. plz ignore poster. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> no in point of fact im not a schitzo, and i dont appreciate the personal attack, which could be construed as a violation of the terms of service. but being the fair man that i am, ill let it slide. To believe completely in extremist liberal ideals makes someone an extremist liberal; conversly to believe in extreme conservative values makes one an extreme conservative. Now if i analyze each spectrum of (left and right for lack of better word) and draw conclusions based on my own opinion, drawn from my own values, and not from a political affiliation values, that makes me MODERATE. So if i, for example, support abortion, but not a government controlled market, that makes me neither extreme liberal or extreme conservative. thus its safe to say im some where in the middle. therefore it is possible to be neither extreme liberal or conservative.

What's next? A draft? Press gangs? Seriously though, I'd wager that people in the U.S. tend to support the war, the troops and Bush in very abstract terms. Clearly, they're not willing to risk death or injury to fight for another country, which is essentially what Bush is asking (if one suspends disbelief for a moment and presumes all that talk of bringing democracy to the benighted brown-skinend people is true). In World War 2, it was an easy sell. The world was endangered by the menance of fascism, so it was not difficult to appeal to people's sense of duty to their country. But what duty to Americans have to Iraq and to a needless war? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> should be noted that my 19 year old brother just joined the army. So now i have a stake in seeing this done right and done soon. at this point with the stretch of personel i suspect they will rush him through a shortened basic training, he could see active duty within 3 months of his first day. I trully hope we can rap up the majority of the fighting soon.

Hardly. Look at the vote in the US last time around. The US voters were looking at many issues, not just the war ones when they narrowly elected GW Bush over Kerry last time around. Domestic issues were probably the biggest factor. In Britain right now, no one has any confidence in the other two parties.Just as in Canada. Many people would probably vote Conservative, even if out of spite against the Liberals, except hardly anyone trusts Harper to run Canada. The Conservatives, with the right leader, should be at about 80% popularity right now, but as it stands, even a scandal of epic proportions can't help make a 'shoe'in' run at the 'big prize'. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> actually i didnt post that 80 percent of britian supports the war. i posted that only 58 percent of britians give a rip (thats all that voted) i wouldnt bother cringing its not worth your time and effort.

I think she was just enraged that the entire community of scholars saw her and her "philosophical" system as an object of derision, so she decided to get even. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> under BD's interpetation you are either liberal extreme or conservative extreme. yes, if BD's responses were absolute truth then i would be in error in calling myself "moderate", but answer me this, if i prefer a republic with very limited governmental power, but i support abortion, which am i? you could argue i was liberal for supporting abortion, but yet i am extreme conservative for supporting a laissez faire style of government. therefore, i fall into neither category, thus proving Black dog wrong, therefore i must conclude that BD is not Absolute truth. /sarcasm excuse me i quoted the wrong quote. plz ignore poster.

Iran has been an enemy of the U.S.A since before their was an Al Qaeda. remember that whole "overthrowing the Shah" business in the '70s? Yeah, you went in to the one country in the Middle East that had no connection with Al Qaeda and was, in fact, headed by a regime on Al Qaeda's hit list (bin Laden considered secular leaders like Saddam to be apostates). The ensuing chaos not only drew more recruits to Al Qaeda, but put them in action against U.S. troops. Bravo. You and me should play Risk sometime. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> the real reason that the middle east is the site for constast struggle is because 1000 years ago christian crusaders took jerusuelum, and subsequently crusaded for the next 200 years. if we wanna get techinical about it

no, what it means is that only 58 percent of the countries voters give a rip. (provided a third candidate didnt recive a larger percantage)

No, not in BD's opinion. In reality. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> id forgotten that BD's opinions were absolute truth. my apology yes i understand that Rand preaches zero tolerance for the ideal of "rob the rich, to feed the undeserving"

No, i have no problem with a union in a true sense, i have a problem with the way they are utilized in the United States. These people are CRIMINALS in every sense of the word. Have you ever met a true pro-union worker? i guarentee you would not hire him. Im all for workers rights, im not for workers exploiting companies, and thats what unions do. (in the US) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> if what you say is valid (provided i can see some evidence), then the unions have only themselves to blame. A union is like communism, nice idea, but twisted to horrid purpose.

