I've personally never bought into that sci-fi robo-soldier stretch either. I've known too many people that have served. I didn't for moral reasons, although I would have if called upon and I willingly registered for the draft when I turned 18.

I wasn't suggesting that young impressionable recruits were marching into a mind melding machine that would erase any moral questions about turning on their own people. Someone mentioned the oath as as a sworn promise to protect the American people and I was simply pointing out the fallacy of that statement.

When you read the history of clashes between US troops and US citizens you learn that typically a number of soldiers would refuse to attack. Even so, there has not been a case yet where the entire dispatch stands down nor a case where the troops failed to defeat the citizen movement.

I think it's naive to think that a "refusal to cooperate" has anything to do with the reason for the agreement between the U.S. and Russia. It's painfully obvious how contrived the OP video is as it speculates wildly on that agreement between the Russian Emergency Ministry and FEMA.

You have to understand that FEMA is tasked with preparing for worst case scenarios. We've already seen what happens in a city when the lights go out. We like to think we are above it but looting and vandalism has proven to be a constant. Something we know is going to happen when law and order is disrupted. You can't tell me troops won't act on orders to protect property and persons from angry or wreckless street mobs. Having survived the collapse of an empire the experts and hands of the Russian Emergency Ministry has a lot of experience in this area.

The video asserts that Russia is effectively our enemy. That's not true. They're more like a loyal opposition on a global scale. Then the video says Russians could be providing security at the next Boston Marathon. Highly unlikely. The stated purpose of the agreement is to share and develop expertise on emergency response procedures not to exchange soldiers. But I guess that's how the narration was able to segue onto the point about the Boston Marathon bombers being Chechnyans and that Chechnya has close ties with the Russians... Yeah, they hate each other.

So the video is just stupid. Another example of fear production. Not to say it can't happen but 'cmon... Russian troops in charge of security at the next Boston Marathon?

yeah, right.

There ya go!

:)

1. Not one Republican voted for the ACA because not one Republican would have been reelected if he/she did. From the conservative perspective, the ACA was more about partisan politics than fixing an ineffective health care system.

2. The ACA is not a socialized system. Despite how many times Fox News repeats the mantra of fear there is STILL do no socialism in the ACA. Aside from the public option, the ACA is only a series of regulations applied to providers who remain structurally untouched. There is no nationalization of providers and so far as we know there are no plans for it either.

3. By contrast, the British do have a socialized health care system, that most of them love. I spent a fair amount of time there and I can say their system has it's downsides (every system does) but overall, it's a good system and there is no motion among the people to get rid of it.

4. By contrast, the American system (if you can even call it that) is a hodge-podge of profit-driven businesses that rank among the most ineffective and expensive in the developed world. Treatment is suggested by doctors according to patient needs but approved or denied by accountants according to profit potential. It's twisted to say the least. For a country that led the world in technology, it's an embarrassment. Our only claim to superiority in health care is cancer treatment an that's mostly because it's the most profitable area of medicine due to the incredible number of cancer patients produced by a complete lack of proactive treatment.

Sorry, back you your question...

1. *IF* the public option pushes out all the other insurance companies, it will not be from government mandate; it will instead be from a lack of competition from the private sector. So shame on them for being so lame.

2. Suggesting that such a thing could happen doesn't say much for your faith in the American spirit of enterprise. Certainly, the public option will raise the bar and make the current practices of the insurance companies unfit to compete, but that will help clear the way for leaner more effective businesses to step up to the plate.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. By launching a public option it will be necessary for the insurance companies to reinvent themselves or at least work harder and leaner to stay competitive. Sometimes industries get fat and lazy and they need a kick in the ass. I feel this is one of those times. The public option is basically saying look, I'm a non-profit option that puts patients before dollars. What are you going to do about it? The ACA does not include any rules that say insurance companies can't come back with something better. It will still be an open market.

Honestly, I can't see anything wrong with that.

Since you brought up Churchill I want to share another speech he made while advocating a land tax. Yes, that's right... land tax. I've posted some excerpts to emphasize the points I want to make... The entire speech can be read at http://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/landandincometaxes.html


Speech by Winston Churchill
Edinburgh, July 17, 1909

A year ago I was fighting an election in Dundee. In the course of that election I attempted to draw a fundamental distinction between the principles of Liberalism and of Socialism, and I said "Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly." And it is from that fundamental distinction that I come directly to the land proposals of the present Budget.

