Finis

"You Can't Handle the Truth!"

-Colonel Nathan R. Jessep

This is the end, sorry it won't be more eloquent but it is the end nonetheless. Ed Encho is now retiring from blogging, immediately and permanently. Times have changed and I have changed as well. After a pretty extended hiatus brought on primarily by health concerns led to my thinking a bit more and realizing that I was leaving the 'left' or what sad remnants of it. The left/progressive farce in this now fully functional corporate fascist society has done nothing but to enable the rot and I have gone on long enough now and have decided to leave this altogether. It was no one event, person, argument or relationship gone bad, it was just the whole accumulated weight of all of it. In ending a longtime collaboration with certain friends over the past week as well as disagreements over how to best move forward and reach new people using new technologies with others, I have just decided that this is just one big waste of fucking time. I have been involved in this for too long now and like the famous scene at the end of The Outlaw Josey Wales where Fletcher tells him that the war is over, well I reckon so.

Of course I am not the only one to decide this is basically no longer worth dealing with. There have been far more influential folks than my humble ass who have moved on out of frustration, notably the great Paul Craig Roberts who in his recent farewell to arms piece: Good-Bye: Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It summed it up perfectly:

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Roberts' lament rings as true as any in this rotting nation of sheep, TV lobotomized zombies, snake mean racists, Jesus juicers and willfully ignorant lemmings. There is zero desire to hear the truth and with the reflating of the latest economic bubble that only benefits the Wall Street looters, the ongoing demagoguery over the latest idiotic would be terrorist allowing for more and more police state powers and the complete failure of the American public to stop the endless state of war that is bankrupting us both morally and financially what is the point?

The worst being of course the perpetuating of the myth of 9/11 that changed everything forever, and it's never coming back. Whatever remains of the 9/11 Truth Movement has been thoroughly infiltrated by disinformation agents and profiteers and the 'left' has ZERO nerve to do anything but try to recycle Bush and Cheney's talking points for political gain. We hear highly paid shills for American fascism like Glenn Beck getting rich while conning millions to buy his products and ghost-written tripe pontificate about his ridiculous 9/12 movement that has spawned misled faux patriot groups and a huge Astroturf political arm of the criminal Republican party in the co-opted Tea Party Movement. All this while there is an abysmal failure of any rational counter force from the left or from antiwar groups about a 9/10 movement and in restoring our civil liberties to the day prior to the American Reichstag Fire.. It has always been 9/11 and thereafter and it will always be used to justify more war, torture, detentions without trial and now the ability to strip dissenting Americans of their citizenship, I could never imaging even Bush and Cheney being able to get away with pissing away taxpayer money on naked body scanners in airports from which TSA goons can ogle the private partes of prepubescent teenage girls and boys. There is NO opposition to any of this either from the Teabaggers or the champaign socialists on the fake 'left', at least none that is more effictive than a mosquito on a rhino's ass. The most abysmal failure comes from the 'left' in their collective failure to articulate or offer any sort of alternative vision to counter to the well funded, organized American Gladio on the right. They are so intent on waging their petty cultural jihads, distorting the words of cranks and conducting political correctness purity purges to bother with either pragmatism or reality. To see people who once screamed for George W. Bush to be strung up by his balls (which he truly deserved) now become total apologists for the Obama administration and the vile continuation of the same policies just because it is their team in the White House makes me want to vomit. If something was wrong under Bush then it sure as hell is wrong under Obama and by definition every U.S. President is a war criminal so in not recognizing this and speaking out then they are all hypocrites of the worst type. Perhaps even worse than the hypocrisy is the general lack of any sort of a spine when it comes down to engagement with the enemy. The left of old, the labor left would have showed up at fascist Tea Party rallies enmasse and there would have been blood, today's social issue driven left is content to tote an occasional sign around, sign up for MoveOn.org or send money to the corrupt Democratic Party. A good argument could be made than when the backs of the old left was busted first by McCarthyism, then by Reaganism and finally what was left whipped into acquiesence by the corporate DLC and when that was allowed it opened the door to the ongoing slide into the abyss, both politically and economically. I cannot denounce the 'left' strongly enough for being woefully ineffective, delusional and no help in staunching the bleeding. When the definitive history of the fall of the United States is written there will be a serious analysis of the role of the enabling 'left' in the implosion.

