Julian Simon is the Most Evil Human Being Ever*

Periodically the issue is raised: who was the most evil human being that ever lived?  As of this writing, the obvious answer would be good old Uncle Adolph.  Granted, the man was not very nice.  He deliberately murdered a few million innocent people, started a war that claimed the lives of tens of millions, and for a few years inflicted tremendous misery and suffering on even more.  You would be unlikely to bump into a more evil person the next time you go shopping at Walmart (the CEO of that establishment is another matter, but he doesn’t shop there).

But as much as Hollywood loves Nazis, there are people whose evil arguably dwarfs that of the corporal from Austria.

A common candidate for Person-More-Evil-Than-Hitler is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or as he is more commonly known, “Lenin.”  The argument is that Lenin started the communist revolution that spread death and terror across the world for nearly a century.  I applaud those who allow themselves to think out of the box, and to consider that true evil might reside less in physical actions than in spreading a corrupt philosophy, but I respectfully suggest that Lenin and Leninism were not only not evil, but arguably somewhat noble.

Consider that when Lenin was growing up, he saw a vast country where most people lived as de facto slaves crushed into poverty, (de jure slavery had been ended previously, but changed nothing), lorded over by a corrupt and brutal elite.  Lenin did what any decent person would have done: he asked himself how this situation could be improved.  He formulated a philosophy, and successfully overthrew the ruling tsars and tried to do something better.

Now this is the key point: Lenin quickly realized that his theories of pure communism were unworkable, so he shifted gears into a “New Economic Policy” (NEP) that allowed a greater measure of economic freedom to individuals.  Things improved, and before too long the Russian economy had rebounded from the utter collapse of the royalists’ bungling of WWI to better than pre-WWI Tsarist Russia.

Now some will claim that if only the tsars had lived that Russia would have turned into a prosperous paternalistic society like modern-day South Korea.  And maybe if Pol Pot had lived he would have suddenly turned into a Jeffersonian Democrat.  The record is that the tsars had stomped on the peasantry for centuries, and there is no evidence that they would suddenly have reformed.  Note also that Lenin didn't overthrow the tsars: the tsars overthrew themselves, as their gross corruption and malevolence came to a head during WWI and crushed the Russian populace into the ground.  Lenin could never have overturned a society like modern South Korea.  And as far as killing the royal family: well, considering all the murderous brutality of the Russian ruling class for all the centuries before, turnabout's fair play, I should think?

But then Lenin died, and he was replaced by Stalin.  Now, there was a butcher.  He repealed the NEP and re-instituted orthodox top-down central planning no matter the consequences.  He engineered famines of groups he didn’t like.  He slaughtered and purged all of his enemies real and imagined. For a long time under Stalin a significant fraction of the Russian (then the Soviet) population lived in forced labor camps.  It could be said that the Stalinist Soviet Union was an example of a slave state.

The British prime minister Winston Churchill said of Lenin that the greatest calamity to befall Russia was that he was born, and the second greatest calamity is that he died when he did.  Churchill was no fan of Lenin, but even he saw that Lenin was far from the worst that there was.  Churchill also wondered if, perhaps, Stalin was even worse than our favorite Teutonic bogeyman – Stalin could be said to have had a bigger kill total, although the issue is debatable. 

Now one might say that even if Lenin himself was not that bad, that he was responsible for his theories being hijacked and used by evil people.  I disagree.  Currently there are many disgusting people who, under the banner of Adam Smith, are crushing billions into poverty and likely condemning the entire world to an age of almost unimaginable horror that will make Stalinist Russia look like a tea party.  Is it Adam Smith’s fault that others have taken his words out of context, cherry-picking the parts about free enterprise, ignoring the parts about decency and morality, and using “The Wealth of Nations” to justify stealing from the working poor and middle class to bail out wealthy bankers?  I don’t think so.  Adam Smith did the best that he could at the time.  If others have used his words to shield evil purpose, it is our fault for allowing that, not Mr. Smith’s.

Anyone of good spirit, who wants to make the world a better place, must worry that they might inadvertently make things worse.  Doing nothing is not a solution.  As the saying goes, ‘for evil to triumph it is enough that the good do nothing.’  If decent people refuse to act because they are worried about accidently causing harm, their place will be taken by those who are determined to cause harm, on purpose. 

The only thing to do is, be cautious. As the physicians say: “First do no harm.” Anyone proposing to make the world better must have done their homework and seen how similar proposals have fared in the past.  If their proposals are carried out, they must be ever mindful of any evidence that they have made a mistake, and be willing to reverse course, no matter the blow to their egos.

