Tag: Propaganda

Alas. The US War in Afghanistan Will Not End on 9/11/21

I will keep my fingers crossed and hope that  president Biden follows through on his promise to withdraw all US ground forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.

But even if he does resist the pressure of DC warmongers now mounted against him, the senseless 20 year war in Afghanistan is bound to continue.

Investigative journalist, Norman Solomon

Journalist Norman Solomon’s article at SheerPost reminds us that we always have to read the fine print in any presidential statement.

There we will see that the air war will continue. US drones will not stop murdering anonymous Afghan civilians, including women and children.

The CIA and various special ops units will continue their clandestine operations.

The insanity of American foreign policy, which appears intent upon dominating the entire globe, has not changed. President Biden remains a neo-liberal, American imperialist.

The publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Washington Post — this generation’s equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth about the horrid, unwinnable war in Vietnam — has been ignored by the public and Congress, meaning that there is little public pressure to TRULY bring this war to an end.

Solomon’s piece is entitled, “The Fine Print on Biden’s Afghanistan Announcement.”

Here it is:

Contrary to what Joe Biden has said and corporate media has parroted, U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is set to continue well beyond September 11, 2021.

When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept

Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. [Photo by Reese Erlich]
at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.

There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when — according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday — all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.

What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”

Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.

“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”

The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.

No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.

Matt Taibbi on “The Two Faces of Joe Biden”

Matt Taibbi’s latest article on Joe Biden’s presidency — The Two Faces of Joe Biden — makes two important points with plenty of supporting evidence.

Matt Taibbi

First, all presidents and their administrations lie to us. It’s a fact of life and we all need to remember it.

It is certainly true that Donald Trump set a new bench mark for the volume of pathological lies spewed daily from the Oval Office. But his special gift for dishonesty was only unique in volume not in kind.

Second, now that political partisanship is baked into the DNA of American media outlets, pure propaganda (as opposed to actual investigative reporting) is the established norm in cable and network news.

No matter which stations or networks you watch, you are being lied to much of the time. That, too, is a fact of modern life.

Taibbi lays all of this out in black and white as he explains not only the two-facedness of Joe Biden’s policies, but the eagerness of so-called journalists at places like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to carry water for this Democratic administration.

Taibbi gives special attention to those lap-dog stenographers who are  enthusiastically describing Biden as America’s new FDR.

Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article.

To read the entire piece requires a subscription, but it’s only $5/month and well worth the money:

. . . With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences.

In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the upscale, cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,” “transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years. The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against “purity” in politics about eight minutes ago.

In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularly lambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine F.D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal after proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general election.

Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect F.D.R. after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing, PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be a radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil Republicans. Is that even remotely true?

Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran in the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!):

Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts…

Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here…

The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills. 

Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand the surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort to reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just expressions of unrequited love?

Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would green-light drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of single-payer.

Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to going to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a year” at the lobbying group PhRMA.

“Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐​playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game‐​playing.”

The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end up visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group, PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place.

Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the White House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned on paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most of the $.”

Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.

This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.”. . . 

Click here and subscribe to read the entire piece.

Deficit Hawk Hypocrisy Aims to Hurt the People

Once again, Republicans (and many Democrats) are  running around like Chicken Little warning about the economic sky collapsing now that Congress has passed the recent covid relief bill.

It is a tired, predictable, knee-jerk, conservative reaction to any government spending that aims to help the average American.

Remember that none of these folks expressed similar concerns about the folly of “deficit spending” when president Trump’s retrograde tax plan added between $1 to $2 trillion to the national debt.

None of these people complained about the CARES Act last March when a vast portion of that relief money, intended for the unemployed and small business owners, ended up lining the pockets of the richest Americans.

The litany of deficit-hawk hypocrisy could go on and on…

[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].

At the DCReport, Bruce Bartlett has a good article exposing not only the

Bruce Bartlett

hypocrisy of this deficit fear mongering but also how very wrong the warnings have always been.

The article is titled “Inflation Hawks: Never Right, But Never in Doubt.” You can read an excerpt below or click on the title to find the entire piece:

Predictably, conservatives are once again warning about inflation. This happens every time a Democrat takes office—even if he merely continues the identical policies of his Republican predecessor.