Here Winston actually makes a distinction between socialists toward which he had little tolerance and liberalism toward which he was willing to compromise. As a conservative, Churchill didn't like taxes at all but he understood the need for them and he found a worthy compromise in liberal thinking. This is what made him a "reasonable conservative" as opposed to the uncompromising conservatives that dominate the right-wing in America today. BTW, if you read the entire speech you will see that his reference to monopoly is in the ownership of land. I own 4.5 acres in CA... no one else owns that specific 4.5 acres, only I do so I have a monopoly on that land.

Anyway, he goes on to say this...

All over Europe we see systems of land tenure which economically, socially, and politically are far superior to ours; but the benefits that those countries derive from their improved land systems are largely swept away, or at any rate neutralised, by grinding tariffs on the necessaries of life and the materials of manufacture.

Here, he is referring to the benefits of land tax being "neutralized" by the detriments of taxing people for the "necessaries of life" which in America today would include tax on supplies and income. Both of which I personally oppose. Churchill also makes a distinction between earned income and unearned income, which it seems American conservatives refuse to acknowledge...


You can follow the same general principle of distinguishing between earned and unearned increment through the Government's treatment of the income-tax. There is all the difference in the world between the income which a man makes from month to month or from year to year by his continued exertion, which may stop at any moment, and will certainly stop, if he is incapacitated, and the income which is derived from the profits of accumulated capital, which is a continuing income irrespective of the exertion of its owner. Nobody wants to penalise or to stigmatise income derived from dividends, rent, or interest; for accumulated capital, apart from monopoly, represents the exercise of thrift and prudence, qualities which are only less valuable to the community than actual service and labour. But the great difference between the two classes of income remains. We are all sensible of it, and we think that that great difference should be recognised when the necessary burdens of the State have to be divided and shared between all classes.

I have to agree with him... I don't have a problem with investment income either and yes, there *is* - *some* degree of thrift and prudence to be recognized, but that doesn't preclude me (or Churchill) from also recognizing the huge difference in actual exertion, especially when looking for the least punitive way to fund a State.

Finally, he lays out the bottom line...

I do not think the issue before the country was ever more simple than it is now. The money must be found; there is no dispute about that. Both parties are responsible for the expenditure and the obligations which render new revenue necessary; and, as we know, we have difficulty in resisting demands which are made upon us by the Conservative Party for expenditure upon armaments far beyond the limits which are necessary to maintain adequately the defences of the country, and which would only be the accompaniment of a sensational and aggressive policy in foreign and in Colonial affairs. We declare that the proposals we have put forward are conceived with a desire to be fair to all and harsh to none. We assert they are conceived with a desire to secure good laws regulating the conditions by which wealth may be obtained and a just distribution of the burdens of the State. We know that the proposals which we have made will yield all the money that we need for national defence, and that they will yield an expanding revenue in future years for those great schemes of social organisation, of national insurance, of agricultural development, and of the treatment of the problems of poverty and unemployment, which are absolutely necessary if Great Britain is to hold her own in the front rank of the nations. The issue which you have to decide is whether these funds shall be raised by the taxation of a protective tariff upon articles of common use and upon the necessaries of life, including bread and meat, or whether it shall be raised, as we propose, by the taxation of luxuries, of superfluities, and monopolies.

...The taxation of luxuries, superfluities and monopolies... To this the American conservative still refuses to concede. The most common excuse is that such a tax will make wealth punitive and will degrade the incentive to work toward what we seem to regard as a right to luxury and superfluities. I don't think it was Churchill's intent to make wealth punitive and it certainly isn't mine either. But with 80% of the wealth concentrated in the top 5%, it is without a doubt THE place to find the money that we desperately need, much like the situation Churchill himself was explaining when he said his proposed land tax would "yield all the money that we need..." and I'm sorry but a tax on wealth, no matter how large the sum, is not as damaging to a person's welfare as a tax on income, no matter how small.

And get this... the rest of his sentence... "and that they will yield an expanding revenue in future years for those great schemes of social organisation, of national insurance, of agricultural development, and of the treatment of the problems of poverty and unemployment, which are absolutely necessary if Great Britain is to hold her own in the front rank of the nations." ...Sound a little progressive there? I GUARANTEE you that if Fox News covered this speech today they would be raging about what a socialist Churchill is for suggesting a tax on wealth to cover benefits for all in the form of... date I say? Social programs.

Well, you don't want to listen to me, don't want to listen to Obama... How about you frickin listen to Churchill then? The message is the same. TAX WEALTH!

