Iraq: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Screwed?

This month, our combat troops of United States military withdrew from Iraq after nearly a decade of killing 100,000 Iraqi citizens of all persuasions, being murdered themselves by insurgents who infiltrated past check points, thousands were killed or maimed by countless IEDs, and, as time plays out over 100,000 American combat troops are predicted to commit suicide from their brains being scrambled by the horrors of war.  Thousands of marriages will fail and countless children will suffer the horrors of war as their fathers live in Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome purgatory.

As to the first question of who won: no one.  As to the second question of who lost: everyone.  As to the third question of who got screwed: America’s military and America’s sons and daughters that served.

Of all the stupid, needless, meaningless and painful wars the United States has created, George W. Bush and the Military Industrial Complex, along with other war profiteers should be sent to prison for their lies, fraud and deception against the American people.  “Weapons of Mass Destruction” will become the poster-phrase for our leaders lying, cheating and swindling the American people.  George W. Bush cajoled, coaxed and coerced us into war with Iraq.

The German Nazi beast Hermann Goring said it 60 years ago:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.  But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Vietnam killed 58,300 kids, wounded 350,000 young men and created havoc across our country. It started our national debt into the trillions of dollars. It split families and it too was based on a lie:  the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon Baines Johnson the “reason” to massacre over 2.1 million Vietnamese in 10 years of war.  No negotiation, no conversation, no attempt at understanding—just go in to Nam and blast them back into the stone age.  Trouble was—they pretty much lived in the Stone Age in the first place.  Because of his sickening choice, Johnson died of depression and a very sick and sad man the last years of his life.  He actually “got it” as to what he did.  It will be interesting to see if former President George W. Bush ever “gets it” as to the astounding amount of death and horror he created.  He may end his life inside a bottle of booze where he started it.

From the war in Vietnam, I wrote a piece showing a doctor’s research whereby somewhere over 175,000 to as high as 225,000 American combat troops that left Vietnam in one piece, killed themselves from their emotional wounds from their service in Vietnam.  The alcoholism and drug addiction from that war grew beyond imagination. It continues today in veteran homelessness, poverty, broken families, drug and alcohol use and nameless children that never enjoyed a healthy father.

The human misery that George W. Bush created in Iraq and Afghanistan may go much higher than 225,000 suicides of U.S. troops.  If you start counting the human misery of 2.5 million Iraqi refugees and incredible displacement of their society, the human misery factor extends off the charts.

As you noticed this past week, the Sunni and Shiites are already bombing each other into more violence.  One bomb in Baghdad killed 69 people and wounded over 100 others.  Sectarian violence will continue.

Our “moment” (10 years) over there might be likened to a person sticking his or her hand into a bucket of water. While our hand remained in the water, the level of the water changed and we created cause and effect.  When we withdrew our hand, it all returned to the same as before we left.  As Richard Engel said to NBC’s Brian Williams on Friday, “Their sectarian violence is just beginning and will implode Iraq.  Iraq’s President Maliki cannot control what’s coming.”

In other words, their endless tribal wars will re-convene.  Which means, all our nearly $1 trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money will have gone for all the death and destruction—for nothing.  In the meantime, our own country’s educational systems, infrastructure and cities crumble before our eyes.

Saddam Hussein was no more a threat to the United States than a baby in a sandbox 10,000 miles away.  To remain in Afghanistan for 10 years defies logic, reason and common sense.  If we are to be the police-nation of the world to bring all the dictators to justice, we would have to attack, occupy and dominate North Korea, China, Pakistan, Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and two dozen other countries around the world.  It’s absolutely absurd what we allowed the Military Industrial Complex to perpetrate on our citizens and our country.

But because we now support an all volunteer army, no one blinks at the deaths and costs.  More disturbing, we spend more money on war than most of the rest of the world combined.  In the meantime, we suffer 42 million functionally illiterate Americans, 46 million Americans living on food stamps, another 15 million unemployed and 13 million children living in poverty.  We’re losing the middle class while our prisons house 2.3 million suffering souls.  We have millions of foreclosures of homes for Americans and we can’t pay our teachers a decent wage while our schools fail.

When will this president address America’s rebuilding?  When will this Congress “attack” America’s problems?  When will Americans speak up for America’s future?

When will 535 members of Congress grow a brain, spine and conscience to represent peace, common sense and reason?  When will we elect presidents that studied history, learned critical thinking and understood logic?  When will America become an instrument of peace in the world?

If I were a betting man, some president in the future will “create” another war guided by the Military Industrial Complex that creates another generation of suicides, fatherless families, plastic legs, arms and PTSD military veterans.  And the American people?  Too apathetic to get off the couch to speak up against war!

Why Continue Two Useless Wars?

Our young kids have fought two wars for ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Total cost exceeds $1 trillion.  Result:  horrific deaths on both sides, destruction and no resolution.  Does anyone know or understand why we sent 6,200 kids to their deaths and another 40,000 brought back home without legs and arms or their minds? We can expect a minimum of 100,000 post-war suicides from combat troops with scrambled brains.  That doesn’t count the ones that stumble forward with alcohol, drugs and poverty.

Did we stop terror?

Suicide bombers and killers blow up churches, government buildings and outposts as regularly in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011 as they did in 2001.  No leader in the United States understands that Muslims will defend their lands against Americans until the last one dies.  We would have to kill every single last one of them to win.

Did we bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan?

Iraq and Afghanistan cannot agree on a constitution or path toward peaceful co-existence any more than a bunch of 5^th graders arguing over a jar of cookies.  Karzi is a puppet of the United States.  We send endless billions of dollars to prop up him and Malaki.  We might as well flush that money down a New York City sewer.

Did we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

We found not one single weapon worthy of such fear to go in and blow up an entire country on George W. Bush’s whim.  He caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and 2.5 million refugees.  What he did to Iraq and its citizens defies human understanding.   Lyndon Baines Johnson did the same thing to Vietnam. He killed 58,267 kids while he blew up another 2.1 million Vietnamese.  In his book Fog of War 35 years later, the architect of Vietnam Robert McNamara said, “I made a mistake.”

George W. Bush is too stupid or inept to write a book on how brainless his decision to destroy Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be.  A full 17 of the purported hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.   Bush should have attacked Saudi Arabia and destroyed that country.

However, overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was an inside job.  If it was, George Bush should be brought to trial for crimes against humanity and America.

Iraq provides yet another example of stupid men in power doing stupid things for stupid reasons with incredibly painful outcomes for millions of innocent people, children and countries.

Are we any safer from terror in the United States after 10 years of war?

More terrorists reside in the United States from our irrational immigration policies than ever before.  We’ve got 40,000 MS-13 gang members in 35 states selling drugs to millions of our kids.  (Source: Newsweek)  We have 10 million illegal alien Mexicans stealing jobs from Americans and breaking our laws while we pay for their medical, educational, babies, prison and food needs.  We import 2,000 Muslims per month from places like Palestine, Iraq and Somalia—as refugees—any of them potential terrorists.

Note that Iranian-American immigrant Manssor Arbabsiar attempted to kill a Saudi ambassador this week. Notice American born MuslimAnwar al-Awlaqi inspired the shoe bomber, underwear bomber, New York Times Square bomber and Major Hasan to kill Americans.

Does anyone think that victory can be won against a religious jihadist Muslim group like al-Qaeda?

We would have to kill most of the Muslim world to kill al-Qaeda.  The Koran dictates that all good Muslims “convert or kill non-believers and Jews.”  That’s the prime directive of Islam.  We can pretend it is a peaceful religion, but every terror event in the world since 1972 has been planned and carried out by Muslims.

If we fight for another 10 years to make it a 20 year war, what will we accomplish?

If the American people sit back and do nothing, the military industrial complex will continue those two wars for another 10 years.  The military won’t win, but it won’t lose, but it will continue fighting and dying as it sacrifices our kids in an endless conflict.   We’ll hear weekly news reports that we’re close to victory, but we need another 40,000 troops.  We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and we don’t want those who have died to have died in vain.   General so and so is making a “new” plan to win the war…ad nausea.

Like corporations that Americans have been protesting against for the past week, the military industrial complex possesses no heart and no conscience.  Young men and women’s deaths mean nothing.

How do we stop those wars, the deaths and the senselessness?

1. We withdraw all our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately.
2. We let their leaders solve their problems.
3. Leaving Muslim lands deletes their reasons for jihad.
4. Enforce our borders with our troops to secure our country.
5. Engage a moratorium on all immigration for 10 years.
6. Use the $12 billion monthly war cost to improve our country.

It’s absolutely crazy to carry on two wars for ten years without any positive result. It’s even crazier to continue fighting them for another 10 years.  It’s even worse that the majority of American citizens lack enough gumption to stand up and speak out against the endless insanity of war perpetrated by our Congress, Bush and now Obama.  In the end, it’s just plain sickening on a mental, physical and spiritual level.

America’s Culpability In 9/11: Military Industrial Complex

This reality pains me more than anyone can understand. I am the son of a career U.S. Marine.  My grandfather served and earned a Purple Heart in WWI.  My father served in WWII and Korea, and died in service. My brother served in the U.S. Army in Desert Storm. I served as a U.S. Army officer during Vietnam.

War is hell and it scrambles men’s and women’s minds.  From the Vietnam War alone, over 200,000 once healthy men committed suicide after coming back from Nam in 1975.  Hundreds of thousands more suffered broken marriages and descended into drugs and alcohol.  The expectations for suicides from Iraq and Afghanistan run into the 150,000 range.  Those suicides can be based on the lunacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon and now, George Bush and Barack Obama.

For the record, I personally know Peter Gadiel the father of a young boy who died in one of the twin towers on 9/11.  His pain continues today because he has battled the U.S. government to stop illegal immigration and secure our borders for 10 year, but they have not.  The incompetence or the “on purpose” path of supporting illegal immigration as well as relentless legal immigration shows a grand design to destroy the sovereignty  and culture of our country by some very powerful elites at the top of the power structure.

My heart goes out to every American and non-American that suffered in the 9/11 massacre.  This past 9/11 Sunday, America mourned.  I mourned.

I love America with every cell in my body. At the same time, I urge a reality check to Americans as to open door for 9/11.  Nothing in this universe or in this world happens without a cause.  We live in a cause and effect world.  Something or some act causes a corresponding reaction.