Unfortunately, these concerns, which always receive wide media attention, are costly both politically and economically.

Bill Clinton was forced to adopt a deficit reduction plan in 1993 that led to the defeat of many Democrats in 1994 and the installation of Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.

Barack Obama was forced to scale back his stimulus plan in 2009 and was browbeaten into deficit reduction in 2011. That kept the economy running in slow gear throughout Obama’s presidency paving the way for Donald Trump.

Now that Joe Biden has gotten his stimulus, the inflation-mongers are just getting started again. . . 

. . . It’s been an article of faith among conservatives since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that inflation is right around the corner.

This conviction follows from a core conservative belief that inflation invariably results from increases in the money supply. As Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist put it a half-century ago in an oft-quoted line: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

Thus, when the Federal Reserve vastly expanded the money supply in late 2008, conservatives anticipated a sharp rise in inflation. It didn’t happen. . . 

. . . Yet, year after year, there was no inflation. In 2009 we saw prices fall slightly, the opposite of these predictions and warnings. The Federal Reserve couldn’t even hit its own target of 2% inflation. The average inflation rate for 2009 through 2020 was less than 1.3% annually.

 

That did nothing to dislodge right-wing orthodoxy, however. Conservatives continue to say that inflation was right around the corner. No amount of empirical data could shake their deeply held belief. . . 

 

Caitlin Johnstone on American Imperialism and Media Propaganda

Regular readers of this blog know that the Australian journalist Caitlin

Caitlin Johnstone

Johnstone is one of my favorite bloggers.

Even though I cannot share in her atheistic, philosophical humanism, I deeply appreciate her analytical insights into the manipulative corruption at the heart of the American establishment.

Her most recent post is entitled, “Consent That’s Manufactured by Propaganda is Not Informed Consent.” She explains how the Biden administration’s hypocritical foreign policy is, in fact, the long-standing, American, bi-partisan status quo.

I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

A new Twitter post by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows:

“We will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are

US Secretary of State, Tony Blinken

at stake, but we will do so only when the objectives are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws, and with the American people’s informed consent – together with diplomacy.”

Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.

Firstly, US military force is never used to protect “American lives” in modern times, unless you count the lives of US troops and mercenaries in foreign lands they have no business occupying in the first place. The US military is never used to defend American lives against an invading enemy force; that simply does not happen in our current world order. It is only ever used to protect the agenda of unipolar planetary domination, which would be the “vital interests” which Blinken obliquely refers to above.

Secondly, Blinken’s claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without “the American people’s informed consent” has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden’s airstrikes on Syria last month. The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed. A nation the US invaded (Syria) was bombed because troops are being attacked in a second nation the US invaded (Iraq) on the completely unproven claim that a third country against whom the US is currently waging economic warfare (Iran) supported those attacks. At no time were the people asked for their consent to this, and at no time was any attempt made to ensure that they were informed of the situation before it happened.

 

Thirdly, US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people’s informed consent. Literally never. Consent is always manufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception. The bigger the military operation, the more egregious the deceit used to manufacture consent for it. Even in relatively “peaceful” times when the US is merely raining dozens of bombs and missiles per day on foreign soil, Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of distorted and outright false narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction.

Consent that has been artificially manufactured by propaganda is not informed consent, any more than sex with someone who’s been dosed with rohypnol is consensual sex. US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation. Informed consent plays no role whatsoever in the use of US military force, nor indeed in any other major aspect of the behavior of the US or its allies.

Every aspect of the US-centralized power alliance is propped up by a relentless deluge of mass-scale psyops. Imperialism, capitalism, electoral politics; consent for all its key pillars is constantly being manufactured by the plutocratic news media, by television, by movies. All of the most influential generators of modern mainstream thought and culture are heavily influenced by a plutocratic class which has a vested interest in keeping power out of the hands of the people.

Why is Facebook Censoring My Wife’s Comments About Israel?

Recently, one of Terry’s (my wife) Facebook posts was flagged and deleted for violating Facebook’s content policies.

Her censored comment advocated for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She noted that it was the Israeli government, not the occupied Palestinians, who were regularly  committing acts of terrorism.