Imagine a physician who sees people dying of a disease, and they create a vaccine.  They test the vaccine as thouroughly as they can, but despite their best efforts, the vaccine causes more harm than good.  The physician immediately stops distribution of the vaccine, and works on minimizing the damage and determining how such a mistake might be avoided in the future.  I would not call this person evil.

Now imagine a physician who does not test the vaccine.  They see the vaccine doing more harm than good, but they refuse to admit it, they censor and attack any who question them (and maybe they make a quick buck from their stock in the vaccine company).  I think that I would call this person evil.

The difference between good and evil may ultimately boil down to due diligence.  If there are any lawyers reading this, you’ll understand.

You know it’s funny: there are all these conservatives railing about Soviet-style communism was the greatest calamity to befall the world, and yet look at the evidence.  After Stalin died, the old Soviet Union was not that bad.  It wasn’t that great, but look at the old pictures of 1970 East Germany.  Now consider modern wonderful capitalist India, where there are a half a billion people who are chronically malnourished.  Or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or Egypt, or Nigeria, or the Philippines, etc.etc.  There is no comparison.  There are in the world today billions of people who would give their left arms to go back in time and live in 1970 East Germany or Czechoslovakia or even Russia.  For someone to condemn communism as a failure, and then turn a blind eye to the vastly greater misery of today’s capitalist third world, the best that can be said is that this is an astonishing willful blindness.

Sometimes I hear that the problems with places like India or Pakistan is that they are ‘socialist’.  Oh really?  A society where you have to work like a dog for fifty cents an hour or starve, where anything and anyone is for sale, where multinationals flock to take advantage of all that cheap labor, where the rich build entire skyscrapers staffed with 600 servants as personal residences – this is no kind of socialism that I ever heard about.  These places are the Neoliberal dream.

No, the greatest evil are people like Julian Simon, who willfully pushed the meme that people breeding like rodents is an unalloyed good.  He attacked the idea that people should not have more children than they can afford to support, and instead pushed the notion that people should have as many children as they possibly can the instant they become fertile not worrying about whether they have a stable job or not because more people are guaranteed to always be better.  He also pushed that the rich should control the population the same way that central bankers control the money supply, creating population explosions to flood the market whenever prosperity threatens their cheap-labor derived profits.  Oh I know, Julian Simon didn’t phrase it that way, but that’s what he was providing cover for nonetheless.

The human suffering in modern India in just one decade dwarfs all the suffering created by Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Ghenghis Khan, combined, and by a large margin. And that's just for starters. And Julian Simon, and people like him, are to blame.

Now Adam Smith’s statement “The More The Merrier” has often been used by vile Neoliberal Economists to justify breeding people like cattle.  Why don’t I call Adam Smith evil?  Well, Mr. Smith was in mid-18^th century Western Europe.  At that time new technologies were coming on line, there were vast untapped physical resources and new lands to colonize, and the potential of economies of scale and division of labor had not been fully tapped.  Under those unusual historical circumstances he had a point.  But if today he were to see the misery of the overpopulated third world, and see with his own eyes how a massive population explosion has wiped out 500 years of technological and economic progress, I hope that he would have rethought his views on population.  If not, I might rethink my views on Adam Smith, but of course, this is hypothetical.

Julian Simon, however, is another issue.  He could easily see how rapid forced population growth drives many into poverty and a few into riches, and he took money to lie about it.*  (You may argue that he was just a useful idiot – maybe – but at some point an ignorance so willful becomes a deliberate lie.  IMHO). He didn’t need to – he would not have starved to death if he had told the truth – but it earned him favors from his wealthy patrons, and he made some extra bucks.  He sold out.

We have developed the technologies such that the world today should be as near to a paradise as fallible human beings can make it.  Instead it is heading into another dark age, and it’s not an accident or act of God.  This population explosion was created and maintained as a deliberate and consistent act, by the rich and their desire to keep their profits and their status via a continued supply of cheap and docile labor.  The ongoing population explosion is the greatest crime committed against humanity that has ever been committed – perhaps it will go down as the greatest crime ever – and Julian Simon helped make it possible.

*IMHO

Has America Lost It's Soul?

I can remember the old days when Americans thought of themselves as the good guys.  The American ideal used to be the image of John Wayne. Polite, strong, decent, brave.  Slow to anger, but when roused to action, powerful. A nation that, when it has to, fights according to the rules, and wins.  A political personification of this ideal might be Dwight Eisenhower.

