Bush sings "José Can You See?" (part 1) - XDTalk Forums - Your HS2000/SA-XD Information Source!

Delija · 05-02-2008, 01:39 AM

I rarely start threads and I never start with a "cut and paste". But since our esteemed moderator Ed Ely seems to endorse the tactic....Ed..This one's for you! LOL

Monday April 21, 2008
(for TomPaine.com)

Psst! George Bush has a secret.

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in
Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to
showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics.
Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks
like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in
toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as
possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the
counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed- Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat.
Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.

Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if
they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush
reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.

The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty
corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

Say what?

As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped intoMexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as
the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler
Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because
Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to
complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is
leading street protests against this greed-grab.

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down
corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re- make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to
adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow,
“we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US ofA.

They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated,
at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a
multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach
homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.

Delija · 05-02-2008, 01:40 AM

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American
Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or
Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will
always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other
misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on
the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales:
self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el
pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity
Council. Get used to it.

Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal
changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three
national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another
NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like,
20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our
economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure.
But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you
can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you
see?”

----
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.

one-eyed-fatman · 05-02-2008, 05:32 PM

Hell that ain't nothing, wait till Canada and Mexico get to start voting in America's elections. DC already gets plenty of champagne contributions from them. Time to dump Bush.

**AZXD** · 05-02-2008, 05:59 PM

Gee,
I wonder how the lock-step playbook says to deal with something like this

Gee, Me pregunto cómo el playbook del cerradura-paso dice ocuparse algo como esto

Gee, Je me demande comment le playbook d'serrure-étape indique pour traiter quelque chose comme ceci

xds&chevys · 05-02-2008, 06:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AZXD

Gee, Me pregunto cómo el playbook del cerradura-paso dice ocuparse algo como esto

Gee, Je me demande comment le playbook d'serrure-étape indique pour traiter quelque chose comme ceci

DON'T CALL ME NAMES!

Delija · 05-03-2008, 08:58 PM

While you'd expect the person that starts a thread to have at least an inkling about the subject matter (at least I would...

.....the truth is, I have NO IDEA AT ALL what to make of all this.

But I did think the allusion to Dresden was somewhat appropriate and a very sad statement of this administration's priorities. Or maybe that's not fair either....maybe it's not the administration, but their constituents. That would be us. All of us.

So maybe the real bottom line issue is where to lay blame. Is this disastrous state of (current) affairs in New Orleans the administrations fault? FEMA's? Or are we all guilty for not voicing our dismay enough to get things done?

Or is it just another one of those "It's not really so bad, it's just the way the "mainstream media" is making it look.

"Dresden".....what a shameful allusion! (on so many levels).

Peace,
D.

one-eyed-fatman · 05-03-2008, 09:28 PM

OH GOD! I'm just glad you didn't blame me.

**AZXD** · 05-03-2008, 09:31 PM

You're doin a heck of a job, Brownie

Delija · 05-04-2008, 12:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by one-eyed-fatman

OH GOD! I'm just glad you didn't blame me.

Nah, you're responsible for so much other stuff, it wouldn't seem fair.

What's sorta weird is that when I posted the article I had no idea that only a few days later I'd be flying over N.O. - that was yesterday (Sat) afternoon. I hitched a ride on a private plane going from Houston to West Palm Beach. The pilot took us as low as he could so we could sort of see the devastation.

I've never been to N.O. - Closest I ever was was driving I-10 twelve years ago when I drove with my son from out west to Florida when I had a good job opportunity and felt it was a perfect time for a life change (my wife had died one month before and I had no idea which way was up...or how to raise a child by myself). I'm sorry I never stopped on that trip ....thought about it at the time, but was tired of driving and felt like we were finally getting close to Florida - didn't know that after Miss. and Alabama (seemed about 5 minuted each on the highway...LOL), that from the Alabama border to SE. Florida (Boca), Florida is almost as big a drive as Texas from El Paso to Louisiana!!!

)

Anyway, it was quite a sight even from pretty high altitude.

I was also extremely impressed with the Houston suburbs....I'd been to the city before, but I must have flown in at night 'cause I had no recollection of seeing what Houston's outlying and close-in residential areas were like...truly impressive. It's amazing how much money so many people have in this country.....then to see N.O. virtually only minutes later....the dichotomy was mind blowing.

Peace,
D.

Brickboy240 · 05-05-2008, 08:01 AM

Excuse me, but the displaced New Orleans residents are NOT just roaming America...they are alive and well and committing crimes as fast as they can here in Houston. Our crime rates soared right after Katrina and the busloads of refugees that we took in.

Oddly enough, some of our clients that still live and work in New Orleans say that the city seems less dangerous and a bit "cleaner" than it was before Katrina. Imagine that.

There is not ONE PART of the Katrina disaster that the current administration got right. Not one part. From no help in strengthening the levees in the decades prior to FEMA's dismal actions after the levees broke. They bungled New Orleans from start to finish.

However, the amazing thing is not the pass that the Bush Admin. gets on handling Katrina, but the pass that Ray Nagin and Kathlene Blanco got on their bumblings during Katrina. They even re-elected Nagin! How crazy was that?

New Orleans stands as a shining example of what happens when decades of leftists run a state and city into the ground as they surely did. But do they get any blame for the decades of inactions and corruption in New Orleans or LA in general. Nope! It all FEMA and Bush's fault!