That particular political observation is no longer permitted by the Facebook censorship policies — which we all know are expanding rapidly.

It’s more evidence of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country which would love to censor ALL criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people living under its control.

Fortunately, the Jewish-led, Palestinian rights organization called Jewish Voice for Peace has begun a campaign on Facebook aimed at combating the Israel Lobby’s dangerous, anti-first amendment influence online.

They call it, “Facebook We Have to Talk: On Distinguishing Anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism in Public Spaces.” Below is an excerpt:

In January 2021, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced a global campaign “Facebook, we need to talk” about the social media giant’s inquiry into whether criticism of the movement Zionism “falls within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards.”

In its current form, the controversy centers around forcing universities, social media platforms, and other public spaces to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard which defines current anti-Semitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel, overall a definition that would essentially shut down any criticism of the Zionist state.

According to Lara Friedman, the goal of Zionist groups who are pushing for this action “isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel.”

In response, hundreds of activists, intellectuals and artists from around the world have launched a petition to ensure that Facebook does not include “Zionist” as a protected category in its hate speech policy—“that is, to treat ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for “Jew or “Jewish.” In its first 24 hours, the open letter gathered over 14,500 signatures, including such figures as Hanan Ashrawi, Norita Cortiñas, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gabriel.

“Cooperating with the Israeli government’s request,” the petition notes, “would undermine efforts to dismantle antisemitism, deprive Palestinians of a crucial venue for expressing their political viewpoints to the world, and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for its violations of Palestinian rights.”

Biden Continues US Imperialism in the Middle East

A few days ago I wrote here about the hypocrisy of US (and Israeli) military exploits in the Middle East. It was titled “A Tale of Two Missile Attacks.”

Today we learned that president Biden approved several new attacks in Syria. The ABC news headline reads, “US carries out airstrike against Iranian-backed militia in Syria.”

As I was preparing another post on this unfolding situation, I discovered Caitlin Johnstone’s article covering the same ground, in fine form. Her piece is titled “US Bombs Syria and Ridiculously Claims Self Defense.”

I remain ashamed to be an American today.

I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases. . . 

So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force (emphasis mine). And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

 

It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.

Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”

This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty. . . 

. . . This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.

An Apostle’s Advice to Churches Divided by Trumpism, QAnon, Stolen Elections, and Other Myths

John Fea recently posted his thoughts about an opinion piece written by

Francis Wilkinson

Francis Wilkinson at Chicago Business.com. Wilkinson’s editorial is entitled “America’s Churches Are Now Polarized Too.”

His article is interesting, and I will return to it in a future post. As I read this piece, I found myself reflecting on my recent readings in the New Testament letters of 1 and 2 Timothy.

Timothy was a close assistant to the apostle Paul. 2 Timothy was Paul’s final letter to his young co-worker, written shortly before Paul’s brutal execution in Rome.

Both letters overflow with advice on what it takes to be a faithful pastor in an agitated Christian community threatened by internal divisions.

In other words, Paul is coaching Timothy in how to deal with the 21st century American church. For the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In this post I will print what I judge to be the most relevant sections of Paul’s advice to Timothy. It’s also very good advice for anyone calling him/herself a follower of Jesus Christ today.

I will deal more specifically with the relevance of Paul’s advice to the contemporary evangelical church in an upcoming post. For now, I will only draw your attention to Paul’s insistence on the importance of combating myths that challenge the truth of the Gospel.

One of the major problems confronting conservative churches today is the open circulation of destructive myths – political myths about Trump, elections, political parties, government agencies, and secular savior figures.

God’s people are called to remain fearlessly faithful to Truth. Truth is always the enemy of myths, whatever form they take.

1 Timothy 4:1ff

The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. . .

 If you point these things out to the brothers and sisters, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished on the truths of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed. Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. 

1 Timothy 6:3ff

If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, they are conceited and understand nothing. They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between people of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth. . .

2 Timothy 2:16ff

Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. Their teaching will spread like gangrene. . .

 Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.

 2 Timothy 4:3f

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

May we all ponder, pray, and act accordingly.

Amen.

Greg Palast on the History of Texas Electric Power

Greg Palast is an investigative reporter who has recently written about the

Greg Palast, investigative journalist

Texas power debacle (among other things). His piece is entitled “Texas Gets Lay’d: How the Bush Family Turned Off the Lights.”