A bit of history from the United States of America

When the European settlers came to this country, they slaughtered the Native Americans with superior, mechanized violence. It proved deplorable yet humanity tends toward self-aggrandizement.  Conquering human tribes always write history in their own best interest.  They (our forefathers) grouped the Indians into detention camps called “reservations.”  Our forefathers took away their freedoms, cultures, customs, languages, religions and ways of life.  We introduced them booze and small pox.  We broke treaty after treaty with the Indians. We massacred men, women and children. Read Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee if you want to appreciate a really in-depth understanding of white men’s violence toward Native Americans.

They have not recovered.  They live on welfare, on reservations, drink endless booze, live on hopelessness and suffer domestic violence as they attempt and fail to adjust to the white man’s world.  We also turned their pristine continent into a chemical, carbon, paved, polluted and littered trash pit.  Look them in the eyes and one can feel their emptiness.  How can we look in the mirror ourselves and feel nothing?

During Harry Truman’s administration, his advisors cooked up the idea that we should halt communism by fighting in Korea. We jumped in to kill hundreds of thousands while suffering 33,000 deaths ourselves—in a conflict that we had no business entering over 10,000 miles away from our shores.   The Korean War killed countless tens of thousands of people and did absolutely nothing to move the world toward peace. North and South Korea today stand as ardent enemies with no solution.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower finished his two terms as president, he warned about the Military Industrial Complex. Quite simply, that is a group of men and organizations that feed on wars, and as we have seen, they create and engineer wars.  We American citizen did not heed Ike’s words.

Thus, the U.S. Military Industrial Complex created the Vietnam War.  It did not create it to make America safer; those elites created it to make more money and wield their power.  We waged it for 10 years because that’s how long those engineers could manipulate us.  It would still be going if not for the “reaction” of the college students screaming, “Hell no, we won’t go!”

The architect of  Vietnam, Robert McNamara, before he died at 92 a year ago, wrote Fog of War.   He admitted that, “Vietnam was a mistake.”  His mistake killed over 2.1 million Vietnamese and poisoned their country with Agent Orange.  It still causes ecological mayhem and birth defects throughout Vietnam in 2011.  Since we don’t see or feel the consequences, we feel immune to our causing them.

The Gulf of Tonkin fraud provided the pretense for the Vietnam War.  But that’s all it took for Johnson to start bombing and sending 53,267 men to their violent deaths with another 350,000 amputated or maimed emotionally.  The “Silent Majority” felt no culpability for the deaths of 2.1 million Vietnamese any more than it felt culpability for the massacres of Native Americans.  When might we understand that we are not the final “father figure” of the planet?

Then, in the early 1990s, we stuck our noses into Kuwait and Iraq. We killed a few thousand people with our firepower.  We lost just short of 400 kids.  At that time, Osama bin Laden warned us to leave Muslim lands.  Several other imams demanded that we leave Muslim lands or face jihad.   We didn’t believe them because we felt immune to the law of cause and effect.

In 1993, Muslims tried to bomb the World Trade Towers at the basement level.  They failed while bin Laden again warned us to leave Muslim lands.  We still didn’t listen in 1993.   We do not listen in 2011 at what costs to our young men and women?  Answer: 4,200 American soldier (kids) deaths and 42,000 maimed.

On September 11, 2001, not Afghanistan and not Iraq, but 17 of the 19 men from Saudi Arabia hijacked our airplanes and flew them into the towers, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania cornfield.  Some very cogent proof shows that 9/11 was an inside job and that someone in high places concocted the entire terrorist act to get us into another war.  Building #7 collapsed because it was rigged with explosives.

From there we have bombed and killed tens of thousands of “insurgents” in that goat herder country of Afghanistan that lacks a single fighter jet or helicopter.  Isn’t it amazing how the finest army in the world can’t conquer a bunch of illiterate goat herders and poppy seed growers?

Then, as usual, the Military Industrial Complex boiled up “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which allowed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to start bombing a country that did not have any weapons of mass destruction.  They used and made a fool out of General Colin Powell.  Subsequently, Bush/Cheney killed hundreds of thousands as they created 2.5 million refugees and contaminated Iraq’s soil and water with depleted uranium “shock and awe” bombs.   I charge George W. Bush and coward Dick “five draft deferments from Vietnam” Cheney with crimes against humanity.  Their total arrogance in the face of Muslim leaders’ warnings borders on Hitler’s megalomania.

In the meantime, Bush and Cheney stroll around their mansions with endless money while our precious, though naïve volunteer soldier/kids walk around with plastic arms, legs and other body parts.  Not only that, 100,000 combat soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan will commit suicide in the coming years as well as suffer horrible broken families and orphaned children.  Of special note, one young man this past week earned the Medal of Honor while millions more earned a PTSD diagnosis. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is another term for having your brains scrambled for life.)

We mourn that dreadful moment on 9/11, yet our own government’s actions and the Military Industrial Complex caused 9/11.   Today, we harbor over 572,000 military personnel on over 700 bases in over 100 countries around the world.  In effect, we foist our standing army into every corner of the Earth. We push our empire onto everybody else’s country without merit and without reason.

The results:  as a nation, we’re broke, in-debt and spiritually vacuous.  We suffer 14 million unemployed while spending $12 billion monthly for two wars of 10 years.  Our schools turn out illiterate kids and our country suffers from insidious malaise such as “flash mobs.”

Our Congress features a 12 percent approval rating and our president suffers from a 46 percent approval rating, worst in the modern era.  He has failed on every pledge to get Americans back to work and bring peace to our country.  Obama’s Nobel Peace prize is a contradiction as he added to and lengthened the war in Afghanistan.  His floundering represents our floundering.  What could that $12 billion monthly war bill do for our citizens within our country?  Plenty!  We have spent over $1 trillion blowing up two ancient countries.

As you now appreciate, 9/11 didn’t occur out of the ether.  By our apathy and refusal to listen to Muslim demands to leave their countries, our government and the Military Industrial Complex caused 9/11.  We’re accountable because we supported Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Iraq with our silence and apathy.

Taking responsibility powers change for a more positive outcome.  Doing nothing as we citizens have done for 50 years—allows the Military Industrial Complex to continue without pause.

How do we stop our Congress, presidents and the Military Industrial Complex from creating and starting more wars?

1.     We need term limits to stop the good old boy network that allows men like Mark Udall, Orrin Hatch, John McCain and Charles Schumer to languish in office for decades, accomplishing little as politicians.

2.     Invite fresh minds and statesmen (women) to move our country forward.

3.     We must elect presidents that honor the Constitution instead of emotions, hunches or other indolent manners of leadership that start wars.

4.     We citizens must cease supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with our apathetic complicity.

5.     We must abandon our ethnocentric arrogance for a 21^st century integrity that understands that all humans matter in their own countries—versus our long standing superior view of America’s power.

6.      May this be America’s time to move toward authentic power with equitable, moral and spiritual actions—understanding that we are part of the human family.  To maintain our current imperialism will invite another 9/11.

Afghanistan and Iraq: Where the American empire dies

History clearly shows that all empires collapse. They fail. They die. They cease to exist because they overextend themselves in wars, in debt, in borrowing and in loss of a comprehension of reality.

Today, the United States embroils itself in three wars that sap and bleed the life blood out of its people, its financial foundation and its understanding of reality. Who created the war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was it 9/11? Was it bin Laden who demanded we leave Muslim lands long before 9/11 or was it the Military Industrial Complex that continues to maintain a strangle hold on Congress and the last two presidents?

What on earth gave George Bush the right to savagely attack a sovereign nation like Iraq with no evidence whatsoever of a threat to the United States? The 9/11 gang came from Saudi Arabia. How did he maneuver the American people to support such insane violence of his famous “Shock and Awe” campaign? Why is it after 10 years and nothing but death to show for it—the current president continues to spend $12 billion a month of borrowed money to carry on such death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan? What incredible immorality!

Why do they pretend success is just around the corner? Why do they want our troops to stay because they don’t want all those deaths to be in vain? Have they ever thought about adding more deaths in vain such as what happened in Vietnam? To date: 6,049 dead American kids in those wars. Over 100,000 people dead in Iraq! It’s just sickening beyond understanding.

Now that bin Laden suffered a head shot…why didn’t they kill him five, six, seven or eight years ago? Is it possible that Congress wanted a “reason” to remain in Afghanistan? Why do we continue in Afghanistan, a backward tribal country that defeated the British, the Russians and now, the Americans with little more than guerilla warfare? Why do we waste one more single American young man or woman? What’s the point?

Somebody or some entity or some corporation holding unlimited financial power that avoids rational thinking and ignores the will of the American people—–continues the wars in the Middle East. It dupes the American people into compliance. It may be the Military Industrial Complex. It may be this president that enjoyed the Nobel Peace Prize shoved into his pocket by a world crying for peace.

But the wars continue with no end in sight. Moms and dads offer their children up to the war machine like sheep to the slaughter, like human sacrifices, like so much unwanted chattel. You see 99 percent of Americans going about their daily lives without even a mention of the wars—but those wars continue killing human beings on both sides—all for nothing.

Henry Kissinger, a man I despise from the Vietnam War era (along with Robert McNamara) said, “Soldiers are dumb pawns. Military men are just dumb, stupid, animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” Henry Kissinger was Secretary of state under Nixon and Chinese trade negotiator while American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.

Senator John McCain said in his stump speeches when he ran for the presidency, “We must fight on toward final victory in Afghanistan.” What a bunch of verbal garbage.

Nixon and Johnson killed over two million people in Vietnam and slaughtered 58,300 young American kids. The “Silent Majority” remained silent throughout all that killing for 10 years. Finally, the college kids of my generations screamed, “Hell no, we won’t go!”

President James Madison said: “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these precede debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.”

Our country bleeds to death daily on a thousand fronts because powerful men in Congress and this president refuse to look at reality. Instead of correcting our educational systems that fail our children, they choose war. Instead of stopping mass immigration that’s buckling the fabric of our civilization, they choose war. Instead of undertaking solutions to solve our ominous energy crisis, they choose war. Instead of giving the truth to the American people, they do everything to obfuscate and cloud the “why” of remaining in three wars. Instead of serving and honoring our finest young men and women who chose to serve their country, our Congress and this president do not serve our young men and women. Instead of honoring their service, the members of Congress use those kids as pawns as mentioned by Kissinger.