Now the new American ideal is the face of Dick Cheney.  An ugly little rodent of a man, a foul-mouthed coward who, while shrinking from any personal risk himself, sends others off to die in pointless wars that enrich his politically-connected buddies.  A man who has besmirched American honor by making torture an officially sanctioned part of American policy.  A man who, by squandering trillions of dollars in utterly pointless wars, is driving the economy and the military into the ground.  A loser who cloaks his failures with arrogance and venom.

If the reports of the mainstream press are to be believed (yes I know, that’s not at all certain) then the American public prefers Dick Cheney to Dwight Eisenhower.  If true, I am aghast. What happened to America?  When did it lose it's soul?

Now I am not saying that America was always some sort of national saint, or that American soldiers or government agents never did anything wrong.  Far from it.  In the heat of battle, when a soldier watches his comrades get killed and mangled, bad things happen.  I am certain that even in the so-called “good war” of WWII, that there was quite a lot of ugliness.  The thing is, that torture was never official policy.  Torture was something that Nazis did, not red-blooded American GIs.  Even if America often fell short of the ideal, it matters what the ideal is.

Nazi Germany, Tojo’s Japan, The Soviet Union… these states were ‘tough’ and used torture as official policy.  They are all gone now, their relics gathering dust in museums.  America didn’t use torture, and it’s still here.  There is a lesson to be learned from this.

Outside the mindless sensationalism of movies and television, professional intelligence operatives know that torture is counterproductive.  People under torture say anything that they think that their tormentors want to hear.  Professionals know that getting information requires careful work and a systematic approach to gathering information. But that’s not ‘sexy’.  It’s not ‘tough’.  It’s not ‘playing hardball.’  It’s not the sort of thing that would excite an armchair general with no practical experience.

There are four reasons for a government to use torture:

1. To extract false confessions for propaganda purposes.

2. To extract false confessions so that the police may claim that they have solved a case.

3. To intimidate other people into not challenging the government.

4. Pure sadism – because the torturers enjoy the sense of power that it gives them.

Is this really what America has come to?

If America wants to defend itself from crazed Wahhabist terrorists, the sane thing to do would be NOT LET THE TERRORISTS ENTER THE COUNTRY IN THE FIRST PLACE.  I mean, the terrorists of 9/11 were mostly illegal immigrants from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who were only allowed to stay in the country because the rules against illegal immigration were not being enforced.  Some of them could not even have gotten onto the plane without legal driver’s licenses that had been given to illegals.  Some camel jockey in the far desert can only cause harm to Americans if you are so stupid as to let him into your country.  Just say no!

It must also be pointed out that you do not demonstrate strength by shooting yourself in the foot.  You demonstrate that you are a fool.  Attacking countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, and then botching the job!  And then wasting trillions of dollars on corrupt defense contractors!  That is not ‘realpolitik’, that’s not ‘making the hard decisions needed to make America safe.’  It’s just bloody stupid.  Period.

We keep hearing about the ‘ticking time bomb’ theory – what if a terrorist has a ticking time bomb hidden in a school and it’s going to go off in 30 minutes and if you don’t torture this person to find out where its hidden lots of kids will die?  If, if, if.  This is an abstract hypothetical that has basically never happened.  It does not justify the use of torture in all those cases where there was not a ticking time bomb, duh.  (I said “DUH”, dammit!).  The reality is that, if you need to torture someone to find out what they know, that means that you don’t really know all that much.  Which means that you are mostly going to be torturing innocent people.  Which appears to have been the case.  Duh, again, Duh.

If there ever really was a ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario, sure, go ahead and torture the person to find out where it’s hidden.  No jury would convict you, and if they did, you would get pardoned.  In the meanwhile in the real world this doesn’t happen, and should not be used as a rational argument for torture.

Recently it has come out that a couple of psychologists made a combined 80 million dollars in consulting fees to tell interrogators how to shove things up prisoners posteriors to maximal effect.  You can’t make this stuff up.  I mean this says it all: evil, ugly, stupid, and corrupt, as the right people make crazy money for doing basically nothing.  Can any nation long endure when this is the new normal?

Of course, nothing will happen to these consulting psychologists.  I imagine that they will continue to rake in big fees, and maybe get jobs at prestigious universities.  And nothing will happen to the government employees that let this happen.  If you fail to punish or censure people for bad behavior, you reward it - you approve it.