Churchill's view on tax as described in his 1909 speech remained consistent during his entire career and it's been the template for my own view on taxes for at least 15 years. I actually think we should drop income tax entirely. If we tax wealth we really don't need it. The only reason why we still have it is because the greed at the top 1% is uncompromising and the gullibility of the conservative is endless. So instead we fret over the variations of income tax like the idiots we are.

It's Britain, not Brittain. ;)

Winston Churchill is my favorite conservative of all time and I'm not being funny, I'm totally serious. I agree with just about everything he ever said. But here's the thing... He was talking about socialists in post-war Britain, not liberals in 21st century America. If you think they are the same thing you are sorely mistaken. The socialists Churchill was referring to actually were socialists at a time when the socialist movement was at it's peak.

There *IS* a socialist party in America today but it's very small and obscure compared to what it used to be. Most American liberals today are progressives, not socialists. If you think they are the same thing, you are again sorely mistaken. In fact the progressive movement was actually started by Republicans under Theodore Roosevelt to defeat the socialists, which during that time were gaining serious power in Washington. The reason why socialists all over the world were gaining so much power at that time was that workers were being grossly mistreated and exploited by capitalists of the Industrial Revolution. BTW, a capitalist is one who makes money simply by owning capital (a means of production) such as a factory. Socialism promised the workers community ownership of the factories. This way profit is shared more fairly between those who actually did the work. The progressives basically said look, how about we let the capitalist maintain ownership but we force them to be more fair with your compensation? As the progressives secured things like the 40 hour work week and minimum wage, the drive to take over ownership of the factories died down, socialism lost it's wind, at least in this country and private property was saved.

So... while socialism takes away private ownership, progressivism protects it and is actually itself, a form of regulated capitalism. Of course there will always be a desire among extreme capitalists to take as much as possible and to that end fight regulation, tax and any other cost factor that diverts money from their pockets and they will use the examples of failed socialists systems to describe the desires of socialists and progressives alike... or anyone for that matter who dare suggest any kind of balance or compromise and it is indeed the believers of such propaganda who learn nothing and are mentally petrified.

Why would civil liberties be needed to defend someone who has been dead for over a thousand years?

Not at all. If that was the case then all those examples I listed of US troops opening fire on American people on American soil would have been categorized as treason too and that wasn't the case.

BTW, I'm not suggesting that it's OK for U.S. soldiers to fire on Americans. On a moral level I find the idea abhorrent, but what I AM saying is that it's been done before and that technically, there are no rules against it.

Blackwater has been employing Russian veterans for years and most Americans didn't even realize it. So much for your theory.

The military oath is a promise to protect the Constitution not the American people. In fact it actually says...

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;

It also says.... "I will obey the orders of the President of the United States".... "So help me God."

Technically, there is NOTHING in the military oaths for enlistment nor office that says anything about defending the American people or refusing to harm them. I understand how hard this is for military folks to swallow. Most of them were very young and impressionable when they took that oath and couldn't imagine the defense of the Constitution meaning anything other than a defense of the American way of life and it's people... But it is. An oath to the Constitution and the President is an oath to the government not necessarily the people.

So it's worth asking who controls the government.

Prior to the progressive movement government intervention in conflicts between workers and the corporations that employed them routinley used the military to protect the interests of the corporations. For example... Andrew Jackson became a strikebreaker in 1834 when he sent troops to the construction sites of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Grover Cleveland used soldiers to break the Pullman strike of 1894. In 1914 The Colorado National Guard came to the aid of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and opened fire on American coal miners and their families in an event now remembered as the Ludlow Massacre. I could go on but you get the point.



Yes, it does... Not unprecedented either as I have already explained.

...and BTW, it's NOT unheard of in this country. YOU never heard of it because your interest in politics is superficial, but the U.S. Army HAS been used against American people... on American soil... several times. Schools don't teach that because their ciriculum has always been institutional and as such, very selective. In 12 years of grade school the only requirement is a single semester of U.S. history. That's because the vast majority of U.S. history is stuff the institutions don't really want us to know about. It's a basic reason why Americans in general have such a poor understanding of their own history which promotes that state of ignorant chauvanism that bewilders the rest of the world.

I won't go down that path right now... instead I'll just mention one well documented case, the Bonus Army. Google that one.

Basically, the so-called Bonus Army was an assembly of WW1 veterans who assembled peacefully in Washington DC in 1932 to protest the Congressional defeat of an act to make good on an earlier promise to compensate the veterans for their service.

