There are a few people I like to listen to regularly for news about the economy, or simply a different take on reality. They are: economist Max Keiser, who blogs for HuffPost, as well as regularly interviewed on Al Jazeera, the BBC and on his site's podcasts (www.maxkeiser.com), Ali G (check out ALL of his interviews on You.tube, especially the one with Gore Vidal which is extremely relevant these days), Naomi Klein interviews (also on Youtube) and, just recently, because BOTH Max Keiser and Naomi Klein had been interviewed by him, I now listen to Alex Jones on www.infowars.com or his Prison Planet radio show out of Austin. Being a fellow Texan, I also tend to enjoy his tendency to lead into shows with Willie Nelson music, and his comments about local politics. I never thought I would be listening to this kind of radio. But it is here that I meet the rest of outraged America.
What I find absolutely amazing (and frankly exciting) about the fact that someone like Naomi Klein is being interviewed on the Alex Jones show, is that the far left academic rational approach to what is going on in the US has now met the patriot movement at a halfway point...and the reason they have been able to do so is because both sides LOVE America! They have also been able to come together because what is going on out there in what increasingly resembles Never Never Land of bank takeovers, spiraling abuses of the Constitution, and a frightening exaggeration of the control state. When Alex Jones asked Naomi Klein who comes from a background of less guns, more gun control, whether or not she thinks it now makes sense to own a possibly use a gun if the FEMA type domestic forces come knocking at your door, (see my recent blog "Controlling Chaotic Situations: Call Out the Army!" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivian-norris-de-montaigu/controlling-chaotic-situa_b_132985.html.) Klein can now relate to the patriot movement's feel that they must defend themselves against the frightening possibility that our rights will soon be taken away, or even, much much worse.
When I saw Klein's talk at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2007 entitled, "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfobI5nG93A (watch all parts of this talk...she outlines the ten steps which lead to Fascism...and we are almost there...missing only number 10, Martial Law)....I knew she was right. Klein decided to put forth this information because an older friend of hers, a child of Holocaust survivors, told her that what has been going on in the US during the Bush years is similar to what was happening in the 1930s in Germany. I have had conversations since Bush became president, with many older Europeans who also lived through WWII and remember the years leading up to it and they agree.
Staring in June of 2001, I was present at an anti-globalization protest in Gothenberg, Sweden, which took place when Bush Jr. made his first trip to Europe just prior to an EU conference. There were over 500,000 well-organized protesters present. The world leaders were kept far from the protesters, and the hotel/conference complex was surrounded by two layers of fencing and security which made it possible to participate in the conference without ever knowing that there were 500,00 people in the street. When I asked one of the organizers inside the conference complex about the protesters outside, he looked at me and asked, "What protesters?" The German Shephards and riot gear wearing police were frightening. A high school which was legally being used by young protesters as a hotel, was surrounded by shipping containers, and several people were shot at with rubber bullets. A few months later, in Genoa, a young Italian male protester was killed...and just after that, we had 9/11...and the end of such large protests and a shifting of the anti-globalization energy, and protest movement, to the internet. Watch out that the internet does NOT get shut down!!!
It was also at this event in Gothenberg that I met my first older European who warned me that we were facing a moment very similar to the 1930s. An Swedish woman protester in her 80s told me that she had not seen this kind of situation not felt this kind of inequality in wealth and power since 1933. Then, later that summer, a Swiss-Italian man running a chalet hotel in the Alps spontaneously told me the same thing. Two years later, post 9/11, a retired Dutch Professor from Erasmus University, and a mentor of mine, who had served in the Resistance during WWII and had been caught by the Nazis and put in a camp (from which he escaped) also said that the times reminded him of 1933. These people KNOW because they lived through it! They remember what we do not know, or what we have forgotten!
I was visiting LA three years ago, sitting in a Beverly Hills Chinese restaurant, an expensive one, with my then partner and some of his friends...and as I looked around, I thought to myself, this cannot continue...this kind of decadence and wealth at this level is not sustainable...most people cannot, do not live this way. As I live in Europe, the pronounced wastefulness of the lifestyle there in Beverly Hills, seemed even more impossible. I had seen a similar kind of wastefulness growing up in the oil culture of Houston. But it is not lasting, it is a dying way of living (or not really living, avoidance of really living). One of the main reasons I could not remain in that LA, with my then partner, was the lifestyle felt hollow and wasteful. Botox kissing collagen, hedge fund scratching the back of media, everyone pretending to be a real estate agent flipping this and that, the immigrant workers heading down the hill at 5 pm as the Mercedes headed up to somewhere which was nothing like a true home. People criticized me for leaving and not liking it and heading back to Europe. I am an American, but that is and never was, my America. We are better than this. We are not these greedy wasteful spoiled people. We are ALL Patriots!
Now we need to take back our country! Obama, you need to help us! VOTE!!!