If someone shot off both your kneecaps, should your assailant not be prosecuted because 'it's history and we need to move on?'  Or would you want justice to be done?

It has been suggested that if we hold government officials accountable for committing acts that are stupid, evil, or corrupt, that this might have a chilling effect on the willingness of government officials to commit acts that are stupid, evil or corrupt in the future.  And this is a problem exactly why?  Has America not just lost its soul, but gone stark bonkers insane?

But of course, there is a higher law as well.  Americans should be against torture just because it’s wrong.  Even if (hypothetical IF!)  not using torture puts a few Americans at some slightly greater risk of danger, you’re supposed to be the good guys!  Aren’t you?

The brilliant political cartoonist Ted Rall recently asked: what if the Nuremberg trials were being held today?  He imagined an American prosecutor telling a war criminal ‘but the holocaust didn’t even work!  There are plenty of Jews left!’  That’s absurd, isn’t it?  The holocaust wasn’t evil because it was ineffective.  It was evil because it was evil. 

You should not need to be told that.

If you are an American and you see Dick Cheney’s face on TV and you are not instantly revolted and infuriated, I humbly suggest that there is something wrong with you.  Perhaps you have just been fed a steady line that the left hates America – and there is some truth to this, although that’s another matter – and you automatically assume that anyone criticizing the government hates America.  Please think carefully here.  Not everyone who thinks that Dick Cheney is evil hates America.  Many of us love it. 

I see America headed into decline.  There is an open-borders immigration policy that will turn the nation into an overpopulated third-world hell within the span of those now living.  An anti-American trade policy that hollows out your industries. Corrupt finance that gives trillions in bailouts to Wall Street while starving the real economy of investment.  A defense establishment that is increasingly little more than a way for insiders to make windfall profits, that sucks up ever more money while the real military decays.  An oligarchy that is increasingly out of control, that can for example tear up the pension contracts of regular folks to pad their bottom lines – while contracts guaranteeing the bonuses of hedge fund managers are of course sacred.

The sad thing is that, I wonder if perhaps Americans deserve this.  Please prove me wrong.  The mainstream press is so corrupt and dishonest that I can forgive an American believing almost anything.  But not that torture is an American virtue.  No, if you really believe that, then I do blame you, not the press.  If you think that Dick Cheney is now what America aspires to be, I humbly beg you to reconsider your views.

Is Elizabeth Warren just another con artist like Barack Obama?

 It was not that long ago that the country was sick of George W. Bush.  They were tired of the endless stupid wars, the showering of the rich with bailouts and insider deals while Main Street suffered, the lies, the greed, all of it.  And then in came Barack “Magic Sparkle Pony” Obama.  He told the American people all that they wanted to hear.  He would stand up for the average American against Wall Street.  He would end the stupid wars. He would renegotiate anti-American trade agreements like NAFTA.  He would have an open administration. 

And it was all of it, completely, totally, a lie.  From day one Obama was the bought and paid for agent of Wall Street and the super rich.  Obama constantly talks about helping the average person – but his every single action is aimed like a laser at enriching his wealthy patrons and screwing the working class. 

During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised to renegotiate the anti-American anti-worker NAFTA trade treaty.  There was a leak, and it turns out that during this time his agents were pledging to his wealthy backers that he didn’t mean a word of it.  And sure enough, once elected not only didn’t Obama work to renegotiate NAFTA, he is secretly negotiating some new trade deals that, according to recent reports, will eliminate domestic sovereignty and make US law subject to a veto by unelected corporate lawyers.  This is not a man who was overwhelmed by events, and please don’t fall back on the infantile excuse that the Evil Republicans blocked his agenda.  No, this is a man who planned and colluded in advance to screw over the average American for money.  And so he is.

After six years of Obama, Americans are starting to get tired of his Potemkin liberalism.  And now along comes Senator Elizabeth Warren, the New Liberal Champion!  Who is standing up to the banks, indeed, even standing up to Barack Obama!  And she tells us everything that we want to hear.  And the big corporate-controlled press outlets give her massive and favorable coverage.  And if your spider sense isn’t tingling, you have not been paying attention.