The American empire cannot continue and it will not continue. We failed the world and we failed ourselves by allowing our Congress and the past two presidents to act in the most reprehensible and immoral manner to bring about so much death and destruction 10,000 miles away.

We have killed tens of thousands, we have bombed their lands, we have created 2.5 million refugees, we have polluted their soils and we have left them in chaos.

Cost to us? After the Vietnam War, a veteran MD wrote a book showing that 175,000 to 200,000 American combat troops came home with their minds scrambled and committed suicide. The projections for the two current wars show 100,000 suicides will be committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. That doesn’t count the endless stream of drug use, alcoholism and ruined marriages along with horribly emotionally damaged children.

How can so much human misery on such a scale be tolerated and accepted by Americans?

The American War Machine (Video)

By Joe Rogan…

When people say “support the troops” but aren’t fighting to bring them home and get the criminals who run things in check, I wonder how serious they are about helping anybody. Joe Rogan speaks for those who can’t.

-WARNING –

This video contains language that some people may find offensive.

The American Empire Created Bin Laden And Is Killing Itself

“An empire is an immense egotism,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson.

For the past 45 years, the United States, with 570,000 military personnel on 700 bases in 120 countries maintained (s) an empire around the world. America created the Korean, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Iraq Wars. Deaths mounted into the millions. Human suffering registered off the Richter scale of misery.

All of their deaths and our deaths amounted to nothing with a meaning of nothing. All could have been avoided with more intelligent minds at work for peaceful co-existence on this planet.

Fifteen years ago, Osama bin Laden demanded that America retreat from Muslim lands. We ignored him. The Muslim world did not want us in their lands. Bin Laden didn’t want Western culture “polluting” Islamic law and culture. Muslims view America as the “Great Satan” of the Western world. Our women wear what they please. We celebrate in Las Vegas. We encourage women to vote, to speak, seek divorce, to teach, to be independent and run for political office. We accept all races, creeds and colors. We accept homosexuals. We do not allow honor killings, female genital mutilation, promote suicide bombings or arranged marriages.

We failed to leave. Osama bin Laden exacted his revenge. We may have killed him, but we are slowly and effectively killing our civilization. All empires decline from over-extension. Examples: Great Britain, Rome, France, Athens, Germany, Spain and others.

Empires, as Thucydides understood, are diseases. Thucydides said, “The tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, “Would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral.”

As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges said, “I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to fight.”

Nonetheless, the military industrial complex in America wins out in every battle against those who promote peace. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, George Bush I and George Bush II started wars that did nothing but bring massive deaths and casualties to other human beings and Americans. They accomplished nothing whatsoever for freedom or human life.

Goering at the Nuremberg Trials said, “Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.”

Is any American looking at what our own government does to us every decade? What exactly are we fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan? Answer: money, power and greed! None of those wars has anything to do with freedom or terror or rational thinking.

“Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life,” said journalist David Swanson in “War is a Crime.” “If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death. But I’m not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow. Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try. Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was not interested in tracking bin Laden down.”

At what point will Americans sicken of their perpetrating war on other countries, on millions of other people and the contamination of our world with bombs, poisons, anger and revenge? How can we call it good when we killed over 100,000 and up to 200,000 Iraqis? How about the 2.0 million we killed in Vietnam in 10 years. How about the 100,000 or so in Korea? What exactly was the point, purpose and reason?

How can the American people be so easily duped, led over a cliff and jingoistically convinced that they are the chosen ones to go about killing so many other people in self-righteous egoism?

When the American military industrial complex cooks up the next war, and Obama or name-your-president decides to blow up another civilization, what will you say and what will you do? If the past is any indication of the present, you will probably remain a sheep like the rest of America. You will send young men to die in war for nothing.

Craig Loves Ayn – A Love Story Gone Wrong

The film opening for Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” opened recently. My son, Arthur, said he wanted to see it, so we went. Dozens of people I know had waited for decades for this movie to make it to the theater. As reported, the characters were flat. Attempts to draw parallels between the predictions made by Rand in her book of 1958 to what we face today fail both badly and sadly. I was strongly reminded of a conversation I had, years ago, with my former husband about fantasies that don’t work. I would bet Craig was there in the theater on opening night, despite what I am about to tell you.

Craig and I were married and living in Santa Barbara when, one night, Craig asked me in a puzzled voice, “I can’t make my fantasy come out the way I want.” I looked up from the book I was reading. “What?”

Fantasies are part of our inner lives and generally it is a good thing when fantasies remain private. From the look on Craig’s face it was clear he was sincerely puzzled, unable to understand his failure to marshal his not inconsiderable intellect in this task of pure unreality. But, according to what he told me that evening, this was not for lack of trying. His face was crumpled and red. He looked like a man in the throes of an arduous task or badly constipated.

You could see he was hesitating to tell me the details. I waited, attentive, dispassionate.

As expected, Craig’s need for advice overcame any hesitancy to share the details. Others who know Craig have noted his disconnect from what is generally normal. I sensed this would be one such occasion.

“It starts out fine. I’m in the torch of the Statue of Liberty, looking out on New York. Ayn Rand is standing there with me as we gaze out on the city, waiting for the lights to go out.”

If you are not familiar with Rand’s work you need to know the final denouement of the book, “Atlas Shrugged” includes the moment when the lights of New York wink out because her Nietzscheian super-heroes have turned their backs on the world, thus canceling all electric power. Craig fancies himself one of the supermen who gather in Galt’s Gulch, awaiting the awareness of how essential they are to the world to dawn in those Left Behind.

Craig went on, “I am holding Ayn in my arms. She is saying, “No, no, I cannot be unfaithful to Frank and Nathaniel.”

Frank is Frank O’Connor, Rand’s long-suffering husband. Nathaniel is Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s lover, 25 years her junior. Rand inflicted her fantasy life liberally on others, many of them very close to her. Rand lived out her fantasies and coerced those nearest and dearest to her to put up with these fantasies, justifying them as the rational, necessary, logic of her ideas and values. Frank had to leave the couple’s apartment as Branden was arriving to help Rand with her fantasy life.

For details read: Judgment Day by Nathaniel Branden and The Passion of Ayn Rand by Barbara Branden.

By his own report, Craig, the only person who ever stalked Ayn Rand, was obsessed with Rand and jealous of Branden. Craig sent Rand copies of his papers on math, which Rand could not understand and so appreciate. Craig sat for hours in the lobby of her apartment building, dressed in a newly purchased Brooks Brothers suit, his finger nails manicured, hair cut, shoes shined, holding orchids for Ayn for quite some time. He also made himself known to her in ways which resulted in a nasty stay-away letter from her attorney.

Craig’s fantasy continued. “I pulled out two documents to show Ayn. That day I had paid Frank and Nathaniel to end their relationships with her. I handed Ayn quit-claim deeds from Frank and Nathaniel, who, I told her, were even then leaving the city.”

What perplexed Craig, because he could not change it to conform with his fantasy, was Ayn decking him with a fast right and left punch, just as he tries to embrace her.

Craig looked to me for understanding.

I pointed out his fantasy was diametrically opposed to the reality he had experienced. Rand loathed him and adamantly refused to have anything to do with him, by his own report. Perhaps this failure was the rational reaction of his mind when asked to distort reality. Craig paused, considering. Clearly, he did not like the answer provided.

I don’t know if he ever managed to get a different outcome with this particular fantasy, the subject then being dropped.

Emotionally normal people move beyond the ideas of Ayn Rand by examining them in detail and understanding the source of the attraction. But many retain a fondness, in the same category as enjoyed earlier with fairy tales.

When Rand was first writing Nietzsche‘s ideas had more traction, as less was known about psychopathy and the neurobiology of the human mind. People in their late teens and early twenties often go through a period of playing with the idea they are ‘special’ in this way. Most recover.

The assertion some group is superior, possessing a right to live by different standards, expressed itself in two other venues in America during the 20th Century. The first was through the work of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, whose work in what he called ‘public relations,’ also known as propaganda. This became the tool which remade American culture at exactly the time Rand what it meant to be an American. The second came out of the thinking of Leo Strauss, where those ‘destined to rule’ were empowered to take whatever action needed to take control. This is the explicit tool used by the Neoconservatives.

Ideas, theology and philosophy, are early human tools used to create a common set of values and expectations, allowing humanity to function in a world of human design, beyond the hard-wiring of the human brain. But going beyond that small town took humanity onto dangerous ground.

Humanity originates from a human culture of small groups where it was possible for all individuals to know each other well and so reliably predict the behavior of others. Think of this as visual credit-rating, an assessment of reliability, honesty, and other values, which aid survival and provide community safety-nets. The drama of superpersonhood had not yet reared its head. The problem of psychopathy, those whose neurological make up is distorted and who have no conscience, was not yet understood. Many now believe the recurring presence of this haunting icon, the devil, refers to those we now know as psychopaths who do, routinely, refer to themselves as outside the ordinary rules, as supermen.

Rand, herself, by reports from those who knew her, was inclined to ignore reciprocal social obligations, citing various justifications of ignoring the subject. She asserted different rules for her supermen than for ordinary humanity, therefore rejected the Lockean ideas which underlie the foundations of American culture.

The hero of her first work of fiction, The Little Street, was drawn from the example of the most infamous cold-blooded murderer of 1928. “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard,” she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)

William Hickman, Ayn’s chosen model, kidnapped a 12 year old girl, held her for ransom and then murdered her. After chopping her body into parts he extorted money from her frantic father and shoved her body out of the car to be found, the girl’s dead eyes sewn open.

Rand was explicitly aware of the circumstances when she chose Hickman.

The network of social obligations is the basis of all human culture, the original and proven-to-work, strategy which allowed humanity to survive and prosper. Robust social networks arise organically, as discussed in Hayek’s, The Fatal Conceit. The corporate business-model, profiting in any way possible, had nothing to do with human survival. Instead, it has brought us to the brink of annihilation.

America was founded on the ideas of equality for all people, an affirmation of the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, expressed so eloquently in our Declaration of Independence. This idea worked with the Christian beliefs which brought the Puritans and Quakers to a new world where all people would be equal in law, as they are in the eyes of Christ and in nature.

