Dave Lindorff

DAVE LINDORFF FOR BUZZFLASH

Let me make a postulate: In a democracy, if there is a legislative proposal that would significantly benefit 80 percent of the population and cost them nothing, and that would be paid for by a relatively insignificant tax on the richest 20 percent of the population, who themselves would receive some benefit from the added tax, that proposal would be overwhelmingly approved.

If you accept that postulate, you would have to conclude that the US is no longer a functioning democracy.

The proof is laid out in the latest study out of the Senate Special Committee on Aging titled: “Social Security Modernization: Options to Address Solvency and Benefit Adequacy.” ...

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DAVE LINDORFF FOR BUZZFLASH

British Petroleum had a fail-safe system for it’s Deepwater Horizon floating deep-water drilling rig.

You know, the one that blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a tangled spaghetti pile of 22-inch steel pipe one mile long all balled up on the sea floor a mile below the surface, and that is leaking oil at 42,000 gallons per day...so far.

The thing is, the fail-safe system, about the size of a McMansion sitting at the wellhead on the ocean floor, um, failed. It didn’t collapse and shut off the flow of oil as intended, and it could take months now to shut the well down--during which time the leak rate is likely to increase to up to 300,000 gallons per day, or over two million gallons a week. ...

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DAVE LINDORFF FOR BUZZFLASH

Just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a lead story about Israeli planning to possibly “go it alone” in an attack on Iran if the US were not to “succeed” in its diplomatic efforts to get Iran to “stop” it’s alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon capability.

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DAVE LINDORFF FOR BUZZFLASH

If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.

The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the total cost of government).  Meanwhile, the military share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion. ...

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DAVE LINDORFF FOR BUZZFLASH

So finally the truth comes out...sort of.

After initially claiming that two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in a US Special Forces raid on an Afghan home in Khataba in February had been discovered bound and slain by the Americans, the US military has admitted that they were actually shot and killed by those US troops -- who then tried to cover up their “mistake” by carving the bullets out of the bodies with knives, removing other incriminating bullets from the compound’s walls, and then washing away the bloody evidence with alcohol.

In this new grisly version of the story issued from the US command in Afghanistan, it was a case of the Special Forces Unit lying to superiors about what had transpired in their botched raid, which also killed an Afghan police commander and a government prosecutor. ...

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Dave Lindorff

Another night-time raid on a housing compound in Afghanistan. Another bunch of innocent Afghans killed. Another round of lies by the US-led forces of the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Only this time, among the dead are two pregnant mothers and a teenage girl.

And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by the intrepid Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to see whether America’s “paper of record” had reported on this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll just write it. There’s no way the Times would cover this story. ...

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Dave Lindorff

When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four heroes who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people. One was Ron Ridenhour, a soldier who learned of the massacre, and began a private investigation, ultimately reporting the crime to the Pentagon and Congress. One was Michael Bernhardt, a soldier in Charlie Company who witnessed the whole thing, and reported it all to Ridenhour. And one was journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in the US media.

Today’s war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes “suspected” of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable “collateral damage” of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen innocent people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26. ...

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

      President Barack Obama is a relative newbie to Washington. ...

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For months, the various government departments dealing with things economic--Treasury, Commerce, Labor and of course the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve, have been issuing soothing words that the nation’s economy is headed back up from the Great Recession that allegedly began in December 2007.

But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we minsunderestimated, as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.  The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that because of a “modeling error,” it misstated the number of jobs lost between March 2008 and March 2009 by 17%. In hard numbers, that is to say, the BLS was reporting that a record 4.8 million jobs were lost during those 12 months of economic collapse, when in fact the job loss total was actually 5.6 million.

They missed 824,000 lost jobs! Just to give you an idea of how many people that is, we’re talking about 10% of the population of the city of New York, and more people than the entire population of San Francisco. ...

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff 
 
       You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side.       

   &n ...

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