Recently Warren has gotten big notice for trying to derail the omnibus spending bill, allegedly because it contains yet more goodies for the big Wall Street banks.  Yes, the big banks want to use taxpayer-guaranteed funds that they are given at effectively a zero percent interest to gamble in the derivatives market.  This is not a minor thing, as witness the massive amount of lobbying effort and money that Wall Street put into it.  Apparently Warren was willing to threaten to shut down the government over this.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Well, maybe.  But let’s consider a few points.  When the Republicans threaten to shut down the government to do things like block Obama’s open-borders cheap-labor immigration policy, the mainstream press is adamant that this is ‘showboating’ and ‘not being responsible’ and ‘purely political’ etc.  Now Warren does it, and the press loves her.  No, it’s not because the corporate press has a liberal bias (I wish!).  It must be because the press wants to push Warren.  And I cannot imagine them doing that unless, somehow, the rich thought that she would serve their interests.

Remember, the corporate press does not consist of independent journalists and editors.  The corporate press is owned by a small number of media conglomerates, and nothing but nothing gets published unless the owners sign off on the script.  And these owners are very much not on the side of the average person.  When they encounter a real populist, it is standard to slander them as either ‘far right’ or as ‘quixotic’ or ‘egotistical self-promoters’.  For some time now the corporate press has only given the progressive seal of approval to people who are the exact opposite.  For example, Bill ‘I feel your pain’ Clinton, who swooped out of nowhere to win the presidency on the back of unprecedented positive corporate press coverage (‘you’ve never heard of him and he’s polling 3% and he has no money but he’s ON FIRE and he HAS THE MOMENTUM and he is THE TOP SEED TO BE PRESIDENT’), and then once elected he screwed over the American people with the NAFTA trade treaty, repealing Glass-Steagal, breaking unions, etc.   Clinton was only prevented from giving the social security system to Wall Street because of the distraction of being impeached over the Monica Lewinsky thing.

No, real populists – U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, Ted Cruz, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and overseas Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage – they are far right, or extreme far right, or egotists who are only spoiling the vote, etc.  If Elizabeth Warren is being hailed by the New York Times and CNN as the new liberal hero, it’s not proof that she’s sold out, but it sure looks fishy.

And we also hear that Obama likes her and has been pushing for her to run for president.  That also is worrying.

Politicians have always lied, but today we have moved to a new level.  I think the main problem is the consolidation of the press into a monolithic corporate-controlled entity (thanks again, Bill Clinton).  In the past when a politician consistently said one thing and did another, there was at least a decent fraction of the mainstream press that would call them on it.  Now, not at all. 

Sure there are alternative publications and an infinite number of internet blogs.  But these are fractured, self-cancelling.  The mainstream press is monolithic, omnipresent, and hammers home its propaganda over and over.  It gets to define the terms.  A million random nerds blogging from their parent’s basement can’t dent that power.  I would say that right now the only alternative media voice to have any power at all is the Drudge Report.  I wonder how long that will be allowed to continue.  Will Matt Drudge be crushed, or pressured into selling out?  Hint: the day that Drudge stops covering immigration, is the day that you can be sure that he sold out.

Remember also that independent bloggers don't have the institutional depth of the old-time news agencies.  They can find inconsistencies in the corporate script, but they do not have the resources to conduct significant investigations on their own.  They rely on the corporate press as their primary source of information - and thus, are not really independent.  Ultimately even the independent bloggers are, without even thinking about it, forced to accept the terms of debate of the corporate behemoths.  

Modern politics today is totally scripted.  It’s like professional wrestling without the muscles.  Obama, now he gets to play the ‘liberal’.  And John McCain, he gets to play the ‘conservative’.  Oh and how they fight and scrap and holler!  The fate of civilization as we know it is at stake!  Next Sunday they square off in a steel cage match!  And then the bankers come by demanding trillions of dollars in bailouts and they both drop everything and say ‘oh yes sir!’ 

We have politicians labeled as what they are not, but the overwhelming monolithic power of corporate media makes it almost impossible to fight this.  After all this time, many people still believe that Obama is a liberal but only because he is officially labeled as such, there is no objective evidence to support that.   We have politicians proposing bills that they know won’t pass in order to gain political points – and when they are in a position to get the votes, they suddenly lose interest.  Politicians are allowed to vote against things they are for, in backroom deals designed to buff their manufactured image.  The government can’t do something that benefits the average American because it’s too hard, or the government is incompetent, or someone looked at me funny – but something that benefits the super-rich?  In that case the government is a streamlined focused paragon of efficiency.  The Republicans campaign against Obama’s amnesty for illegal immigrants – and once they win the midterm elections, they push to make sure Obama’s amnesty is funded.  Not to worry though, the Republicans will eventually propose a bill addressing the issue that they know will be vetoed.