Of course it was a Republican president (big surprise) - Herbert Hoover, who atually ordered the Army to attack the American war vets. Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were among the commanders of the attack. They used infantry and calvary and Renault FT tanks and killed 4 people and injured 1,017.

http://pierrelegrand.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/t1larg_bonus_army_gi.jpg

http://www.newseum.org/news/2007/07/pennsylvania-avenue-protests-slideshow/3051.jpg http://ovo127.com/media/batk-300x217.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiMuzkpT8Xs&list=PLCDF9657DA4848BD2

You probably spent half a century following politics on a superficial reactive level rather than a deep understanding level. There's a difference. If you had a deeper understanding this would not be a surprise to you. Your reacting to a personality (which is typical of superficial politics) and completely missing the undercurrents and the fact that Obama's involvement is more ordinal than personal. Chances are the same thing would have happened if Romney was president. There is a movement afoot on which presidents are more pawns than kings.

Can you come up with a good reason why Obama would want to kill Americans? I think what Obama and Bush are both interested in is using Americans to leverage private equity. The key is to minimize the negative reactions of the American people. Obama and the Democrats will continue to use progressive techniques which were design specifically for that purpose, while Bush and the neocons prefer to use highly effective propaganda to pull the wool over our eyes.

At some point both techniques will loose their effectiveness (when enough money drains from the middle class) and that will be when the police state will come into play which by then will be primed by the so-called "war on terror".

...

So here we are depending on Russian rockets to launch our sattelites and this surprises you? Ya know, this is the kind of thing that happens to people who are so entrenched in partisan views that they only pay attention to the warning signs when their loyal opposition is in power.

First of all, oldroy, let me say this... Yes, beleive it.

Now, I hate to keep bringing up the Bush administration because I'm sure a lot of you get the feeling I'm just trying to blame everything on Bush, but seriously, if you are genuinely concerned about the U.S. government contracting Russian military personnel then you need to understand how we got to this point and you can't do that by starting at chapter 5.

I saw this comming from way back in 2003 when Cheney and Rumsfeld were privatizing military operations in ways this country has never seen before. It was then that we started to hear about private security companies like Blackwater taking on huge military contracts. We never heard of such a thing during Vietnam or Korea, but that was an era where the military was almost entirely a government operation. What Vietnam taught us specifically, was that the American people have little sympathy for wars they don't undertand, especially when their sons and husbands are involuntarily drafted to supply the troops and as voters that can cause problems. What the Bush administration learned later on is that they actually *can* wage these kinds of wars without the large scale protests as long as the American people aren't forced to be personally involved. They figured out that they can use contracts with private "security firms" to basically fill the same need without reinstating a draft. So basically, mercenaries.

What most Americans didn't seem to learn is that a lot of the personnel in these security companies are not Americans. Many of them in fact are Russians. When the Soviet Union fell a huge army fell with it releasing thousands of unemployed soldiers who basically didn't know what else to do. Many of them now work for private security firms all around the world.

Now, let me make this clear... I'm not putting all the blame on Bush here. I think there is something far bigger happening and I wish some of you would get past the petty president bashing so you can see it.

Welcome to the 21st century... A time where power is shifting from sovereign states to private equity. Private equity that allows new private empires to be established on a global scale without national loyalty. Private equity that uses national governments as resources. This is the change that has cleaved the GOP in half, with old school paleoconservatives like Gingrich pining for the days of national loyalty and neoconservatives who's only interest in a strong America is how much money they can squeeze out of it. I mention this because it's the more obvious effect but the Democrats aren't in the clear either. With their more progressive approach they are trying to make the decline a little more comfortable for us but the prime directives are apparent in Obama's foreign policy which is basically towing the same line that Bush was.

It saddens me to think that people are such suckers for propaganda that they don't realize something is wrong until they realize their taxes are paying Russians to check their bags.

LOL... roy... I think EVERYONE is aware that China is controlled by their communist party. I got the statistics on defense budget from several sources but years of observations on my own part seem to confirm the pattern.

What you don't seem to understand is the concept of the military-industrial complex as a business. This business is what put food in my belly and a roof over my head as a child growing up the son of an aerospace engineer who depended on government defense contracts for a living.

The challenge during the cold war was no different that it is today - it was to make as much money as possible. The Soviet economic system was no match for our capitalist system and as such we were ALWAYS far ahead in the race. There was never a point where we needed to "catch up with them" it was always the other way around. Not because they were any less evil but because they just couldn't keep up with our production output. Of course, this isn't what our government told the "sheeple". They manufactured a fear of Soviet attack to justify the pseudo-socialist system of taxing people to pay for the private profits of defense contractors.

Obviously, it worked on you, an apparently full-fledged member of the chicken-shit sheeple.