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The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand allegedly convulsed Europe into World War I. The part about Britain having just converted from coal to petrol and the Germans attempting to build the "Orient Express" all the way to Basra and the Iranian oil fields, of course, never made it to the headlines.
I'm sure Archduke Ferdinand was a nice enough fellow, perhaps even had a chance to help a handicapped child or two.
Alexandros Grigoropoulos, aged 15, had his chance to make the lives of others a little easier taken from him by Athens police on December 6, 2008. After a two day lull in the protests, the Greeks today attacked the riot police of Athens' headquarters, and overtook the state run news broadcast of the Prime Minister's "call for calm" and "we'll get those 20% of you back above the poverty line Real Soon Now" with banners demanding that Greeks stop watching this idiot, Costas Karamanlis, and hit the streets.
The riots in Greece have resonated as far away as Argentina and solidarity actions with Greece have been held in Italy, Germany, Argentina, Portugal, Spain and, of course, Great Britain.
Why are we in the US continuing to listen to Lou "NeverMetAXenophobeIdidntlike" Dobbs and Wolf "ImaUboatCommanderandMossadApologist" Blitzer? Why does the loss of 100,000 more jobs all of next year drive the Greeks nuts while we can lose two million and can't even fog up a mirror with a protest?
Are we THAT ignorant here in the United States of America, the actual Land of Lincoln?
As a 13 year veteran of the educational testing industry, I can say with a certain aplomb that I have not seen a single year, since 1981, where the students in any major metropolitan area, or even in a State concerned enough with student performance, could perform on standardized tests as well as they perform within the context of the United States military.
Two key differences exist within the US military that we can not reproduce in a free and fair republic: we can't credibly threaten the parents of children who are unable to focus on what it is they need to learn, and we also can't control the tendency of educational bureaucrats to give themselves enormous salaries while teachers languish in both economic and political powerlessness. The United States military, because it is neither a free, nor a fair, republic, does not have the same burdens as the US public education system.
But while folks like former President Bill Clinton believe that the problem is "too much freedom," I would argue that the problem has more to do with the machinations of oligarchial wealth and stupidity than the "freedom" of parents operating outside of the reach of a military dictatorship.
Parents have both been working in those households where, since 1981, US children have been given a proper and stimulating education, and at least one of those parents was college-educated, or worked under a contract negotiated by organized labor.
In 1981, with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the United States began its shift towards fascism, its movement from a nation where the sentiments of only a few corporate elitists managed to penetrate past the FDR egalitarianism, to a phenomenon of mass public brain-washing that has left US citizens both intellectually incurious and perpetually incapable of separating propaganda from their own best interests.
In other words, most people in the United States do not realize that what is happening in Greece and Europe and is driving ordinary people into the streets, is going to happen here, is likely to happen here. Our government knows this, and has known it for some time, and is deploying combat-hardened troops in our formerly free and fair republic to dissuade a nation of Rothschild wage-slaves from taking back their freedom from a lazy, inbred, mentally deranged leadership class, once and for all.
If you doubt our government's foreknowledge of the potential for wage-slave violence, take notice of all the US Post Offices that have been built since 1981. The main post offices have been built to withstand bombs and standard ballistic attacks in the event that attempts are made to disrupt what was, at the time these planning decisions were made, a key component of our economic infrastructure.
The long range planners of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan era did not anticipate the Internet and the Worldwide Web, and they still do not realize, thank a loving God, what the web really means.
The worldwide web does not just mean that we know what happened in Greece today and what is likely to happen here sometime next year -- once the Obamanation becomes apparent. The web, left free and fair, will mean that the national security state, even the global security state, will become obsolete relics from an era where wretched wealth routinely poisoned human beings, made their nervous systems weak and drove them completely insane. And we allowed them to rule over us because we feared what their insanity might lead them to do.
But now we know, and we were correct to be concerned. The global economy and what freedom we have managed to grant ourselves since the Age of Reason, has been utterly and completely destroyed by one stupid, mentally ill white man with only the most perfunctory of educations and only the most dysfunctional of upbringings.
If the Bush Era (1947-2008) has meant anything, it has reinforced for me the importance of keeping criminals and spies away from public service and for properly identifying criminal behavior when it occurs, whereever it occurs. Had Prescott Bush been properly tried and convicted of treason for helping to launder the money required to build the Third Reich out of the dust of the Ottoman Empire, in 1944, we would not be staring down the barrel of multiple global extinction level events. We would not have seen a President's brains blown out of his skull in broad daylight, we would not have seen prodigous population growths in the Third World that we have seen and we would not be suffering from the kind of economic blackmail that only oil company and banking execu-fascists know how to create.
And we certainly would not be looking at the collapse of the American Experiment while the suffering that made it possible is happening on a global scale as never before.