As long as the state of LA and the city of NO do not see where the problems lie and refuse to fix them. they will never fully recover. Fixing what ails NO will take decades and the undoing of the way things have been run there for decades.

- Brickboy240

05-02-2008, 01:39 AM	#1
Delija XDTalk 3K Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: South Florida Posts: 3,943	Bush sings "José Can You See?" (part 1) I rarely start threads and I never start with a "cut and paste". But since our esteemed moderator Ed Ely seems to endorse the tactic....Ed..This one's for you! LOL Monday April 21, 2008 (for TomPaine.com) Psst! George Bush has a secret. While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico. You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons: First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America. The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council. Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed- Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe. And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.” Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits. Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s. Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does. The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods. Say what? As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped intoMexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade. Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab. I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re- make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming. Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.” There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US ofA. They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders. __________________ It is what it is - Frenchy, 2008

05-02-2008, 01:40 AM	#2
Delija XDTalk 3K Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: South Florida Posts: 3,943	Part 2 The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly. So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it. Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century. Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?” ---- Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. __________________ It is what it is - Frenchy, 2008

05-02-2008, 05:32 PM	#3
one-eyed-fatman XDTalk 5K Member Join Date: Mar 2004 Posts: 9,865	Hell that ain't nothing, wait till Canada and Mexico get to start voting in America's elections. DC already gets plenty of champagne contributions from them. Time to dump Bush. __________________ http://home.houston.rr.com/gunpics/images/one%20eye.wav

05-02-2008, 05:59 PM	#4
AZXD XDTalk 5K Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Valley of the GUN Posts: 9,974	Gee, I wonder how the lock-step playbook says to deal with something like this Gee, Me pregunto cómo el playbook del cerradura-paso dice ocuparse algo como esto Gee, Je me demande comment le playbook d'serrure-étape indique pour traiter quelque chose comme ceci __________________ Voting for Obama is like putting a gun to your head and hoping he calls for its confiscation before you can pull the trigger - AZXD This election is really about ... The Best Democracy Money Can Buy ... And Obama will attempt to prove it to all of us. - AZXD Oh good grief. AZXD .... you never fail to amaze me at what you will do to stir the pot. - KEVWYO I stirred nothing. Talk to your candidate and tell him I said he could go F himself. - AZXD

05-03-2008, 08:58 PM	#6
Delija XDTalk 3K Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: South Florida Posts: 3,943	While you'd expect the person that starts a thread to have at least an inkling about the subject matter (at least I would........the truth is, I have NO IDEA AT ALL what to make of all this. But I did think the allusion to Dresden was somewhat appropriate and a very sad statement of this administration's priorities. Or maybe that's not fair either....maybe it's not the administration, but their constituents. That would be us. All of us. So maybe the real bottom line issue is where to lay blame. Is this disastrous state of (current) affairs in New Orleans the administrations fault? FEMA's? Or are we all guilty for not voicing our dismay enough to get things done? Or is it just another one of those "It's not really so bad, it's just the way the "mainstream media" is making it look. "Dresden".....what a shameful allusion! (on so many levels). Peace, D. __________________ It is what it is - Frenchy, 2008

05-03-2008, 09:28 PM	#7
one-eyed-fatman XDTalk 5K Member Join Date: Mar 2004 Posts: 9,865	OH GOD! I'm just glad you didn't blame me. __________________ http://home.houston.rr.com/gunpics/images/one%20eye.wav

05-03-2008, 09:31 PM	#8
AZXD XDTalk 5K Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Valley of the GUN Posts: 9,974	You're doin a heck of a job, Brownie __________________ Voting for Obama is like putting a gun to your head and hoping he calls for its confiscation before you can pull the trigger - AZXD This election is really about ... The Best Democracy Money Can Buy ... And Obama will attempt to prove it to all of us. - AZXD Oh good grief. AZXD .... you never fail to amaze me at what you will do to stir the pot. - KEVWYO I stirred nothing. Talk to your candidate and tell him I said he could go F himself. - AZXD

05-05-2008, 08:01 AM	#10
Brickboy240 XDTalk 5K Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Houston, TX, USA Posts: 8,322	Excuse me, but the displaced New Orleans residents are NOT just roaming America...they are alive and well and committing crimes as fast as they can here in Houston. Our crime rates soared right after Katrina and the busloads of refugees that we took in. Oddly enough, some of our clients that still live and work in New Orleans say that the city seems less dangerous and a bit "cleaner" than it was before Katrina. Imagine that. There is not ONE PART of the Katrina disaster that the current administration got right. Not one part. From no help in strengthening the levees in the decades prior to FEMA's dismal actions after the levees broke. They bungled New Orleans from start to finish. However, the amazing thing is not the pass that the Bush Admin. gets on handling Katrina, but the pass that Ray Nagin and Kathlene Blanco got on their bumblings during Katrina. They even re-elected Nagin! How crazy was that? New Orleans stands as a shining example of what happens when decades of leftists run a state and city into the ground as they surely did. But do they get any blame for the decades of inactions and corruption in New Orleans or LA in general. Nope! It all FEMA and Bush's fault! As long as the state of LA and the city of NO do not see where the problems lie and refuse to fix them. they will never fully recover. Fixing what ails NO will take decades and the undoing of the way things have been run there for decades. - Brickboy240 __________________ NOBAMA 2008...neo-Marxism is a very poor substitute for pretend conservatism! Es mejor morir a pie que vivir arrodillado Volvo...the Swedish Brick!

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