2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 400,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 7 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

COTO Report 2011 Annual Report

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 620,000 times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 8 sold-out events for that many people to see it.

How We Doin’?

By Rady Ananda

Following the widespread banishment of all radical elements on a certain “progressive” website, which included yours truly, several of us started other sites.  Akin to AA thinking that asks, how do you start an AA meeting (“all it takes is a coffee pot and a resentment”), we did just that.

Hence, Coalition of the Obvious, Food Freedom and, a month later, COTO Report were born.  My buddy, Patrick, runs the first site, and I run the last two. That’s only possible with a dedicated crew who keep the engines going with original essays, artwork, news tips, and shares on social media sites.

Though COTO doesn’t draw as many visitors as Food Freedom, it gives an outlet to radical thought.  Given the corporate-government’s propensity to censorship, more outlets are better than fewer, I figure.  Here are the stats since inception:

Global Strike – 15th – 17th April 2011 – Peaceful Non-Compliance

William Engdahl, *Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century*

Globalization and de-industrialization were the opening moves of the trap- privatization is the trap closing on our necks.  Of course the rest of the world has been experiencing all this for a long time; but we are no longer the minor beneficiaries of American Imperialism, we have become the next course in its move to devour the world.- Claudia

Find the book at: Amazon Review of: Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century (Paperback) by Reg Little

William Engdahl’s latest book is another awesome exploration and explanation of the boldness and failings of Anglo-American global strategy over most of the past century and a half. Engdahl recalls in his introduction a statement from the 1970’s attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the powerful Rockefeller circles, in which he declared, “If you control the oil, you control entire nations; if you control the food, you control the people; if you control the money, you control the entire world.”

What’s at stake in Wisc: Public Assets No-Bid Give-Away to Koch brothers

Mike Konczal Feb 21, 2011    Rortybomb

The Less Discussed Part of Walker’s Wisconsin Plan: No-Bid Energy Assets Firesales.

Have you heard about 16.896?

The fight in Wisconsin is over Governor Walker’s 144-page Budget Repair Bill. The parts everyone is focusing on have to do with the right to collectively bargain being stripped from public sector unions (except for the unions that supported Walker running for Governor). Focusing on this misses a large part of what the bill would do. Check out this language, from the same bill (my bold):

16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).

The bill would allow for the selling of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants without bids and without concern for the legally-defined public interest.  

Shooting Safeguards. A Society Armed

 

 

copyright © 2011 Betsy L. Angert. Empathy And Education; BeThink or BeThink.org

Once again, Americans are up in arms or perchance, better armed and dangerous. Only little more than a week into 2011, citizens have had to confront their fears, feelings, all at gunpoint. It began on a calm, clear Saturday. In a Safeway Store Tucson parking lot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords held one of her customary Congress on the Corner events. It was January 8, 2011. Friends and admirers from each political Party turned out. Suddenly, cordial chatter turned icy cold. gunshots shattered the calm. People were slaughtered. Some survived. However, as a nation, we were all wounded.

Retorts followed. Seemingly, a culture was changed, or was it? Just as has occurred, many times in the recent past, people quickly took sides. Blame was ballied about. Solutions were also presented. Some argued for stricter gun control laws. Others used the occasion to validate a need for less restrictive restraints on gun ownership. Persons who held a position similar to the most prominent victim proposed a need to protect themselves.

Awaiting the Storm

December 17, 2010     by Fred Reed

Flags. These are always a bad sign. Hardly a politician appears on television who doesn’t stand in front of an American flag, sometimes three American flags. A venomous nationalism now poisons the air, and grows.   We are off and rolling.

The trappings of fascism spread. General David Petraeus, commander of the Eastern Front, poses with the President in the White House in combat fatigues.  The country is now the Homeland, reminiscent of the  Nazi Fatherland and the Soviet Motherland. We hear of American Exceptionalism, the ritual self-idolizaton beloved of pathological nationalism. Blood and Soil. The American Dream. Ubermenschen. All we need is a short Austrian.

We may get one. The times ripen for a man on a horse. (Or perhaps a woman: Twitler of Alaska looms.) An ignorant population, unread, unfamiliar with the outside world, focuses its anxieties on troubling dark things lurking abroad, the brown hordes from the south, the rising Chinese, inexplicable Moslems who want to kill all Christians.  Sooner rather than later such a mob finds solace in an angry unity. From an unhappy lower middle-class spring Brown Shirts. Wait.

Canada: Usage-based internet billing approved

Richard Moore comments:

Usage-based doesn’t sound so bad, when you get lots of gigabytes at a fixed  price as a starting point, as is the case below. But this is a precedent, the camel getting its nose in the tent. If it gets to the point where we’re charged for each message sent, for example, email lists will become prohibitively expensive.

October 28, 2010

CRTC green lights usage-based internet billing

By Peter Nowak,  CBC News
Metered internet usage is on the way, with the CRTC handing down its final decision on how wholesale customers can be billed by large network owners.

The federal regulator on Thursday gave Bell Canada the approval to implement so-called usage-based billing to wholesale customers – usually smaller internet service providers that rent portions of its network – within 90 days. Under the plan, Bell will charge wholesale service providers a flat monthly fee to connect to its network, and for a set monthly usage limit per each ISP customer the ISP has.

Vox Populi Trailer

America’s Middle Class is dying and the stats prove it

Irish Central July 24, 2010            By CAHIR O’DOHERTY                                                 BUZZ!