Three times in the 20th Century ideas have been used to convert us to a view which deifies corporations. This line of reasoning has proven potently valuable to the entire Military Industrial Complex, in recent years, especially the Brothers Koch. The first people who should have noticed what they proposed was not free market were the same people who lined up to support them, framed as they were in the Rand Fairy Tale. This is the reason Alan Greenspan was named Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The corporates knew we would not attack ‘one of our own.’

Ideas which consistently create disaster, personal, national and global, should be deleted.  End the Fed.  Enforce accountability by demanding restitution for profits made through fraud.

This article is dedicated to Nathaniel Branden, who recognized Craig Franklin as bizarre while we were in therapy with him, and to Craig himself, who, still trying to achieve his fantasy, illustrated in one story line, how psychopaths impact our world, from the personal to the hidden reaches of corporate profit.

The Walls in Bethlehem, Baghdad and Afghanistan

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters speaks about his passionate campaign for the rights of the Palestinian people and why, more than 30 years after he wrote the globally-acclaimed album ‘The Wall’, he is focusing on another wall – the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank:

Ann Jones, humanitarian aid worker and author of  recently wrote from Kabul, Afghanistan:

“I’ve come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They’re stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) — and they only seem to grow and multiply…What’s called security generates fear.

“How Lies Begat Illusions Begat Lies…you can’t understand the Taliban without knowing about America’s covert operations in the region in the 1980s.Back then, President Ronald Reagan’s administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used “channels built with U.S. money” to install in Afghanistan a friendly government — the Taliban.

“Later, after the George W. Bush administration invaded the country and the U.S. ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government. Thus, this peculiar, well-established fact underlies the current war in Afghanistan: the United States sponsored both sides.

“Only the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called, year after year, for a moral accounting. Its surveys of Afghan citizens consistently find that the people want lasting peace, and to attain it, they would prefer some sort of truth and reconciliation procedure, like the one that took place in South Africa, to cleanse the country and set it on an honest intellectual and moral footing.

“As I write, 4,000 newly arrived U.S. Marines are trudging through the blistering heat of Helmand Province to push back the Taliban so local Pashtuns can turn out to vote next month for Karzai, their fellow Pashtun. What’s wrong with this new Obama strategy? For one thing, in some areas the local Pashtun population has instead turned out to fight against the foreign invaders, side by side with the Taliban (who, it should be remembered, are mostly local Pashtuns). They’re as fed up as anybody with the puppet Karzai. Like millions of other Afghans, they say Karzai has done nothing for the people. But saddled with history, Karzai remains the horse the U.S. rode in on.” [1]

The Hescos of Afganastan and the twelve foot high concrete walls in Baghdad that divide the Sunni and Shia populations-see video here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/mar/17/baghdad.city.of.walls are dwarfed by the 30ft high concrete ones in the ‘Holy’ Land; which is in pieces, Bantustans.

All the builders of these barriers and walls claim that they are democracies and that the walls are all about Security.

All builders of these barriers and walls exhibit the schizophrenic discipline of thinking two contradictory truths at the same time. Coined by George Orwell in “1984” as ‘doublethink’ the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth fabricates lies and the Ministry of Love tortures and kills any it deems threatening. Most threatening of all for Big Brother are those with independent thought.

In 2007, Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.

Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth in the past five years cannot be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation — and to showcase their wares.

“Young Israeli computer scientists and engineers gain their training in the military, and then go on to start the kind of technology companies that have proliferated wildly in Israel and whose products are much sought after abroad. The entire Israeli hi-tech sector and not just military technology per se, is thus an outgrowth of Israel’s hyper militarization. The Israeli economy’s tech sector grew by 20% in 2006 alone, and Israel is now the foreign country with the second most US stock exchange-listed companies. Klein’s point that Israel’s military-derived technologies are an economic growth-driver because they can be tested in situ is correct, but it is insufficient for describing the magnitude of the military’s tremendous penetration of the country’s economy. Palestinians under occupation can indeed be seen as human ‘guinea pigs’ and not just merely military targets, as Klein claims, but the society’s militarization is far more profound than even she suggests.

“After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999…That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector.

“Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion–an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.'”

Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan”–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.”[2]

In July 2005, the International Court of Justice released its Advisory Opinion on the “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

This opinion detailed the court’s findings that the Wall violated Israel’s obligations under international law, that the Wall should be removed, and that Israel ought to lift its travel restrictions on Palestinians. Today, construction of the Wall continues and Israel’s restrictions on Palestinians have only intensified, and we the people who pay taxes in the USA provide “$1.5 million per mile [to construct] the Israeli wall that prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves, which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [3]

On page one of Jeff Halper’s, Obstacles to Peace, A Re-Framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, he wrote, “Missing from Israel’s security framing is the very fact of occupation, which Israel both denies exists…and that ‘security’ requires Israel control over the entire country…rendering impossible a just peace based on human rights, international law, reconciliation.”

International Law also states that military occupation is to be temporary and by what RIGHT can any State claim to put up a WALL on somebody else’s property?

1. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175096

2. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198

3. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007

The Enduring Mystique of the Marshall Plan

Amidst all the stirring political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East the name “Marshall Plan” keeps being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the political advances, which hopefully will be somewhat progressive. But caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.

During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I’ve often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and ignoring the many positive sides. When I ask the person to give me some examples of what s/he thinks show the virtuous face of America’s dealings with the world in modern times, one of the things mentioned — almost without exception — is The Marshall Plan. This is usually described along the lines of: “After World War II, the United States unselfishly built up Europe economically, including our wartime enemies, and allowed them to compete with us.” Even those today who are very cynical about US foreign policy, who are quick to question the White House’s motives in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, have little problem in accepting this picture of an altruistic America of the period 1948-1952. But let’s have a look at the Marshall Plan outside the official and popular versions.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called “communism” stood in the way, politically, militarily, and ideologically. The entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this “enemy”, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign, when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. This return to anti-communism included the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan as a warning to the Soviets. ¹

After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires:

1. Spreading the capitalist gospel — to counter strong postwar tendencies towards socialism.
2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations — a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g., a billion dollars of tobacco at today’s prices, spurred by US tobacco interests.
3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat.
4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist Parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the communists from any kind of influential role.

The CIA also skimmed large amounts of Marshall Plan funds to covertly maintain cultural institutions, journalists, and publishers, at home and abroad, for the heated and omnipresent propaganda of the Cold War; the selling of the Marshall Plan to the American public and elsewhere was entwined with fighting “the red menace”. Moreover, in its covert operations, CIA personnel at times used the Marshall Plan as cover, and one of the Plan’s chief architects, Richard Bissell, then moved to the CIA, stopping off briefly at the Ford Foundation, a long time conduit for CIA covert funds. One big happy family.

The Marshall Plan imposed all kinds of restrictions on the recipient countries, all manner of economic and fiscal criteria which had to be met, designed for a wide open return to free enterprise. The US had the right to control not only how Marshall Plan dollars were spent, but also to approve the expenditure of an equivalent amount of the local currency, giving Washington substantial power over the internal plans and programs of the European states; welfare programs for the needy survivors of the war were looked upon with disfavor by the United States; even rationing smelled too much like socialism and had to go or be scaled down; nationalization of industry was even more vehemently opposed by Washington. The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, to purchase American goods, making American corporations among the chief beneficiaries.

The program could be seen as more a joint business operation between governments than an American “handout”; often it was a business arrangement between American and European ruling classes, many of the latter fresh from their service to the Third Reich, some of the former as well; or it was an arrangement between Congressmen and their favorite corporations to export certain commodities, including a lot of military goods. Thus did the Marshall Plan help lay the foundation for the military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life.

It is very difficult to find, or put together, a clear, credible description of how the Marshall Plan played a pivotal or indispensable role in the recovery in each of the 16 recipient nations. The opposing view, at least as clear, is that the Europeans — highly educated, skilled and experienced — could have recovered from the war on their own without an extensive master plan and aid program from abroad, and indeed had already made significant strides in this direction before the Plan’s funds began flowing. Marshall Plan funds were not directed primarily toward the urgently needed feeding of individuals or rebuilding their homes, schools, or factories, but at strengthening the economic superstructure, particularly the iron, steel and power industries. The period was in fact marked by deflationary policies, unemployment and recession. The one unambiguous outcome was the full restoration of the propertied class. ²

The rising up of the people … and the conservative mind

James Baker served as the Chief of Staff in President Ronald Reagan’s first administration and in the final year of the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He was also Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and Secretary of State under Bush. Thus, by establishment standards and values, inside marble-columned institutions, Baker is a man to be taken seriously when it comes to affairs of state. Here he is on February 3, during an interview by our favorite TV station, our very own shining beacon of truth, Fox News:

“We want to see the people in the Middle East have a chance at democracy and free markets … I’m sorry, democracy and human rights.” ³

Baker has a record of speaking his mind, whether Freudian-slip-like or not. When he was Secretary of State, on an occasion when the Middle East was being discussed at a government meeting, and Jewish-American influence was mentioned, Baker was reported to have said “Fuck the Jews! They don’t vote for us anyway.” ⁴

They couldn’t resist, could they?

News flash: “Judge Mustafa Abdel Jallil, the Libyan justice minister who resigned last week in protest over the use of force against unarmed civilians, said he has proof that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi ordered the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. He would not disclose details of the alleged evidence.” ⁵

Hmmm, let me guess now why he wouldn’t disclose details of the alleged evidence … hmmm … Ah, I know — because it doesn’t exist! How could Gadhafi’s many enemies in Libya resist kicking him like this when he’s down? Or perhaps the honorable judge is simply protecting himself from a future international criminal tribunal for his years of service to the Libyan state? If you read any more of such nonsense — and you will — reach for some of the antidote I’ve been providing for more than 20 years. ⁶

The empire’s deep dark secret

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined,” declared US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on February 25.