The truth about 9/11 will never be seriously challenged, the establishment won't allow it to happen because no matter what the truth is the resulting police state, the power of controlling it and the exponentially growing surveillance and control systems is just too seductive to ever be reigned in. The United States of America is a failed state, choked with corruption, pollution and poverty - the rest of the world is ahead of the curve as civil unrest grows as essential services are cut to bail out the criminal scum, the politicians and the casino banks for destroying their economies. It isn't going to get any better here either but we as Americans are too easily made to accept the unacceptable, for those who are angry there are controlled pressure valves like the Tea Party and the progressive blogosphere. There is lots of noise and clamor but nothing changes does it? Again, I excerpt from Paul Craig Roberts farewell piece:

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Yes, the worst is coming. I have read my history and know all too well the signs of the rising tide of totalitarianism, the parallels between the present day U.S. of A and Weimar era Germany are astonishing, only here it is much, much more subtle but the ongoing economic collapse is setting the stage just perfectly for the real new Hitler, he or she just hasn't emerged yet to capitalize on the seething resentment and desperation that our failed political system and woefully ignorant citizens have created. A prophetic and favorite warning of mine came from Earling Carothers 'Jim' Garrison, the only man to attempt to bring about a serious legal action over the assassination of President Kennedy:

"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line."

It was roughly forty years ago that Garrison uttered those words. Today, May 12, 2010 how can any reasonable person even attempt to deny the truth in that statement? It is the lack of those reasonable people that have now driven me to leave this behind as well. Life is too short to continue to expend considerable energy and waste considerable time in trying to make any sort of a meaningful difference - there is no desire to hear the truth and no sense of shared duty to transcend the petty differences that control what passes for discourse in this diseased country.

So now I take my leave, I have better things to do than to tilt at windmills with the rest of you and would strongly advise you all to think very seriously about how you want to spend your remaining days. Don't fail to take into consideration that today is the best day of the rest of your lives, each day will be incrementally worse because of the abject failure to do anything to stop the war machine and the fascist state that provides the lynchpin for it.

So as I ride off into the sunset I offer a tip of my hat to my good friends, I want to especially note Diane and Gottlieb, Elian, Woody, Ed and Bob as those who I will miss most, your hearts were always in the right place and may you continue to fight the good fight despite our differences. To all of the others who I have worked with and who are of varying political affiliations, intellectual backgrounds and long term goals I salute your efforts as well. There are too many of you to name here and for the sake of brevity I won't . The one thing in common is that I am proud of the time that we were able to work together and honored to have done so. As Reggie Hammond once famously remarked..."Y'all Be Cool".

This is Ed Encho signing out.

Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers

All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

-I.F. Stone

Given the last several days of having to run the electronic gauntlet of slavering testimonials over the premature death of Tim Russert of the crown propaganda jewel of the G.E. branch of the military industrial media complex Meet The Press I have found the perfect antidote to the gag reflex. Via Common Dreams comes this nice little article by Jeff Cohen on a REAL journalist who spoke the truth to power in an era before the well-fed, finely coiffed millionaires and big titted, big haired vacuous bimbos whose only attribute (other than their obvious physical ones) is their ability to recite government/corporate talking points off of a teleprompter. Izzy Stone (better known as I.F. Stone came from an era when journalists were not celebrities first and understood their responsibility in holding state and corporate power accountable per the mandate enshrined in the Constitution about a free press being necessary for a free people to enjoy liberty. Today voices such as Stone's are alive and raising cain in the blogosphere, to the extent that the corrupt establishment is even now scrambling to find some palatable way to lockdown the internet as it has become a serious threat to their big con game. We here at the Station are proud to present:

Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers

by Jeff Cohen

It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The legendary blogger was 81.

Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?

Well, yeah, but when I think of today’s blunt, fact-based online hell-raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.

Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we associate with today’s best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day — and physically visit government archives and press offices, and personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That’s how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.

Izzy was the ultimate un-embedded reporter. His journalism was motivated by a simple maxim that resonates loudly in our era of Cheneys and Rumsfelds and WMD hoaxes: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone’s Weekly (biweekly through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone.

In real time in August 1964, Izzy was virtually alone in challenging the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, an imaginary “unprovoked attack” on U.S. warships used by the Johnson administration to send several hundred thousand American troops into Vietnam. How did Izzy do it? By citing international law texts and finding nuggets of truth in the Congressional Record of the Senate debate (no C-SPAN then) and in contradictory reporting in mainstream publications.

Izzy’s expose began boldly: “The American government and the American press have kept the full truth about the Tonkin Bay incidents from the American public.” He fumed at the credulous MSM: “The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen.” Only two senators, Oregon’s Wayne Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening, had voted against the Tonkin Resolution; Izzy noted that the press had “dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the antiwar speeches of Morse and Gruening.”

Like today’s online journalistic entrepreneurs, being his own editor and boss allowed Izzy the freedom and space to parse out the distortions of government in detail. A year before the Tonkin hoax, he wrote: “In this age of corporation men, I am an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise.” While most journalists “find their niche in some huge newspaper of magazine combine, I am a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone.”

