Obviously, Oliver is a press. Not as obvious, though, though more important, it is a press that's deliberately not a part of what passes for the artistic, literary, political--or publishing--mainstream. 

 

You can read Oliver's reasons for being by going to the press's Home Page. There, among other things, you'll find these words: "Not for money but for merit. Not for lies but for truth. Not for corpo-America but for those silenced and diminished by it."

 

With aims like those, you can be pretty sure that all the swimming Oliver does is upstream. That takes stamina and also courage. Partly for this reason, Oliver comes up with slogans now and again--for focus and also for courage.
 
One of them is a single word: "Onward!"
 
Another is about writing: "Every sentence must be an event."
 
And one is about truth-telling: "A  truth known but unspoken is a lie."
 
That last one--"A truth known but unspoken is a lie"--suggests part of why we think so highly of Tim Gatto. With disastrous effect, as we can see almost everywhere around us today, most people are afraid to speak the truth even if they know it. Even worse, they're afraid to believe the truth in the first place.

 

Not so Timothy V. Gatto. And that's why this Special Edition is here right now, in order to bring you Tim's most recent piece of writing--his most recent expression of intellectual passion and of uncommonly powerful human conscience.

 

Forward it anywhere you can. Send it to every one of your friends who is a reader or a thinker. And, while you're at it, tell everybody you know to sign up on Oliver's mailing list. Just as a farmer's field needs seeds, Oliver needs people on its mailing list. Help us out, please!

 This is the end of one era and the beginning of another. The "real" world that so many people believe in here in America is not the world you see on your TV sets--that's the world that the government and the media want you to believe in. We are so accustomed to believing in our own American ideology that we can't understand the ramifications of what we have done. So many people in this country continue to believe that what we have done can't be undone. This is the reason we have come to this point. We are not "invincible." We are not "exceptional." We must abide by the same financial tenets that the rest of the world must obey. We cannot spend above our means. We cannot spend 1.4 trillion dollars on the military and get nothing back. We cannot give trillions in fiat money to prop up the bankers and financiers on Wall Street.
 
The only ones benefitting from this spending spree America is going through are the families that own the banks that make up the Federal Reserve. Of every fiat dollar that is printed, six cents ends up in the transnational banks of these families. We have mortgaged our own nation to the same people we fought the Revolutionary War against. To me, the worst President in the world was Woodrow Wilson. I hope he rots in hell. Like Obama, that man reneged on almost everything he said he stood for. He was pressured into the First World War, a war we should have stayed out of. He also let us become slaves of a Central Bank. Instead of printing our own money, we were now faced with printing money that included an automatic debt.
 
I believe that the only reason our government is waging these incessant wars and spending money that they don't have is so that the rest of the countries in the world remain afraid to refuse to take dollars as payment for oil and other imports. The minute one nation refuses to accept dollars, there will be a cascade of other countries that will follow suit. That will trigger hyper-inflation and our dollar will be worthless. No more cheap imported oil. No more cheap electronics. No more spending on infrastructure. We won't have a pot to piss in.
 
Undoubtedly the United States will launch a major war. Even they can't understand that the petroleum to run the war machine has to be paid for. Ask the Japanese in WW2 how that worked out for them. We will be thrown into the same circumstances that the Soviet Union faced in the last great super-power meltdown. The break-up of the United States will be a huge probability. If you think that the families that own the Federal Reserve are going to bail us out, think again. They have seen empires come and go. No, they won't back us up, they'll just buy everything in this country in a huge fire sale with the money they made by putting us in debt.

 

This recent fiasco concerning health insurance really made me understand that most Americans have no idea what is really important. The minuscule amount of money compared to the defense budget and the bail-outs is not the important issue here. The selling out of our nation by Congress and the Executive Branch is the real problem. Giving away our nation's treasure to financial insiders that produce nothing but debt and supporting military adventures that produce no lasting results is what is killing this nation. We can't continue to go trillions of dollars in debt every year and continue to enjoy the standard of living that we enjoy in America. That day is coming to a close. Get used to it.
 
The other problem this nation faces is the timidity of the "Left." It seems that the so-called left in this country can't get involved enough to speak out. Where are all the people that protested the Iraq War? Where is the outrage on this war for an oil pipeline in Afghanistan? The Taliban don't want to attack the United States, they just want the "foreigners" out of their country. Afghanistan is funny like that; look at what they did to Alexander "The Great." Let me tell Olbermann and Maddow and all the Daily Koster's that Obama is not your friend. Supporting this so-called "progressive" is like the old socialists that supported Hitler. Hitler called himself a "socialist" but he was a Nazi. Obama may call himself a "Progressive" but he is a fascist. Most of our politicians are. Our government is in collusion with corporations that will ride this gravy train to the very end. Let the left stay quiet and when the toilet flushes on the United States, they can take it up with the tea-baggers or some other right wing coalition.
 
All I can say is that we had better start treating what is happening to this country with all the seriousness that we can muster. We don't have much time; in fact, we may already be out of time. I am loathe to write what I'm writing, but a friend reminded me that we must all continue to speak out. There is no place to hide. Maybe there are some of you out there that are listening.

 

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