Remarkable. Every one of the many wars the United States has engaged in since the end of World War II has been presented to the American people, explicitly or implicitly, as a war of necessity, not a war of choice; a war urgently needed to protect American citizens, American allies, vital American “interests”, freedom, or democracy. Here is President Obama speaking of Afghanistan: “But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” ⁷

This being the case, how can a future administration say it will not go to war if any of these noble causes is seriously threatened? The answer is that these noble causes are irrelevant. The United States goes to war where and when it wants, and if a noble cause is not self-evident, the government, with indispensable help from the American media, will manufacture it. Secretary Gates is now admitting that there is choice involved. Well, Bob, thanks for telling us. You were Bush’s Secretary of Defense as well, and before that 26 years in the CIA and the National Security Council. You sure know how to keep a secret.

Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part II

• In its more than 50 years of revolution Cuba has never reciprocated the US aggression against it; no military or terrorist assaults have emanated from Havana in spite of the many hundreds of CIA aerial bombings, ground attacks, acts of sabotage, and assassination attempts. Oh, did I mention all the chemical and biological warfare? Oddly, the State Department’s list of “State sponsors of terrorism” includes Cuba, but not the United States. The little nation of Cuba has defied all rational odds against its socialist survival.
• The wit and wisdom of Mr. Barack Obama: “To ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad, we all share the belief we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” (December 1, 2008, Agence France Presse) How true. All Americans share that belief, as they rejoice in the strongest military on the planet and a veritable overflowing of prosperity at home and peace abroad.
• Steven Bradbury, Department of Justice lawyer under George W. Bush, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was discussing the legal status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: “The president is always right.” (Washington Post, July 12, 2006)
• “There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to 1. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” – President Lyndon Johnson, 1966
• As the George W. Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling the National Security Council: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.” A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum declared to the New York Times Magazine: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”
• Shortly after Salvador Allende became president of Chile in 1970, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, recorded a conversation in which Secretary of State William Rogers agreed that “we ought, as you say, to cold-bloodedly decide what to do and then do it,” but warned it should be done “discreetly so that it doesn’t backfire.” Rogers predicted that “after all we have said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.”
• “The revulsion against war … will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy.” Charles E. Wilson, 1944. During World War II he held leading positions overseeing the huge US military production effort; after the war he resumed his position as CEO of General Electric, one of the leading defense corporations.
• Remember Ben Tre? That was the Vietnamese village the Americans destroyed in 1968, saying “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” Since then the Americans have been saving towns all over the globe, in Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Nicaragua, Sudan, Iraq, Yugoslavia and more. Then on Sept 11, 2001, someone, no doubt overcome with gratitude, decided to save some Americans. – Bev Currie, Canada
• United Nations Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia was the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Today, Kosovo is independent, because the United States wants it that way, because Serbia is still being punished for its refusal in the 1990s to act like a proper European state displaying subservience to the United States, the European Union, NATO, and capitalism. Independent Kosovo is perhaps the most genuinely gangster-state in the world. It’s led by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, whom a Council of Europe investigation recently accused of being the boss of a criminal operation to kidnap people and steal their kidneys.(sic) (Associated Press, December 14 and 15, 2010) He and Washington, naturally, are on the best of terms.
• “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO in 2001, “this is a military organization. It’s moving towards our border. Why?” He subsequently described NATO as “the stinking corpse of the cold war.” (Associated Press, June 16, 2001; Press Trust of India, December 21, 2007)
• Senator John McCain, re: fighting in Georgia, 2008: “I’m interested in good relations between the United States and Russia. But in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” (Washington Post, August 14, 2008) One really has to wonder at times about the sanity of neo-conservatives, or at least their IQ.
• Re: “collateral damage” produced by US bombing in many countries: Killing innocent bystanders when targeting someone else has long been considered murder in Western law.
• “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” – Voltaire
• “The central aim of the war in Afghanistan — planned well before the attacks of September 11, 2001 — was to take advantage of the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution to assert US domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.” – Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site
• “To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world.” Lord Curzon, British viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898
• Ricardo Alarcon, President of the Cuban National Assembly, stated in 2008: Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.
• Washington’s “Plan Colombia”, launched in 2000, was the militarization of the war on drugs.
• Michael Moore, March 24, 2008: “I see that Frontline on PBS this week has a documentary called ‘Bush’s War’. That’s what I’ve been calling it for a long time. It’s not the ‘Iraq War’. Iraq did nothing. Iraq didn’t plan 9/11. It didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. It DID have movie theaters and bars and women wearing what they wanted and a significant Christian population and one of the few Arab capitals with an open synagogue. But that’s all gone now. Show a movie and you’ll be shot in the head. Over a hundred women have been randomly executed for not wearing a scarf.”
• Michael Collon: “Let’s replace the word ‘democratic’ by ‘with us’ and the word ‘terrorist’ by ‘against us’.”
• The American Century went the way of the Thousand Year Reich.
• Reagan invaded Grenada in October 1983 because he cut and ran from Beirut after the United States lost 241 Marines in the infamous truck bombing. The United States invaded Grenada two days later.
• Noam Chomsky: “The whole debate about the Iranian ‘interference’ in Iraq makes sense only on one assumption; namely, that ‘we own the world’. If we own the world, then the only question that can arise is that someone else is interfering in a country we have invaded and occupied. So if you look over the debate that took place and is still taking place about Iranian interference, no one points out this is insane. How can Iran be interfering in a country that we invaded and occupied? It’s only appropriate on the presupposition that we own the world. Once you have that established in your head, the discussion is perfectly sensible.”
• In late 1997, according to Dana Priest’s book, The Mission, the Bill Clinton White House wanted CENTCOM commander Gen. Anthony Zinni to order his pilots to provoke a military confrontation with Iraq in the no-fly zone by deliberately drawing fire from Iraqi planes.
• Reagan accepted a fateful trade-off when he agreed not to complain about Pakistan’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability in exchange for Pakistani cooperation in helping the Afghan rebels.
• “The presumption of ‘government incompetence’ is seldom a useful assumption in evaluating the behavior of governments. We only reach such a conclusion if we take their official rhetoric at face value. In terms of ‘achieving democracy’, the official rhetoric, Bush has been ‘incompetent’ in Iraq. But in terms of the real agenda — building permanent bases and controlling the oil — he has in fact been successful. I have found that this is always the pattern: some real agenda is always being achieved by the policies in force, despite the apparent bungling in terms of the official agenda.” – Richard K. Moore
• The 9/11 attacks reflected the anger and rage that US foreign policy had produced in the past and then provided the excuse for US officials to continue such policy in the future.

Upcoming talks by William Blum

Saturday, April 2, 7:00 pm
University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, PA
504 East Main Street
Henne Auditorium
Titusville is about 2 hours by car from Pittsburgh and 2 1/2 hours from Cleveland.
For further information call
Or email Mary Ann Caton: 

Thursday, May 19
Paris, France
Conference: “Ethics and US Foreign Policy in the 21st Century”
Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, Amphi B-2
All day, beginning at 9 am
Email me for full schedule

Notes

1. See William Blum’s essay on the use of the atomic bomb ^↩
2. For discussion of various aspects of the Marshall Plan see, for example, Joyce & Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and US Foreign Policy 1945-1954 (1972), chapters 13, 16, 17; Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (1991) passim; Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the world of arts and letters (2000) passim ^↩
3. ^↩
4. The Guardian (London), December 12, 2000; Haaretz (Israel), November 14, 2008 ^↩
5. McClatchy Newspapers, February 26, 2011 ^↩
6. The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case Not Closed ^↩
7. Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009

Capitalism and the Duplicitous Meanings of Democracy

Democracy is a word that is used too recklessly in western culture. Despite the prevalent belief that the meaning of democracy is universally understood, it remains an elusive idea that is not easily implemented.  As a political philosophy, democracy is more closely associated with the socialist governments of Latin America, with Venezuela and Bolivia, than with the United States.

Webster’s Online Dictionary provides seven short definitions for democracy. The fourth definition is the one that comes closest to my own understanding of the term: “Government by the people; a form of government in which supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.” If one accepts Webster’s definition as a starting point for dialog about democracy, there are two main points that must figure prominently in the discussion: democracy is a concept that relates strictly to human beings and that working people, who constitute upwards of 95% of the citizenry, are disempowered and unrepresented.

Judging from these criteria it is apparent that the U.S. is neither a representative democracy nor a democratic republic. For instance, the people have no say in whether or not the nation goes to war. Nor do they have a voice in deciding economic policy. If they did, we would not have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. We would not be bankrupting the treasury to bail out a criminal banking industry, or to finance the privatization of the public domain. We would not bankroll a bloated military or the imperial wars it wages for the financial gain of defense contractors and corporate investors. Like other developed nations, we would have universal health care and publicly-subsidized higher education. Our tax dollars would provide social services rather than corporate welfare and tax cuts for the rich. There would be egalitarianism rather than neo-feudalism. People would matter more than profits.

Not only are our freedoms restricted; they are more illusory than real. We are permitted to choose between political candidates preselected for us by the elite. We have the freedom to choose where we will eat or shop or what kind of car we will drive. We have the freedom to migrate from one job to another, but we have no say in how the work is performed, how much it pays, or how the final product of our labor is marketed. We do not get to decide whether it will be bartered or sold. No matter where you go the workplace is a hierarchal dictatorship. The business owner does not care what you think. You are a replaceable cog in a heartless machine that is designed to profit the owner by exploiting the worker. This is the indisputable legacy of capitalism.

The U.S. political system is controlled by capital. Elections preserve the status quo rather than permit reform or complete political and social reorganization. It is corporate money, not people, that chooses who can compete for office and who will ultimately win. Americans are literally voting in the absence of choice. Most legislators sell themselves to the highest bidder. The electoral system perpetuates the illusion of democracy while actually promoting its opposite: plutocracy.

When the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people and that money is free speech, multinational corporations began outright purchasing legislators who would construct the legal framework for dismantling the social infrastructure in favor of an authoritarian corporate state. Capital replaced people in the political equation. This sleight of hand facilitated stocking the judiciary with corporate sycophants rather than justice-dispensing public servants.

By reifying corporations as omnipotent persons and by equating capital with free speech, the Supreme Court gave corporations and their CEOs enormous power. Since corporations do not have a pulse or a conscience, the courts essentially created sociopathic institutions that are driven by an insatiable lust for profit. Originally, corporations were moderately controlled by government through regulation. But as corporate influence in government waxed, corporations began to lobby for and to win greater deregulation. The revolving door between big business and government gave rise to the corporate state and to unfettered capitalism.

