Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Our Nobel Peace Prize Laureate president has presided over the aggressive prosecution of government whistle blowers. The FDA is just taking their cue from the top.

The rot starts at the top.

I assume the Noble Laureate himself explicitly sets the cues to be taken. Even the gushing puff-piece profiles make it clear he's a tireless control freak.

I'm sorry to hijack my own post, but the thing that really interests me most about this is the human potential to consciously step away from cruel absurdities. It does happen, although rarely, and the exercise of that potential looks truly revolutionary.

A Mass exodus

It's biblical ain't it

These exist seems to roll from the bottom up
Even if triggered by a smal out of here move from anywhere up the ladder

The notion of middle management walking out in signifigant numbers
Behind a middle mangement Moses seems far less intuitive them

Adowning of the tools at the base after similar emblematic walk out

Could be another useful application
Of the maxim

If you have onlyyourchains to lose ...

Empires would collapse to dust if there was ever a mass walk out in any of them. Hasn't happened in thousands of years. There may be the occasional sell out, rebellion or slave revolt, but the slave pen keepers usually do their jobs efficiently and with zeal.

Yet the conventional wisdom remains that government officials could never successfully conspire against the interests of the American people on behalf of outside entities. Someone will always blow the whistle if that happens and that whistle blower will be given all the attention he deserves.

Agreed, Sean. I'd been musing over Iceland's general strike/no confidence movement of a few years back. But of course Iceland isn't an empire and has never devoted nearly as many resources to a security control state. For something similar to happen here... it's close to fantasy.

Al wrote: ...it's close to fantasy.

Plus, there's football, or more properly, Football!™

Spectacular functions, even and especially the evolutionary and historically developed ones which don't require conspiracy thinking, exists because they work.

That cracked me up, Jack. In a good way.

My working thesis is there's no lasting step towards a better country without a general disposition to ridicule cruel absurdity and walk out on its promoters. And I figure I might as well shoot for the stars in the circumstances that obtain right now, so I'll add a general disposition to make sure those who walk out don't pay a price for doing the right thing.

Sean
Must know the deservedly famous line of David Hume

Exodus is not an option to any nation's exploited class
In particular when exploited by their own national brothers and sisters

And I agree the crumbling of an existing state system is rare

However mass walk outs one corporation or corporate cluster at a time

That can happen. We can make it happen if we plan catefully and we organize
Persistantly and effectively
I'm sure Sean agrees With this

I've been thinking for a very, very long time now ...one of the things we really, really need to do, is to create a very safe place for our whistleblowers.

For one, fucking ENORMOUS EXAMPLE, there are no safe places (certainly, Unions have never even been allowed to be whispered amongst them) for those doing the monetary accounting.

I'm thinking both: of Ciara (sp?) the young Irish American (Massachussetts (fuck the spelling), UZ "home town" if I'm not mistaken (Bulger Brothers residence also) grunt military tenderly young woman bean counter, shot in the head in "safe quarters" in Afghanistan, ..... also of that movie, something about a train, where di nero play a bounty hunter ..............

www.militarytimes.com/valor/army-cpl-ciara-m-durkin/3078209/ :

Durkin’s sister, Fiona Canavan, told The Boston Globe that military officials have told the family she was found shot in the head inside a secure area at the base. Canavan said her sister was near a church at about 6:30 p.m., after the fall of darkness.

“The family has been informed that she was in the compound, and she was shot in the head,” Canavan told the newspaper. “She was in a secure area of the compound, which, even though the investigation is not complete, leads the family to believe it was what is called friendly fire,” she said.

The National Guard had said Sept. 30 in a statement that Durkin was killed “in action” and that the incident was under investigation. A Guard spokesman, Maj. Jack McKenna, told the Globe that the term “in action” means “that she was killed in Afghanistan and she wasn’t killed at home.”

Canavan said her family was meeting with U.S. officials and also speaking with Irish officials about the investigation of the death of her sister, who was born in Ireland and moved to Massachusetts when she was 9 years old.

Canavan said the family’s Army liaison said it could take as long as eight weeks for the investigation to be completed.

[Ciara] Durkin was a 1996 graduate of Fontbonne Academy in Milton, and joined the Army National Guard in October 2005 after getting laid off from her information technology job at Fenway Health, her family told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy.

The family said Durkin was credited last April with helping save[ d] t he li fe of a contract>or who fell 26½ feet after slipping off a ladder in the building where she worked. Her duties included making sure the finances of soldiers were in order and that their families were getting benefits.

“She wanted to be somewhere where she could help,” Fiona Canavan told The Ledger. “She felt it was an important job.”

www.liveleak.com/view?i=f5c_1191574173:

Soldier who told family to investigate if killed, is shot in the head Ciara Durkin warned her family before returning to Afghanistan, "If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated."

What seemed a joke at the time could have been eerily prescient as Durkin, a National Guard specialist, was found dead, shot once in the head, within the fortified walls of Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The Pentagon is releasing no details aside from confirmation that Durkin's was a "non-combat" death.

"We just want full disclosure," Durkin's sister Deirdre said on CBS's Early Show Thursday.

Now Durkin's family is demanding an independent investigation and has enlisted the help of Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, who represent their home state of Massachusetts.

Although Durkin was gay, her family does not believe her death had anything to do with that. But Durkin, who worked in a finance office, told her family that she had uncovered some information that would upset other military officials.

"She was in the finance unit and she said, 'I discovered some things I don�t like and I made some enemies because of it.' Then she said, in her light-hearted way, 'If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,'" Durkin's older sister, Fiona Canavan, told The Patriot Ledger. "But at the time we thought it was said more as a joke."

Durkin died last Friday of a single gun-shot wound, but the Army has not said whether a weapon was found near her body. The Defense Department says it is investigating the incident, according to reports.

The family told Television interviewers that they didn't believe Durkin killed herself because she seemed upbeat on a recent trip home. Only hours before her death, Durkin left her brother a cheerful voicemail and sang happy birthday to him, the family told ABC News.

How did that work itself out ‘Master’ John Heinz Kerry? we’ve yet to see the news?

Whoopsie Doopsie!!!! .... accidentally left this off of my last 'post':

(The military [MIC]) is definitely holding back, Canavan told the Boston Herald. As to why we can only speculate.

Thanks for the comments, Diane. I didn't read them carefully enough, the first time through.

There's an evil old tradition of viciously punishing whistle blowers; murder, brutal beatings, terrorizing. The dirty business they reveal seems so ordinary. There would be little consequence over the greater bulk of the empire. The higher-ups might be subjected to a few weeks disgrace, if that, and then move on to some patronage reward.

Al, I should have clarified, but then got too depressed on the reread of Ciara’s death and went to sleep, that I was meaning to tie my posts into Owen’s thoughts about how we might be able to take some of the monsters down.

There are a lot of good people doing grunt bean counting (many because of what was always touted as the presumed ethics in the accounting industry, which - as we can see via the Obscene Fraud winked at/aided and abetted by the Multinational “BIG FOUR” Accounting Firms - has always been pretty much a lie), who have absolutely nowhere to turn but joblessness, and worse, when they uncover the rot.

I would have provided a non-government example, but of course one generally can’t be found, there is no safety for bean counters (generally paid far, far less than many imagine if they stick to any ethics whatsoever).

To my mind, the reason we are looking at the stunning Corporate Thievery and Brutality, we are in the midst of, has much to do with that.

(and there are many, many parallels between the Accounting and the, also never ever-unionized, Legal Industry. Certainly a feature, ... Not, 'a bug.')