Palast covers Texas’ history of deregulation and ability it gives the power companies freely to engage in extreme price gouging.

Not only was this crisis anticipated, not only did the power companies refuse to prepare, now those same companies are charging exorbitant prices for power they have failed to deliver.

You can’t make this stuff up. It’s called crony capitalism — and how much capitalism is not tied to cronyism in one way or another?

Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire article by clicking on the title above:

Maybe because Texas gave us that wet-lipped huckster Ted Cruz, you think the state deserves to freeze in the dark.

I get that, but it’s not their fault, a least not the victims burning family heirlooms to stave off frostbite.

“What happened was entirely predictable,” power distribution expert attorney Beth Emory said of the blackouts. She told me this twenty years ago, after the first blackouts in Texas and California, following the cruel experiment called “deregulation” of the power industry.

Until 1992, the USA had just about the lowest electricity prices in the world and the most reliable system.

For a century, power companies had been limited by law to recovering their provable costs plus a “reasonable,” i.e. small, profit. But in 1992, George H. W. Bush, in the last gasps of his failed presidency, began to deregulate the industry.

“Deregulate” is a misnomer. “De-criminalize” describes it best. With the “free market” supposedly setting the price of power, Texas-based Enron was freed to use such techniques as “Ricochet,” “Get Shorty,” and “Death Star” to blow prices through the roof when weather shut down power plants. (This week was not the first game of Texas Gouge’m.)

Enron was not the only Lone Star power pirate. Houston Power & Light was “ramping” plants up and down at odd hours which whistleblowers said was deliberate.

Bush’s son “Shrub,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush, signed a law in 1999 forcing the state’s hapless customers to accept any price the “free” market dictated. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay showed his appreciation by becoming Baby Bush’s number one donor for Dubya’s presidential ambitions.

This week, wholesale electric prices in Texas, normally $50 per megawatt-hour, busted over $9,000/MWHR. Again. It happens with every cold snap and heat wave. One shop owner, Akilah Scott-Amos, showed the Daily Beast her electric bills which blew up from $34 per month to $450 for a single day.

 

How Long Will the Trump Delusion Virus Remain Contagious in the Church?

John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah College. He also maintains one of the best blogs I know of. He writes prolifically at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. 

I am convinced that he either keeps a closet full of hyper-active minions near his office to work on his blog, or he is a much more industrious man than I am.

He recently posted an article entitled, “Evangelical Trumpers are coming to a church near you” describing a pro-Trump “revival meeting” in Hamilton, Montana.

Yes, revival meeting is the most accurate descriptor here. I grew up in churches where we had them regularly. I know what they look and sound like.

I also happen to pass through the town of Hamilton often when I am looking for a new falcon to trap. I listen to what passes for Christian radio in that community.

Upsetting is too weak a word to describe what I hear. Thus, as sad as it is, this story is not the least bit surprising to me.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t disturbing and lamentable.

[I am very interested in hearing from you my readers. Are you familiar with similar tent revival type pro-Trump, stop-the-steal evangelistic events like this in the churches of your area? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a note, please! Thanks.]

Here is Fea’s post in full:

Last week we called your attention to an event at Calvary Chapel-Chino Hills featuring pastor Jack Hibbs and Trump wonder boy Charlie Kirk. Today, I want you to see a video from The River, a Southern Baptist church in Hamilton, Montana.

The video captures a special Saturday night service devoted to “education,” “learning,” and “unity.” The topic is the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The speaker is Dr. Kevin Horton, the director of the Institute for Biblical Authority, “a Biblically based nonprofit organization dedicated to upholding and strengthening the principle that the Bible is the life-changing authority for human lives.” The Institute promotes creationism and recently hosted a conference featuring David Barton. The website includes an “American History Quiz” that repeats the widely debunked, and frankly absurd, claim that 29 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were “pastors.”

Watch the video of Horton’s appearance at The River Church on the Facebook page of Montana state senator Theresa Manzella or on the church Facebook page.