Corporate power expanded. Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets. Money triumphed over people. With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations that were ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy that is eroding civil liberties and killing the planet.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public. And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.

The perversion of democracy permitted non-persons—corporations—to have representation in government by shutting out actual persons. Prostituted by corporate money, politicians put profits above the needs of the people. Capital gained primacy over human beings, and the market was deified as an omniscient, divine oracle. Now it is regarded as a primal force of nature too powerful to be controlled by mortal men and women.

Owing to the perversion of language created by the elite, Webster’s definition of democracy must be revisited and reinterpreted. Corporations have replaced people in the formula and capital has become synonymous with free speech. Webster’s definition of democracy was altered to become “Government by the corporations; a form of government in which supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the corporations.” Now capitalism is God and human beings are its subordinates.

It is imperative that we comprehend how the perversion of language serves the agenda of the elite. For instance, when President Obama speaks about bringing democracy to the world through the power of militarization and colonization, he is not talking about democracy in the classic sense that Webster defined for us. Obama is merely substituting capitalism for democracy. Let us recall, however, that In Baghdad, as elsewhere in the world, McDonald’s and Burger King were preceded by carpet bombs and tanks.

We must understand that capitalism and democracy are irreconcilably opposing philosophies.  Just as two objects cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time, we can either have capitalism or democracy, but not both simultaneously. Markets either serve people or people serve markets. One has to be in control of the other, one has to be more powerful than the other.

Private ownership of the means of production and the invisible hand of the market are two key components of modern capitalism. In reality, there is no ‘invisible hand’ of the market, as the proponents of free market capitalism contend. If there were, the global banking system would have collapsed long ago. We have only to lift the cloak of secrecy for the human finger prints of manipulation to become plainly visible. A small cadre of the elite is manipulating everything.

Webster’s interpretation makes it clear that democracy can only be applied to people. To equate corporations with human beings and capital with free speech is a perversion of language that sets reality on its head. It is a thinly veiled attempt by impotent human beings to play god, to create a Frankenstein monster and unleash it upon the world and to worship it as an omniscient deity. This is the handiwork of egomaniacal jesters that must be rejected as the work of madmen.

If democracy were synonymous with capitalism, then the economic and social disparity between rich and poor, which is greater in the U.S. than anywhere on earth, would not exist. According to Thomas Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door, the top 1 percent of the population owns greater wealth than the bottom 90%.With the continued growth of corporate power and the adulation of free market capitalism, the gap will continue to widen.

If we permit the unpardonable sin of substituting corporations for human beings and continue to associate capitalism with democracy, we will sanction the continued evolution of a repressive corporate state with all of its Orwellian connotations. We will also seal the fate of working people to a life of servitude to the elite. This is clearly the direction we are headed.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy have particularly onerous ramifications for military personnel. Told that they are bringing democracy to the world, in reality our military is forcing capitalism upon people who have other ideas about social and economic theories of government. Those who believe they are protecting their country from external threats are actually fighting for the creation of a totalitarian corporate state run by the global elite. Generations of presidents and generals have pulled the wool over their eyes. But occasionally the truth comes out.

As used by the ruling class, ‘democracy’ and’ freedom’ are code words for capitalism and free markets. Do not be fooled by them.  Making the world safe for corporate plunder does not pave the way for democracy. It opens the door to economic exploitation and subjugation.

In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, a highly decorated four star general, wrote a treatise on militarism and capitalism called War is a Racket. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34^th president of the United States, warned us about an emerging military-industrial complex in his farewell address on January 17, 1961. Private Bradley Manning and Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange are warning us today, and they are paying a heavy price.

As his record attests, President Obama is an ardent believer in the corporate state and in free market fundamentalism. He makes no bones about it and never has. Like his predecessors, Obama is a disciple of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics. It is only by viewing him in this context and through the lens of class consciousness that his actions make sense in a historical context. War and occupation can never be reconciled with the principles of democracy.

Obama is unabashedly representing his real constituency: the banking industry and the military industrial complex.  In the purview of the elite, anyone who opposes these ideologies is an enemy of the state or a terrorist. They are pawns in another of America’s endless wars: the one that pits the working class against the ruling class.

The Corporate Media Industrial Military Security/Surveillance Complex and Eisenhower’s, Orwell’s and Washington’s Warning to US

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Fifty years ago Dwight D. Eisenhower warned we the people not to bind our economy to the “military-industrial complex” but like most prophets he was ignored in his lifetime and today we the people pay to support much more.

Eisenhower cautioned in his farewell address of the potential for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” from militarist interests that would gain control over this country’s national security policy and it came to be after that day we call 9/11.

The 9/11 attacks fed into militarist alliances and the Bush administration exploited a climate of fear as The Media assumed the role of secretaries taking down Big Brother’s dictation and we the people were railroaded into a war of aggression against Iraq. American military leadership used Iraq as the base from which to wage a campaign of regime change that expanded to other countries and assured even more power to the war mongers.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy wrote how after 9/11:

“The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress. The Pentagon embraced the idea of the ‘long war’– a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army adopted the idea of ‘the era of persistent warfare’ as its rationale for more budgetary resources.

“The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest explosion of military spending since the early 1950s — and now accounts for 56 percent of discretionary federal spending. The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false.

“Those moves have completed the process of creating a ‘Permanent War State’ — a set of institutions with the authority to wage largely secret wars across a vast expanse of the globe for the indefinite future. The Special Operations Forces, which operate in almost complete secrecy, obtained extraordinary authority to track down and kill or capture al Qaeda suspects not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many more countries.” [1]

In Naomi Klein’s 2007 release, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” she argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.

Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth could not be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation-and to showcase their wares.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war.

“Israel now sends $1.2 billion in ‘defense’ products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world. Much of this growth has been in the so-called ‘homeland security’ sector.

“Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of [2007], Israeli exports in the sector [reached] $1.2 billion-an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

“Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’. Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling Hamasistan–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.” [2]

In 1948, George Orwell wrote “1984” and illuminated that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away because of the human addiction to power.

“Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins [and] although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy all the fighting nations lost moral considerations…the unlimited destruction of civilian populations…atomic bombs…can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?” [3]

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington warned US:

“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.”

It will require an alert, engaged, knowledgeable citizenry of conscience to rise up and not just hold politicians accountable but fill them with fear of loosing their power that will save US from becoming nothing more than ‘guinea pigs’ for the Corporate Media Industrial Military Security/Surveillance Complex.

1. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/17-6

2. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/klein

3. Erich Fromm, Afterword, Centennial Edition “1984”

Ike was right all along: The danger of the Military-Industrial Complex

From: Independent.co.uk…

Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower warned of the danger of the ’military-industrial complex’. The huge budget and reach of America’s modern defence industry has proved him correct, says Rupert Cornwell

If you doubt, half a century on, that Dwight Eisenhower had it right, then consider the advertisements on WTOP, the Washington region’s all-news radio station. Every big metro area in the US has one, where car dealerships tout their bargains, and fast food chains promote a new special offer.

WTOP has all that. But it boasts other advertisers too, with names such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Of course, the average listener can’t remotely afford a brand new military aircraft, or a state-of-the-art battlefield management system. But that’s not the point. These almost otherworldly ads, with patriotic music playing softly in the background, are aimed at a very restricted audience: the government that is their only customer for such wares. For the rest of us, they are proof that in the capital of the world’s richest democracy, the defence industry is a very big player indeed.

Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex.

Exactly 50 years ago, on January 17 1961, Eisenhower delivered one of the most celebrated farewell speeches in American history, whose fame has only increased over the decades, eclipsed not even by JFK’s inspirational inaugural that followed three days later. Kennedy might have projected the dynamism of youth. But the old soldier won the prize for prescience.

In his speech, Eisenhower warned about the growth of a ’military-industrial complex,’ and the risks it could pose. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Ike said, “exists and will persist.” His anxieties back then were prompted by the ten-fold expansion of the US military after two world wars, and by the development of a “permanent arms industry of vast proportions”. Today, the proportions of both the military and the industry that serves it are vaster than ever.

Adjusted for inflation, US national security spending has more than doubled since Eisenhower left office. Year after year, the defence budget seems to rise – irrespective of whether the country is actually fighting major wars, regardless of the fact that the Soviet Union, the country’s former global adversary, has ceased to be, and no matter which party controls the White House and Congress.

One common thread however exists: the military-industrial complex, or perhaps (as Eisenhower himself described it in a draft of his speech that was later amended) the military-industrial-congressional complex. Others have referred to the beast as the “Iron Triangle”.

In one corner of the triangle stands the arms industry. The second is constituted by the government, or more precisely the Pentagon, the end-consumer of the industry’s output. In a totalitarian state, such as the Soviet Union, that combination would be sufficient. The US however is a democracy, and a third corner is required – an elected legislature to vote funds to pay for the arms. This is Congress, made up of members who rely on the defence industry for many jobs in their states and districts, and for money to help finance their every more expensive re-election campaigns.

But maybe even triangle is an inadequate description. Today, more than ever, a fourth element underpins the military-industrial complex. It is the extraordinary prestige, verging on veneration, Americans accord their armed forces. Whatever the country’s soldiers need, the general public broadly believes, they should have.

In fact, the MIC is not the largest show in town. According to the specialist website of the same name that tracks US defence spending, the total value of contracts issued by the Pentagon since October 2006 exceeds $1.1 trillion, while total military spending in that period tops $2.5 trillion. But even these gigantic sums pale beside a health-care sector now accounting for a sixth of the entire national economy.

The difference of course is that the MIC basks in the reflected glory of the military, shown by poll after poll to be the most trusted institution in the land. In terms of trust and admiration, the health insurance and drug companies rank right down there with Wall Street and the banks.

Nonetheless Eisenhower’s warning has never ceased to resonate since his death in 1969. Indeed, it is one reason that in the stock market of posthumous presidential reputations, few have risen like his.

When he delivered that farewell address, America couldn’t wait to be rid of him. Ike was regarded as senile and semi-detached, utterly out of touch with the times. The future lay with Kennedy, symbol of vigour, youth and novelty. But the old general knew whereof he spoke. Indeed, the MIC had worried him for years.