In the old days, before journalism became corrupt, there were three laws for evaluating a politician. 

1. Examine the record.

2. Examine the record.

3. Examine the record.

So what’s Elizabeth Warren’s record?  Well the corporate press calls her a tireless champion of the middle class.  The corporate press says a lot of things.  Is she?

Much is made of her tenure on the consumer protection bureau.  She made a lot of speeches.  But nothing came out of it that in any way discomfited the rich.  Much is made of her criticizing Wall Street.  But she was part of the TARP bailout oversight panel, and while she talked a good game, nothing stopped the big banks from screwing over the economy and grabbing trillions of dollars in bailouts.  I see no objective evidence that anything she actually did in any way inconvenienced Wall Street. 

So maybe it would have been impossible for anyone in Warren’s position to do anything useful.  And maybe she talked a good game but was careful to never actually do anything that might build momentum and hurt the big bankers.  I don’t read minds.  But I see no objective evidence to rule out possibility number two.

Here’s a rule of politics: never really trust a politician unless they have objectively, and seriously, injured the prospects of what they claim to be against.  Otherwise, it might be just another act.

And there are other issues.  Elizabeth Warren is for an open borders immigration policy that will make most workers poorer and the rich much richer.  She is for endless pointless wars whose only possible objective is to enrich politically connected defense contractors.  These are not classical liberal positions.

Of course looking at the donors can be instructive.  Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who with 20/20 hindsight are both vile and disgusting corporate whores, received massive funding from Wall Street.  Warren apparently not so much, but after things like the Citizens United case this is getting hard to track.  She is getting boatloads of cash from a lot of rich people, that much is clear.  Remember also that, increasingly, political campaigns don’t run on donations per se – they run on favorable coverage in the corporate-dominated press. 

I mean, suppose you are a politician and you raise a million dollars.  You run a few TV ads and send out some fliers.  But the press doesn’t cover you, except to maybe run a series on your divorce ten years ago, or show you picking your nose.  Your opponent raises a half-million dollars – and every day they are shown on the front page looking official and poised, and articles are breathless about their gravitas and experience and compassion… It would have cost a billion dollars to buy that kind of publicity.  Guess who’s going to win?  Yes, campaign money still has its place in American politics, but the center of gravity has shifted to the corporate controlled press.  That is now the arm of decision in politics, not nominal campaign fundraising.

So to conclude, no, I don’t have any proof that Elizabeth Warren is yet another sweet talking corporate con-artist like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.  I see reasons to be suspicious, but no smoking gun.  But the gross betrayals of Obama should make us cautious of any politician who is telling us what we want to hear, and whom the rich are not censoring…

The amount of disinformation out there may have made it basically impossible for any non-insider, no matter how intelligent or skeptical, to make an objective assessment.  And surely that is the major political issue of the day.  There is no democracy if the American people do not know what they are voting for.

Do I have a solution?  No.  But I propose that, more than any other issue, the corporate press needs to be broken up.  Media news outlets cannot be owned by large conglomerates, they cannot be joined with other classes of businesses, they should not be owned or controlled by foreign nationals.  Until that is done, I do not see that the people will be any match for an increasingly sophisticated and dishonest system of organized propaganda.

--------------------

UPDATE May 13, 2015.  Well as expected the utterly vile TPP corporate coup de tat has passed the first hurdle int he senate, but it is beginning to look like Elizabeth Warren may be the real deal.  It's so hard to tell nowadays - it's all opposition theater, they pretend to fight something and then when they get a chance they vote for it etc.  But in the fight against TPP Warren showed what appeared to be genuine spunk. 

Also, the mainstream corporate press is starting to be a little less polite towards her.  When Obama lied about the TPP being secret ('how dare anyone say that this secret trade agreement is secret!  You must be lying!'), and Warren called the sleezebag president on it, a lot of corporate papers came up with things like 'And Warren embarrassed herself by suggesting that the sainted Obama was not telling the truth about the top-secret trade treaty that it is a felony to leak to the general public being actually completely open and transparent.'

Look to see how this goes.  If Warren is in fact the real deal, it will get ugly.  They will find something in her background - something that would not get the time of day if committed by an Obama or a Clinton - and hammer, hammer, hammer, to destroy her credibility via pure mudslinging.

If you ever feel that Elizabeth Warren - or any politician - is on your side but you feel pressure from all these news articles that somehow they are just not 'credible', well, get over it and send them money and vote for them, dammit.