Take off your hats and bow to your betters. It’s over – the noble American experiment I mean.

The American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer here at a historically unprecedented rate.

Once the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but that’s ending at a blinding pace.

The new ‘global economy’ means that middle class American workers have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and practically no regulations.

If the socialism the Tea Party is shouting about means anything in the U.S. anymore it refers to the golden circle of the super rich, who are profiting at unheard of rates whilst the rest of this nation suffers.

U.S. Corporations have grown massively rich exploiting third world labor pools, but middle class American workers have increasingly lost out.

“No Fly List” Blocks People From Flying without Explanation or Due Process

ACLU July 8, 2010    Late last month, the ACLU filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit on behalf of 10 U.S. citizens and lawful residents who are prohibited from flying to or from the United States—or over U.S. airspace—because they are on the government’s “No Fly List.”

None of the individuals in the lawsuit, including a disabled U.S. Marine Corps veteran stranded in Egypt and a U.S. Army veteran stuck in Colombia, have been told why they are on the list or given a chance to clear their names.

Thousands of people have been added to the “No Fly List” and barred from commercial air travel without any opportunity to learn about or refute the basis for their inclusion on the list. The result is a vast and growing list of individuals who, on the basis of error or innuendo, have been deemed too dangerous to fly but who are too harmless to arrest.

Left-Leaning Despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Do You Really Believe in Miracles?

by David Ray Griffin     Global Research July 6, 2010

An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi.1

According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles.

After documenting this charge in Part I of this essay, I show in Part II that the exact opposite is the case: that the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center implies miracles (I give nine examples), and that the 9/11 Truth Movement, in developing an alternative hypothesis, has done so in line with the assumption that the laws of nature did not take a holiday on 9/11. In Part III, I ask these left-leaning critics some questions evoked by the fact that it is they, not members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, who have endorsed a conspiracy theory replete with miracle stories as well as other absurdities.

Globalization Is the Contagion: On the Idiocy of Interdependency

What we are witnessing today is simply the entire foisted-upon-us “interdependency” idiocy coming home to roost. To repair and reform, we need to break out of the fascist trade and banking straight-jackets and rebuild local, national and regional freedoms – all according to real democratic processes and prerogatives.

Friday 07 May 2010         TruthOut

by: Kent Welton

Were there no European union there would be no Greek crisis beyond Greece, Greece would have retained its currency and paid its price for budget problems in the value of its currency.

But the stitching together of so many diverse countries and cultures into one unit, with one currency, has presented far more problems than it has solved and, worse, has removed national and cultural liberty, sovereignty, as well as necessary freedom for tariff-based re-balancing mechanisms.

As a result, we now have synchronized global pain and ruin serving to give the banksters more opportunities to gain evermore resources and power over our lives with their out-of-thin-air private money machines.

Worst of all is exactly this private central bank contagion, in which nations have given up their rights to create their own money and credit, and without interest if they see fit. The world-wide sovereign debt problem is essentially a private central bank, debt-money, problem. It’s the interest, stupid. Its the inevitable Kondratieff wave of debt-money.

Top Ten Posts Week Ending May 1, 2010

By Rady Ananda

Volaar is still in the top ten!

Top Ten Posts Week Ending April 25

By Rady Ananda

Volaar tops the weekly Top Ten for the second week in a row, and my piece on federal spending priorities made it this week.

Top Ten Posts Week Ending April 18

Richard Volaar tops this week’s top ten with his Katla Volcano ideas, and Meghan ‘Verb’ Kargher stays in the top ten with her interview with David Icke.

Radicals on Parade: COTO Digest thru April 2, 2010

COTO Report | Station with No Name; Feedback Loop; Reflections on an Anniversary

Buzz this today! http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=1085494

By Rady Ananda

I love radicals; I can’t think of a stiffer drink Planet Earth has to offer me. Early one morning I followed an email link to this article by Tony Forest, The ‘Station with No Name’ – a dream, mixed with imagination and an irresistible pull to keep reading:

The Impoverishment of the Middle Class: When Empire Hits Home, Part 2

“The world has already, in the past two years, witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.[78] What will follow is a global restructuring of class structure as the western educated middle class will largely be decimated and liquidated of all its material wealth. This is a new phase of globalization.”

By Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, March 30, 2010
This is Part 2 of the series, “When Empire Hits Home.”

see also Part 1: War, Racism and the Empire of Poverty

and  Part 3:  Riots, Rebellion and Revolution

The western nations of the world have built their great wealth and societies on the exploitation and plundering of the people and resources of the rest of the world. The wealth, freedom, and structures of our societies have been built on the starvation, robbery, deprivation and murder of millions upon millions of the world’s people, both historically and presently.

It seemed for a time that “Western Civilization” had worked, even if only for the west. We saw the emergence and growth of a vibrant middle class, which has its origins in the Industrial Revolution, out of which we also saw the formation of the “nuclear family.” The middle classes of the west grew in wealth, education, and access. While the great problems of the world, and for the majority of the world’s people, persisted and expanded exponentially, the great purpose of the middle class was siphoned and expanded into facilitating the development of a massive consumerist society. The function of the middle class became that of consuming, not necessarily contributing to determining the direction of society.

Top Ten Posts Week Ending April 1

Of original work, Megan ‘Verb’ Kargher’s Interview with David Icke and Richard Volaar’s Feedback Loop on global warming made it to the Top Ten.