A treasure trove of old documents, covered with dirt and pine needles and discovered last year at a cabin in Minnesota once owned by Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos, reveals that the 34th president had been working on the speech since mid-1959. It went through at least 21 drafts; in a later one, the “congressional” reference was struck out because, it is supposed, Ike did not want to upset old friends on Capitol Hill. But the “military” part was there from the outset.

At the time, the speech raised few eyebrows. Now its words are viewed as prophetic, and the man who spoke them is deemed one of America’s greater presidents. From today’s anxious vantage point, the 1950s are remembered as a golden age of order, contentment and certainty. Ike himself is perceived as a wise and measured statesman who most certainly would never have led the US into the ruinous Iraq adventure.

In fact, for all his strictures about the MIC, the worst has not come to pass. Wars have always been good business for weapons manufacturers – and so it has been with Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The arms industry therefore was never going to be very happy with the notion of a “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War.

But it is a leap to describe modern America as a “warfare state” – in which the Iraq war, say, was the direct result of a colossal conspiracy by the arms industry to force the country into a conflict purely to enrich itself. As for the ultimate nightmare, a military take-over akin to the one that came close to in John Frankenheimer’s fictional 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, that is simply inconceivable.

The true tragedy is not quite the one that Eisenhower imagined. The US by itself accounts for roughly half of military spending worldwide. How much better if some of that money would be used to improve the country’s education and infrastructure, or provide health care for all, or increase foreign aid, rather than on protecting America from threats that geography alone renders illusory.

In reality, the dangers of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” are not new; from the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders have warned of them. “Overgrown military establishments,” George Washington said in his own farewell address of 1796, “are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty.” Nor is the concept confined to America.

In the Soviet Union, the ultra-secret arms industry devoured a third or more of GDP (compared to around 4 per cent in the US currently) and was a cornerstone of Communist power. Or, closer to home, consider Krupp in Germany during two world wars, or later Dassault in France, or Vickers and British Aerospace in the UK. But nowhere has the synergy between government and defence manufacturers, most of them headquartered a lobbyist’s lunch drive from the Capitol, been as entrenched as in the US.

Ah yes, some say, but the tide is now starting to turn. After experiencing some contraction in the 1990s, the industry enjoyed a boom after 9/11. But the deep recession of 2008-2009 and the continuing colossal deficits will not spare even the hitherto sacrosanct Pentagon budget.

Once again, one might note, Eisenhower hit the mark in January 1961. Back then, budgets were more or less balanced, and the possibilities of the future seemingly boundless. Even so he urged his countrymen to “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow”. That of course is what has happened with the “credit card” wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose costs will burden American taxpayers for years to come.

Nor is that reality lost on Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, who back in May was warning that Congress could not, and would not, write blank cheques for ever. The Pentagon had to make every dollar count, he said, rather than indulge in such projects as “$20m howitzers, $2bn bombers, and $6bn destroyers.” Alas, as Gates knows full well, the arms contract that comes on budget has yet to be invented.

Since then of course Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives, which controls the pursestrings of government, a victory driven by a Tea Party movement vowing to eradicate deficits. Last week, Gates announced $78bn of cuts over the next five years, to pre-empt demands from deficit hawks for even greater reductions. But the MIC has survived far worse, and will most certainly survive this modest downturn in its fortunes.

For one thing, even when the Pentagon wants to cut a programme, Congress – prodded by its defence contractor benefactors – sometimes won’t let it. Take the case of the back-up second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive procurement programme in even the Pentagon’s extravagant history, at a total of $382bn or a mere $112m per aircraft. The Pentagon doesn’t want the second engine, to be built by GE and Rolls-Royce, and nor does the White House. But it gets funded anyway.

And so the show goes on. The Republicans may vote through some shrinking of the military budget. But giant arms projects, however wasteful, provide jobs and exports at a time when the broader economy struggles to do either. Congress will not sacrifice them lightly.

At the same time, the infamous “revolving door” between the Defense Department, the top military contractors, their lobbyists and congressional staffers will continue to spin, strengthening a commonality of viewpoint between the separate components of the MIC, and tightening the bonds of the “Iron Triangle”.

Campaign contributions meanwhile will grow even more important. Defence companies give money to sitting Congressmen who have fought their corner. True, in the ferociously anti-incumbent mid-terms of last November, they could not save Ike Skelton, their ally and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, from defeat.

But financial support from Boeing workers was key in the re-election of Senator Patty Murray from Washington State, where she has fought hard to save Boeing jobs threatened if the company loses its bid for a $35bn tanker contract, for which the European-based EADS is also competing. That battle, incidentally, is also playing out in its own fierce ad war on WTOP, aimed at the same audience of government and Congress.

And even if budgetary pressures temporarily compress the market for top-of-the-line military hardware, fear not. The demand for national security and intelligence in the “war on terror” continues to surge – to the point that a Washington Post investigation last summer found that 33 facilities for intelligence work, equal to three new Pentagons, have gone up around Washington alone since 9/11.

Most fundamentally, there remains the popularity of all things military, at a time when civilian leaders with the stature and experience to challenge the Pentagon brass, and by extension the MIC, are few. George HW Bush was the last commander-in-chief to have tasted war and its horrors. His son famously had not, and – perhaps to make up for it – gave the military everything it wanted, and more. So maybe there is only one answer. America should elect a general as commander-in-chief. Like Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Planet Overkill

“Everything in excess is opposed to nature.” – Hippocrates

Back in the Cold War days, a useful myth was that of extreme Soviet supremacy. Surely, if the godless communists, hell bent on world domination, were allowed to surpass US military might…well, you get the picture. Author Edward Herman once defined the “Soviet threat” as “a large and formidable beast of prey, the size of whose claws and fangs varied with the demands of the Military-Industrial Complex.” As journalist Ken Silverstein explains: “It’s now virtually undisputed that the menace once attributed to the Red Army was greatly overrated.”

On the topic of overrated, I’m reminded of another America delusion: the protein myth. In the US, the typical adult ingests 100 grams of protein every day—roughly four to five times the amount recommended by scientists not affiliated with meat and dairy corporations. The average American—in his/her lifetime—will consume 12 sheep, 15 cows, 24 hogs, 900 chickens, and 1000 lbs. of assorted animals (like fish). How did we ever develop this idea that more is better when it comes to protein, especially animal protein?

Part of that answer is profit-related, of course, but another part of it is the result of a third popular American pastime: The irrational quest for size. While waif-like models inspire shame, anxiety, guilt, and eating disorders among the female population, those artificially-tanned, oiled-from-head-to-toe, chemically-enhanced bodybuilders smiling at you from the pages of your favorite magazine have the power to wield considerable influence. This is what a real man looks like, they seem to be saying. Envy me. I am a powerful man who commands the sexual attention of others.

“The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men,” writes author Chuck Palahniuk in his novel, Fight Club, “as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.” In order to reach that sculpted ideal, the men (and women) Palahniuk refers to are usually doing too many reps using far too much weight while taking way too long of a break in-between sets as they walk around in a permanent lat pose. Add in the wallet-draining habit of downing powders, pills, and potions, and you have yourself an industry founded on the illogical pursuit of mass.

Much like the Military-Industrial Complex…

“Military history is full of trumped-up threats,” Business Week columnist Stan Crock wrote in late 2002. “Time and again in military preparations, fears are raised that later prove unfounded.” Crock calls this gap-ology. A gap, according to Herman, is “a frightening but mythical deficiency relative to some foreign power.”

First there was the 1955 bomber gap. “The Soviets flew Bison bombers repeatedly in a loop over visitors at an air show, giving an exaggerated notion of their numbers,” says Crock. “A worried US military proceeded to build up its air-defense system.”

Another example of taking action based on a wholly manufactured basis is the hyper-ingestion of protein due to the scientifically useless and morally indefensible institution of animal experimentation. Since trying to discern biological trends from human to human is often impossible, what makes us think testing done on a rat will lead to any knowledge about our anatomy and physiology? The breast milk of rats, for example, derives nearly half of its calories from protein. Human breast milk is 5.9 percent protein. Obviously, there’s little useful information to be gained from monitoring the protein needs of rodents. However, many of today’s “experts” are still relying on protein requirement studies done on rats…in 1914.

What about those who believe we need extra protein because we want to run faster, jump higher, or grow bigger and prettier muscles? “Although in the past it was thought that vegetarian and vegan diets might impair athletic performance,” explains Natalie Digate Muth, MPH, RD, “scientists, coaches, and athletes alike now agree that with proper planning a diet without animal products can effectively fuel peak performance.” In addition, the decidedly mainstream National Academy of Sciences has declared, “There is little evidence that muscular activity increases the need for protein.”

But evidence is rarely the primary guiding factor inside a gym. After all, when was it decided that muscular hypertrophy was the ideal and is there even a shred a proof that such over-development has any correlation to health and fitness? The human body has evolved over millions of years to support muscle mass similar to that of, say, a swimmer. Until the Industrial Revolution, humans had little time to use solely for the sake of gaining size. Today, however, we are surrounded by men and women who have piled up enormous muscles on bodies not designed to bear such a burden. Also, the type of training needed to promote and maintain such unnatural mass is not exactly conducive to joint health.

Look around the gym. How many people do you see lifting more weight than they can handle? You know the type: usually men, big arms and chest, equally big gut, thin legs, and not a shred of muscular definition. Not to mention, the aching shoulders, elbows, knees all covered in an assortment of Ace bandages. All of them chasing what cannot be caught because it doesn’t exist…like the missile gap.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy gave America the infamous “missile gap” when he claimed the U.S. nuclear arsenal had fallen behind the Soviet stockpile. Upon his election, JFK revealed that a gap indeed existed but it turned out that it was the U.S. that had the advantage. “That didn’t stop Kennedy from launching a nuclear-arms buildup,” adds Crock.

Presidents Carter and Reagan combined to make a late 70s/early 80s contribution to the Soviet threat: the “window of vulnerability.” Based on the faulty assessment of a group of conservative defense analysts, Reagan announced that the Soviets had the ability to knock out America’s land-based nukes in a first strike. “The claims were based on faulty assessments of the Soviet weapons’ power and accuracy—to say nothing of Moscow’s intentions,” Crock explains.

If we chose, we wouldn’t have to rely on “faulty assessments” to figure out how much protein we actually need. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition says 2.5 percent of our daily calories should come from protein. According to the World Health Organization, it’s about 5 percent. How does that work out in grams? A lot lower than the US average of 100 grams a day, that’s for sure.