No, i have no problem with a union in a true sense, i have a problem with the way they are utilized in the United States. These people are CRIMINALS in every sense of the word. Have you ever met a true pro-union worker? i guarentee you would not hire him. Im all for workers rights, im not for workers exploiting companies, and thats what unions do. (in the US)

in your opinion you mean.

http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/textbook.htm

would you know anyone that would want to join the military during wartime?

yes a revolution may occur, but the revolution will not be what you want, it will be away from the unions, most americans are sick of their gangster strong arm tactics, if anything happens, the unions will be severly cut down in power. criminals all of them. Ive seen there work first hand. (UAW) If i owned my own company, i would shut the damn thing down before i saw it unionized. I trully love how other countries sit back and angerly denounce americans for you using the democratic process to elect are officials. then call us undemocratic when they dont like the results.

black dog: As for your other accusation I'd be intereste dto see hwat evidenc eyou have this suppossed slide by the Dems into socialism. What positions did Kerry take, for instance, that reeked so strongly of socialism? You've made this ridiculous assertion before with no evidence whatsoever. I'm interested to see if you can manage to pull some out now. ME: Glad you ask heres one example for you A SINGLE LABOR UNION HAS COMMITTED $65 MILLION to defeating President George W. Bush this November, reported the July 12 BusinessWeek Magazine. This biggest union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which by year’s end will have 1.8 million members, at its June convention in San Francisco agreed to spend $40 million for more than 2,000 organizers to work full-time against President Bush in 17 key battleground states. It also plans to supply 50,000 “volunteers” from its members just prior to and on election day. And SEIU will spend an additional $25 million on voter registration, “education” and getting out the vote. Why is SEIU so bent on defeating President Bush? Let us count the ways: SEIU is one of America’s two biggest government unions, the other being AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The nightmare for such unions is not a weak economy, as it would be for private sector workers. Government workers get their money not from a free marketplace, but from coerced taxes. And many SEIU workers not employed directly by government are hospital and nursing home staffers paid indirectly by government dollars for Medicare, Medicaid and welfare patients. For this reason the government unions are the party of American socialism. Public Enemy Number One for these socialist vanguards are Republicans who want to reduce the size and spending of government, and to contract out millions of existing government tasks to money-saving, non-unionized private companies. The wealth, power and future of these unions depend on replacing a Republican President with Democratic advocates of government expansion like the team of Kerry and Edwards. “Public sector workers want government to grow first, and the overall health of the economy isn’t as relevant to them,” as pollster Scott Rasmussen explained in the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, the blue collar union workers, the SEIU ostensibly represents, pay far more in taxes than they receive via government checks. Democrats created the laws that have allowed unions to impose themselves on unwilling workers, get away with using violence and threats of violence to enforce their power, and extract involuntary “dues” from worker paychecks. In order to keep buying this privileged power from government, Unions kick back many millions of dollars in extorted dues to Democrat lawmakers, governors and Presidents. The result is a money-laundering operation in which leftwing politicians appropriate money for themselves, using friendly labor unions as the middle-men intermediaries who expropriate it from workers. Nearly 40 percent of union workers today are registered Republicans, but a sizeable chunk of their wages is taken and used to elect Democrats. This union money is the mother’s milk of the Democratic Party. If these millions in union campaign contributions vanished tomorrow, most Democratic officeholders would be bankrupt overnight, and the Democratic Party would immediately shrink to permanent minority status. Click here to see what SEIU as just one union among many dozens acknowledges in Federal Election Commission reports in the current election cycle that it does to bankroll Democratic members of Congress. Direct contributions to Democratic candidates is merely the tip of the iceberg however. A much larger and indeterminate contribution takes the form of money funneled through party and other organizations, the supply of ground troops to man telephone banks, door-to-door campaigning, or get-out-the-vote efforts on election day that if paid for would be worth many millions of dollars. In Michigan, the UAW got the auto companies to make election day a holiday so that union workers could get paid by their companies for campaigning against Republicans. This amounts to an illegal corporate contribution to political campaigns, but no law enforcement official has seen fit to issue any subpoenas. The current president of the SEIU is Andrew Stern, a former New Leftist came out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an anti-Vietnam War activist. One of the eulogies given at a Democratic Socialists of America memorial after the death of DSA co-founder Michael Harrington gave tribute to “the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU….” Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy which was formed by SDS radicals Heather and Paul Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement. Paul Booth who was National Secretary of SDS is now the assistant to Gerald McEntee, a member of Al Gore’s kitchen cabinet in the 2000 campaign and the president of the other powerful government union, AFCSME. Stern and Booth became the first unionists affiliated with the AFL-CIO to go to the Peoples Republic of China under the auspices of the Chinese government controlled unions. The AFL-CIO has a position of no contacts with such unions. Heather is the guiding force of the radical organization ACORN and was a legislative aide to Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum before he retired. So successful has the Booths Academy been that its work is now carried out by Union Summer, a program entirely financed by the AFL-CIO to train radicalcollege students to become union organizers. Union Summer is run by the son of Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin nephew of Democratic Sentator Carl Levin, so incestuous is the Union-Democratic nexus. Andrew Stern’s rise to the presidency of SEIU was paved when as director of organizing under John Sweeney when he was president of SEIU. Stern advanced to the presidency when Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America became the President of the AFL-CIO. In 1996, Stern told his members that he expected “every leader at every level of this union – from the international president to the rank-and-file member – to devote five working days this year to political action.” (Reported by Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray report in their new book Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics (New York: Crown Forum, 2004). Stern’s order is tantamount to a labor levy worth between $500 and $1,000 that each SEIU member is expected to donate to the Democratic Party. In addition to SEIU’s commitment of $65 million to defeat President Bush, the AFL-CIO has already allocated $44 million for the same political purpose – which makes $109 million from just two labor organizations out of the many dozens that fund political activities. A quarter of all the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Boston will belong to the two largest Teacher Unions, one of which by itself, the National Education Association, has 2.7 million members and far more money than SEIU. The money doesn’t all go one way, however. From 1996 through 1999 the Clinton Administration gave more than $1 million in tax dollars to the SEIU as grants, largely from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Money being fungible, one could reasonably assume that some taxpayer dollars have filtered back to the partisan coffers of Democratic political candidates such as Al Gore in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004. No wonder the unions want to provide as little financial disclosure as possible – and are eager to remove President Bush for attempting to shine light on how they use members’ dues money. Such disclosure was supposed to be required as of 2004, but another Democrat-appointed Federal judge blocked implementation of the LM-2 Financial Disclosure Forms for unions until after this year’s elections, after which a new Democratic President Kerry elected with union money might be able to rescind all disclosure requirements for unions. SEIU began as a Chicago-based janitors’ union. It was Stern, using New Left tactics of the 1960s with Sweeney’s approval, who shut down parts of Los Angeles with a “Justice for Janitors” strike that blocked not just one company but city streets as well. These workers, at Stern’s direction, wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in the clenched fist that symbolizes Marxism. “We’re going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America,” Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his convention address last month. But Stern’s ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss Andy Stern. Stern’s current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether. SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call the “death of a thousand cuts.” Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine. The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted NO to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker’s neck – and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union. “He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks,” Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined “Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union” after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. “They politicize the union’s staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union’s business…. ‘It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,’ said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help.” (Stern sounds remarkably like King George III explaining why the colonists should have no right to vote in the American colonies.) “Some SEIU staff say straight up, ‘This isn’t a workers’ organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn’t be an organization,’” wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the leftist magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of another leftist magazine The Nation. In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members.. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as “Union Democracy.” SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin: “The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland’s Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. ‘Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,’ observes one labor official. “The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU’s boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation,” wrote Kotkin. “No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now ‘in complete accord’ with the AFL-CIO’s program. ‘The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,’ wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention. “That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists,” continued Kotkin. “particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. ‘All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,’ complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. ‘It’s like the 1930s all over again.’” Some SEIU activists boast that they are the “new CIO,” referring to the radical, class warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented AFL to create the AFL-CIO in 1955. Such leftwing ideology was on display last month in San Francisco as the SEIU convention moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members’ dues to Democrat Howard Dean’s quixotic, losing anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.) This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU’s allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows. But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers, who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: import poor immigrants, who with proper union brainwashing can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population. As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com last March 2, SEIU’s Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the leftwing Democratic Party auxiliary Americans Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros. As Kotkin quoted, you might think that this is the year 2004 – but in the New Labor movement, minds have regressed to the 1930s and are again hypnotized by and enamored with totalitarian statism, ideological hatred for American capitalism, and socialist utopian fantasies that history for the rest of us has utterly discredited. As happens with individual human beings, perhaps with the labor movement growing old and feeble, as it nears death senility has taken it into a second childhood of Marxist reveries and memories. The bad news is that this dying, senile movement is still able to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and use that money to elect leftwing Democrat politicians. By doing so in 2004, organized labor could shorten the liberties and life of the United States. The National Journal reported, e.g., that SEIU’s Stern played a big role in persuading the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent to pick as his running mate Senator John Edwards. A fourth reason the SEIU in particular, and organized labor in general, is desperate to defeat President Bush this November is its own survival. Half a century ago nearly half of private sector workers were union members. Today that proportion has plummeted to one American private sector worker in 12 – according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics (DLS), only 8.2 percent of private sector workers. (One reason for this decline that organized labor, of course, refuses to admit is that unionized companies, forced to pay wages imposed in violation of the law of supply and demand, became uncompetitive in the global marketplace and have been going out of business. This is why “union alley,” the political-economic disaster zone analogous to tornado alley from Illinois to Pennsylvania, is known as the Rust Belt.) This is why AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s battle cry has been that unions must either “Grow or Die!” (This, ironically, is the same dilemma that Lenin ascribed to capitalism, a need for constant growth that inevitably leads to imperialism, capitalism’s “final stage”…so by Lenin’s logic we apparently are now witnessing Organized Labor’s final, imperialistic stage, its desperate dying grab for absolute power.) Today more Americans are employed by government than work in manufacturing – actually making things. And today, according to DLS, 37.2 percent of public sector (i.e. government) employees are unionized. This is virtually the only sector of society where unions have been growing. And this is precisely the niche in which SEIU and AFSCME dwell, the two unions that in 2002 gave more soft-money political campaign contributions than any others. Both these unions have a vested interest in helping Democratic politicians who will block efforts to reduce government and to lower taxes. They urgently need, for their own selfish reasons, to elect politicians who will press to make government ever-bigger so that it can produce more and more union-dues-paying jobs for welfare workers, socialized medicine healthcare workers, Medicare nursing home workers and the like. To make such expansion possible, SEIU’s President Stern recently joined what some labor activists call "the gang of five” – he and his fellow Presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (with a history linked to organized crime); the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) (also with a history linked to organized crime); the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters – to create the “New Unity Partnership.” (HERE and UNITE also formally merged in July 2004 to form the new mega-union UNITE HERE with approximately 840,000 members.) Stern argued in his convention speech last month that the AFL-CIO’s “loose trade association of 65 disparate unions” is too weak to carry the labor movement successfully into the future. To revitalize Labor, he has proposed consolidation of these 65 into no more than 15, and perhaps as few as five, giant unions with enough money, power and political clout to intimidate companies, industries, politicians, even entire countries as unions like SEIU and its New Unity Partnership become the international union equivalent of multinational corporations. Stern’s ballyhooed vision for “New Labor” is really a century old, akin to the goal of the International Workers of the World (IWW) “Wobblies” to create “One Big Union” for all workers so powerful that it could impose socialist-anarchist government, confiscate all private companies, redistribute all private wealth, and end war by having the world’s workers refuse to fight. The IWW refused to avoid strikes during World War I, opposed the war, came to be widely perceived as unpatriotic and anti-American, and this led to the extinction of this early dinosaur version of the labor movement. These are the same old leftward reptilian footprints, right down to last month’s SEIU withdraw-the-troops resolution, that Stern today is following. Because of their strangehold on the Democratic Party, this is an ominous portent of politics to come. Now let me tell you a little about UAW, street thugs, every last one of them, back when i was a kid there was a strike going on, and my dad was in the truck tire business back then, well we made a drop off @ a ford plant, and the demonstrators were not too bad, i heard a couple choice comments, keep in mind all my dad was doing was selling them tires. We drive down the road, and a truck cuts us off, and out jump some big boys. ones got a lead pipe ones got a tire iron, my dad backs up and peels out. these guys were gonna beat down my father for selling tires to the company they were on strike against. Unions are the problem with america, 50 years ago they had a purpose now they are nothing more than organized crime.