Bloggers battle today’s McCarthyites who smear Iraq War opponents as un-American abettors of our country’s enemies. Izzy battled the original Joe McCarthy, in issue after issue of his weekly. Indeed, he launched his publication the same month — January 1953 — McCarthy became chair of the Senate Operations Committee, enhancing his powers of intimidation. Izzy warned prophetically: “McCarthy is in a position to smear any government official who fails to do his bidding. With such daring and few scruples, McCarthy can make himself the most powerful single figure in Congress.”

Three months later, he wrote: “The most subversive force in America today is Joe McCarthy. No one is so effectively importing alien conceptions into American government. No one is doing so much to damage the country’s prestige abroad. . . .If ‘subversion’ is to be met by deportation, then it is time to deport McCarthy back to Wisconsin.”

Not until 11 months later did Edward R. Murrow air his first report on McCarthy.

Today, online media critics and bloggers expose the bigotry and fallacy gushing forth from Fox News and talk radio and the Rev. Moon-owned Washington Times, long-edited by Wes Pruden Jr. They blog about MSM being stenographers to rightwing extremists. When racists in Little Rock were obstructing court-ordered school desegregation in 1958, Izzy was on the scene reporting: “A staff correspondent in Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden the segregationist leader, as saying, ‘The South will not accept this outrage, which a Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on us.’ This was my introduction to a regional journalism which prints such statements matter-of-factly.”

The Communist-dominated regime referred to by Pruden Sr. was headed by Eisenhower.

Izzy loved to tell the story of how he found — hiding in plain view in different editions of the New York Times — one-paragraph “shirrtail” wire stories indicating that our country’s first underground nuclear test in Nevada in 1957 was detected in Toronto, Rome and Tokyo. Months later, just as hawks in Washington were preparing to attack a test ban treaty with the Soviets on the basis that nuclear tests could not be detected more than 200 miles away, Izzy found a seismologist in the Commerce Department who told him the test had also been detected as far away as Alaska and Arkansas. Izzy’s reporting obstructed the government’s lie before it could get its shoes on.

Starting out in his teens, Izzy was a daily reporter, editor and columnist. After moving to D.C. in 1940 to become Washington editor of The Nation, he exposed U.S. corporations still doing business with Hitler’s Germany. He was one of the first to sound the alarm about the Nazi holocaust, referring in 1942 to “a murder of a people.” An anti-racist, he battled the all-white National Press Club over exclusion of black journalists.

Izzy’s cantankerousness and “hound-dog tenacity” — in the words of his biographer — would make even the most stubborn blogger blush. Although he was a lifelong progressive, his journalistic hallmark was independence: “I felt that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism.” His writings show deep admiration for Franklin Roosevelt, yet his article on FDR’s death criticized his “deplorable disrespect for the constitutional amenities” in resisting a reactionary Supreme Court that knocked down one New Deal bill after another.

He wrote books passionately supporting the birth of Israel, but strongly criticized it for mistreatment of Palestinians. He advocated peace and negotiations with the Soviet Union, while increasingly vocal in denouncing its rulers: “The worker [in Russia] is more exploited than in Western welfare states.”

He despised racists, but fought for their free speech rights, and everyone’s: “Once you put ifs and buts in the Bill of Rights, nobody’s civil liberties will be secure.” That he marched to his own drummer can be seen in his dispatch from the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, in which he criticized “respectables” for muting “Negro militancy” into support of JFK’s inadequate program, and referred to Martin Luther King as “a little too saccharine for my taste.”

Born of immigrant parents, Izzy was an American patriot who worshipped the Bill of Rights: “You may think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I’m keeping Thomas Jefferson alive.”

And he worshipped our country’s tradition of press freedom: “There are few countries in which you can spit in the eye of the government and get away with it. It’s not possible in Moscow.” But Izzy was never naïve about American traditions that threatened freedom, and he had a 5,000-page FBI spy file to prove it.

Today’s muckraking bloggers are often belittled for working from their homes, far removed from the corridors of power. Izzy worked out of his home. If he were alive, he’d be applauding the Josh Marshalls and other independents, urging: Keep your distance from power.

I made no claim to inside stuff. . . I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. . . I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry. The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department or the Pentagon for a wire service or a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line. . . But a reporter covering the whole capitol on his own - particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures.

Imagine the obstacles Izzy faced — did I mention his impaired eyesight and hearing? — launching a weekly and finding an audience at the height of McCarthy’s witch hunts (even at $5 for an annual subscription).

Far fewer obstacles face today’s bloggers who seek to follow in Izzy’s footsteps — blessed as they are with relative freedom and this awesome research and outreach tool known as the Internet.

As these upstarts speak truth to power, I see Izzy Stone watching over them, from the heavens.