The video begins with the congregation milling around the sanctuary while a song called “Potter’s Hand” by Hillsong plays over the speakers. Here are the lyrics to that song:

Beautiful Lord, wonderful Savior
I know for sure all of my days are held in Your hand
And crafted into Your perfect plan

You gently called me into Your presence
Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit
Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life
Through Your eyes

And I’m captured by Your Holy calling
Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself
Lead me Lord, I pray

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand
Call me, You guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

You gently call me into Your presence
Guiding me by Your Holy Spirit
Teach me dear Lord, to live all of my life
Through Your eyes

I’m captured by Your Holy calling
Set me apart, I know You’re drawing me to Yourself
Lead me Lord, I pray

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to my Potter’s hand
Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

Take me and mold me, use me, fill me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand
Call me, guide me, lead me, walk beside me
I give my life to the Potter’s hand

The display screen at the front of the sanctuary says “Inciting the Riot?”

Horton takes the stage at about the 5:45 mark after pastor Allen James offers a “prayer for the United States of America” in which he asks the Lord to make us “truly be one nation under God again.” (Italics mine). Horton begins by telling the audience how the Lord prompted him to go to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 to protest the election results. He laments the fact that social media companies removed Trump from its platforms, closed Parler, and even suspended his own accounts for merely “witnessing to the truth” about what happened in Washington D.C. After taking a few required shots at Congress for impeaching Trump, Horton describes what he saw at the U.S. Capitol.

The central argument of Horton’s presentation is that Trump did not incite the riot on the U.S. Capitol. Horton bases his argument on pictures and videos he took at the insurrection. He tells this evangelical congregation that the rioters were not “true Trumpers” and then attempts to distinguish between the “peaceful” evangelical Trumpers and the evil insurrectionists. (Along the way he takes a shot mask-wearing).

At about the 47:00 mark Horton tells the audience that he is boycotting Amazon, Walmart, and Google until they “repent” for their support of Senators who refuse to investigate who was really behind the insurrection. Then he complains about how CNN is trying to “close down” Newsmax and One America News. Horton speaks in a friendly, easy-going style as he defends these conspiracy theories before an evangelical congregation led by a pastor who provided him with the platform to do this.

At the 52:00 mark he describes the election fraud protests as a “fun time” until the “cloud of evil” emerged in the form of the rioters. (If his pictures are any indication, Horton appears to have spent most of the riot only feet away from the doors of the U.S. Capitol).

Horton ends by telling his pro-Trump evangelical audience that we are now “all targets” and are no longer “safe” as Americans. (The assumption is that the insurrections were a demonic force working against the God-honoring supporters of Donald Trump. He stops just short of saying that the Democrats were somehow behind the insurrection. Or at least that is how I understood him). The only way to find peace and safety, he says, is by accepting Jesus Christ as savior. He then moves into a brief Gospel presentation.

As a fellow evangelical, I am disgusted by the way this man stoked fear, lied about voter fraud, and used his presence at the Capitol insurrection as a platform for preaching the Gospel. Apparently the audience at The River Church disagrees. They gave him a standing ovation. Pastor Allen James endorsed everything Horton said, going so far to tell his congregation that the election was rigged. James then calls his congregation to separate the Gospel from politics. This is admirable. But everything about this event sent the exact opposite message.

“Unity” is Not a Magic Word

Many politicians, including president Biden, are calling for our nation to unify. Biden says that he won’t be the president of red states or blue states — Trump frequently emphasized that he was president primarily for red states — but for the United States.

The question, however, is how will this happen?

During Mitch McConnell’s reign as senate majority leader, the Republican party has shown about as much interest in unity as a harlot has in chastity.

Historically, Republicans establish unity by ignoring Democratic complaints and proceeding full steam ahead. (The last two Supreme Court appointments were text book examples of this tactic.)

Democrats, on the other hand, are congenitally spineless, establishing unity by rolling over and giving Republicans most of what they want. (In a great many ways, the Obama administration was one long give away to Republican demands.)

Politics is adversarial by definition.

How do rivals ever find unity, especially when one side or the other is not particularly interested in burying the hatchet (except in an opponent’s back)?

Watch and behold the wonders of bipartisanship as Republican commentators glory in heart-warming calls for “unity.”

The video is titled “How Conservative Media is Covering Biden.” Watch it and weep.