So why no acountability? Evidently, accountability is reserved for presidents who get hummers in the Oval Office, not those who mis-lead the nation into a war that costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> no i agree that there has been no accountability, but look at your situation, we have a two party system, with the presidential party holding a major power block in congress, the democrats are fragmented and are in danger of basically becoming extinct. hate to see it because i fully support loyal opposition. but if you look at the republican party, it has moral authority (religious groups) and financial banking (big business) in order to effectivley get anything done, the democratic party needs to step back from the brink of socialism, which obviously NO american wants) {see the landslide election} and get a realistic party platform, also running kerry who couldnt make up his mind on the color of shit was probably not a good choice for candidate, in my opinion there were better qualified candidates. So look at your political situation, a well financed, morally right (in the mind of christian america (thats a broad statment) that has a platform and for the most part is unified and a not as well fiananced (even tho they spent more on the last election) broken up on different ideals. So is it right that we know that bush lied and cant do anything about it? No, its really not, but what we can do is vote in the next election, hopefully the democrats field a capable candidate or the republicans bring one with more integrity.

are own intelligence agency has told us there wasnt enough data to support wmd. we knew this a long time ago.

If you look at the individual statistics cited by Matthew White you will notice that his estimates are in each case based upon a very broad base of data reflecting the academic consensus, as well as including the opinions of both left-leaning and right-leaning scholars. Although it certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, the vast number, the fair selection, and reliability of the sources used at Matthew White’s website make me doubt that there is a better source available online. The numbers I have given are thus similar to and reflect the estimates of such sources as official statistics from the United States and communist nations, scholarly estimates from academic sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, and even the opinions of left-wing activists such as Noam Chomsky. I suspect your claims that the United States massacred ‘hundreds of thousands’ of innocent civilians is in fact based upon North Korean propaganda. Although American soldiers did commit several significant atrocities, by far the largest of which were the indiscriminate bombings of residential cities (sometimes support by Canadian fighter planes by the way), it’s false to say that deliberate democide by US forces exceeded 100,000. Both the government of South Korea and the United States agree that reports of a systematic policy to murder refugees are false. The largest single massacre committed by American troops was probably about 200 refugees who were murdered at No Gun Ri. Although there was probably also a massacre at Sinchon, the number of deaths was almost certainly no where near the 900 claimed by North Korean sources. That is the death toll of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, not the Cambodian Civil War. Most sources estimate about 600,000 deaths during that war and even Noam Chomsky agrees that no more than one million died. I do not attribute any of the deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship to the United States because no direct military or economic aid was given to them. Although it is true that for a brief period the United States encouraged China to assist the Khmer Rouge, the minuscule amount of aid that resulted from this was not influential and at any rate did not reach the Khmer Rouge until they had already been ousted from power. Aside from Pol Pot and his associates, China and North Vietnam undoubtedly bear the largest responsibility for the KR regime because both of them supplied vast quantities of economic and military aid. This is especially the case for North Vietnam which, in 1970 and 1971, was actually supporting the Khmer Rouge offensives with tens of thousands of conventional soldiers. Formerly, some scholars considered the United States partly to blame for the rise of the Khmer Rouge based on the claim that American bombing drove civilians in the KR’s arms. However, huge gaps have since emerged in this thesis, as even the author of it admits. The communist military units that overran Phnom Penh, for instance, were largely recruited before 1970. Moreover, since KR collectivization began piecemeal wherever they gained new territory, KR terror was already killing, by the early-1970’s, almost as many as people as US bombing. The 500,000 figure was originally reported by UNICEF and many scholars have noted that it was based off questionable methods of statistical analysis and yet had been cited by numerous other sources without properly verifying it. It’s most likely that the death toll from the Iraqi embargo was about 500,000, and Matthew White’s estimates suggest a number between 350,000 and 500,000. That being said, Iraq earned enough food aid and medical supplies from the oil-for-food program to care for a million people several times over; the embargo did not have to result in any deaths at all. In my opinion the United States is the nation second most to blame for those 500,000 deaths, after Iraq. Granted, however, even if we do use the controversial figure of one million, and attribute 50% of it to the United States, and then add 50% of the deaths caused by the wars in Indochina and Korea, that still does not come close to 8 million. Even these calculations, which to me are far too high, we arrive at only about 3.5 million. I have shown clearly in my posts exactly how I arrived at that number. However, no one here as come close to a decent documentation of the 8 million. Therefore, I propose we do away with the preposterous figure of 8 million altogether. In discussing the total number of US-induced deaths since the end of World War II, I propose we use figures of no more than 4 or 5 million at the most. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> tokoyo 4tw! eureka now your just being hardheaded. excellent analysis tokyo.