“An adult male on a fast only puts out 4.32 grams of urinary nitrogen per day,” says William Harris, M.D. author of The Scientific Basis for Vegetarianism. “Each gram represents 6.25 grams of broken down protein, so under conditions in which some protein is actually being catabolized and used for fuel, only about 4.32 x 6.25 = 27 grams/day are actually needed.” Twenty-seven grams.

Which brings us back to human breast milk. Humans undergo their most rapid growth during infancy and human breast milk has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to become the perfect food to facilitate that growth. As stated earlier, it derives only 5.9 percent of its calories from protein. So, here’s a question for everyone working two jobs just to afford their expensive protein supplements: If we need less than 6 percent of our calories from protein during a time of intense growth, why are we consuming so much protein as full-grown adults?

That’s naturally fully-grown adults…not juiced-up bodybuilding freaks. We look back now and laugh at what once passed for entertainment. Stuff like gladiator contests or even Vaudeville. What will future generations have to say about the artificially-inflated, tanned, and oiled bodies of men and women trying to impress us with their flexing in tiny outfits under the glare of klieg lights—all pretending to represent health? It’s not natural. It’s overkill…just ask that unrepentant Cold Warrior, Caspar Weinberger.

US Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1987, Weinberger remained unfazed by any evidence of US deception. “In the end, we won the Cold War,” he declared, “and if we won by too much, if it was overkill, so be it.”

A slice of life on Planet Overkill…

Welcome to Oz

Being comfortable with what is most familiar to them, people are slow to realize that things are no longer what they used to be. In America, the Democratic Party has failed to offer working people an alternative to the Republicans. The only way democrats can win elections is to be more republican than the republicans. Few liberals have drawn a line in the sand and fought vehemently for the ideals they espouse.

It was not this way when the specter of socialism posed a credible threat to capitalism in America less than a century ago. But now the people are no longer permitted to speak of such things in public. Organized labor is dead as a revolutionary force in this country. The red menace was replaced by the ghost of Bin Laden, national security, and irrational fear of Islam. Thank god we have George Bush, Barack Obama, and the military industrial complex to protect us from democracy.

While voting is hailed as the cornerstone of American democracy, it is useless as a vehicle of change. American democracy does not exist. It never has. Nevertheless, millions of people will go to the polls next week and deceive themselves into believing that meaningful change is possible within the established order. They naively believe that the corporations that are running the country permit them to decide how trillions of tax dollars are spent. Like innocent children in the presence of a pedophile, they believe that those in power give a rat’s ass about what we the people think.

We live in a bizarre country where incredibly irrational events are a daily occurrence. These events would astonish visitors coming from a planet where justice and reason prevail, where the laws of physics and thermodynamics apply. But not here where the legal fiction known as corporations have the same rights as people but none of the responsibility of citizenship. Corporations and their CEOs routinely murder people en mass in the name of profits, but when has a corporation ever been executed by the state? When has a corporation ever served a prison term? Have you ever read about a corporate charter being revoked?

This year’s West Virginia coal mine disaster and BP oil spill provide recent examples of systemic corporate mayhem and murder. But who cares? It is business as usual. The oil and coal must be kept flowing. The money must keep flowing into the coffers of corporate CEOs. The lives of the miners and oil roughnecks are as replaceable as cogs in a machine. The system rolls on. Markets, not justice, or ethical systems of conduct define value and thus behavior in capitalist cultures.

The supreme court, like all of the other branches of government that are supposed to provide checks and balances to limit abuses of power, is awash in corporate money. It, too, is owned and operated by the wealthy and their multi-national corporations. In its infinite wisdom the Supreme Court has declared that corporate donors may now purchase outright the candidates of their choice and that money is free speech. There will be no paper trail to trace which corporation bought which public servant. We the people are irrelevant. We are not part of the equation anymore, if we ever were.

Those in power permit us to vote in elections that provide nothing more substantive than the illusion of choice. The people are allowed to choose from a small field of war-mongering corporate fascists and capitalists whose sole purpose is to increase the wealth and power of the ruling elite at the expense of the working class. It is a game of predator and prey designed and operated by sociopaths. The super-rich have no empathy for the people whose lives they destroy. Annihilation is a sadistic form of amusement to them. Do the bankers lay awake nights worrying about those who homes they foreclosed this morning? Not a chance. They are too busy counting their money and dreaming about who and what they can buy with it within the confines of their gated communities.

Capitalism is a game that only the privileged are permitted to play. Workers are no more than plastic chips in a game of chance. The people are never permitted to deal the cards.

We are told that voting is democracy in action, that it is our patriotic duty as citizens to elect politicians to office, our duty to choose between the pro-business men and women that were pre-selected for us by multi-national corporations. This is our role in the political apparatus of America: to sanctify the choices that have been made for us by those in power, to give the substance of reality to the illusion of participation. It is we who give it the appearance of legitimacy by participating in a system that does not permit real change.

Without thinking, millions will do their duty and then return to the safety of the TVs’ tiny light to vegetate and marinade, their minds benumbed with entertainment, advertisements, and outlandish propaganda. Unwilling to make trouble, they will do whatever the oracle tells them to do; they will believe whatever it tells them to believe. They will become all that it tells them to be, nothing more, nothing less.

The inert masses will continue to go wherever the herd goes, following the prompts given them by the men with the electronic cattle prods: the makers of video games, cell phones, Fox News, iPods and SUVs. Mystified by how bad things are, the people expect change from a system that does not permit transformation. Capitalism empowers money and those who have it, not people like us. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Welcome to oz.

The only way out, if there is one, is organized and sustained class struggle against capitalism.

The Corporate Industrial Military Media Security/Surveillance Complex

2010’s Big Brother is The Corporate Industrial Military Media Security/Surveillance Complex and dissent is what keep’s democracies healthy.

10.10.10 is a Global Day of Noncompliance that calls to all people of Conscience to rise up against Corruption, Theft, Fraud, Murder, Propaganda and mindless over consumption.

Totalitarian regimes control their people with FEAR and propaganda and we are NOW living George Orwell’s nightmare.

Coined by Orwell as doublethink, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth fabricates lies and the Ministry of Love tortures and kills any it deems threatening. Most threatening for Big Brother are those with independent thought, such as Seán Clinton, who is the chairperson of the Limerick branch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a former Boycott Officer on the National Committee of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

He wrote:

“Most people are unaware that Israel is one of the world’s leading producers of cut and polished diamonds. As diamonds are normally not hallmarked, consumers cannot distinguish an Israeli diamond from one crafted in India, Belgium, South Africa or elsewhere. The global diamond industry and aligned governments, including the EU, have hoodwinked consumers into believing the diamond trade has been cleansed of diamonds that fund human rights abuses, but the facts are startlingly different.

“Israel — which stands accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the crime of apartheid, extrajudicial executions within and outside the territory it controls and persistent serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions — is the world’s leading exporter of diamonds.

“Revenue from the diamond industry helps fund Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, its brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people and its international network of saboteurs, spies and assassins.” [1]

And all roads lead US to Israel!

The “Fabric of Life Road” in occupied Palestine is in reality an apartheid road; separate and unequal. Palestinians must travel through sewage and tunnels, but Israelis ride on only well maintained contiguous highways. At the checkpoint from Jerusalem to the little town of Bethlehem in occupied territory, the Ministry of Tourism had draped a thirty foot high doublespeak sign that proclaimed “Peace be with you” a loose translation of “War is Peace.”

In 2007, Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argued that at the height of the 2003-07 economic boom, the military industrial complex was driving Israel’s tremendous economic growth, and Israel had the largest GDP growth of any Western country.

Klein theorized that the source of Israel’s tremendous economic growth in the past five years couldn’t be attributed simply to its encouragement of high tech entrepreneurship and basic science. Its success must be understood, rather, as a product of its ability to use the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory for defense industry innovation — and to showcase their wares.

“Young Israeli computer scientists and engineers gain their training in the military, and then go on to start the kind of technology companies that have proliferated wildly in Israel and whose products are much sought after abroad. The entire Israeli hi-tech sector and not just military technology per se, is thus an outgrowth of Israel’s hyper militarization. The Israeli economy’s tech sector grew by 20% in 2006 alone, and Israel is now the foreign country with the second most US stock exchange-listed companies. Klein’s point that Israel’s military-derived technologies are an economic growth-driver because they can be tested in situ is correct, but it is insufficient for describing the magnitude of the military’s tremendous penetration of the country’s economy. Palestinians under occupation can indeed be seen as human “guinea pigs” and not just merely military targets, as Klein claims, but the society’s militarization is far more profound than even she suggests.” [2]

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and “suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war…Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999…That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world…Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion–an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are …precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror… Israel’s policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also “laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians–whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling “Hamasistan”–are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs…” [IBID]

Poster-boy for Israel’s Corporate Industrial Security/Surveillance Complex is Mordechai Vanunu.

Every email Vanunu has ever written, snail mail received, phone call conversation and walk he has ever taken over the last 6 ½ years has potentially been monitored 24/7, since his release from 18 years in an Israeli prison for telling The Truth about Israel’s nuclear deceptions.

Thirty odd years from my first time, I reread Orwell’s 1984, that was published in 1949. I was struck at how much Vanunu reminded me of Winston Smith, Orwell’s man with an independent thought that Big Brother; The Party incarnate found so threatening that they tortured him beyond his endurance in order to break him, brainwash him and strip him of his humanity.
But Big Brother has failed to break Mordechai Vanunu.

Vanunu also threatens Israel in 2010, far more than he did in 2004. If Israel had practiced justice and mercy, they would have let Vanunu go in 2004, and chances are, that by now Vanunu would have faded into a footnote in history, instead of keep making it!

On 11 October 2010, Vanunu returns to the Supreme Court seeking the rescinding of the draconian restrictions that have denied him his inalienable human rights of speech and movement ever since he emerged from 18 in a windowless tomb sized cell on 21 April 2004.

In 2008, Vanunu wrote, “There is a lot of suffering here…Israel wants to hide so much because it is not good for its image as a democracy and a friend of America…1984, yes I read it many times and many years ago.1984 is here.”

In 1987, in Ashkelon Prison, Vanunu wrote, I had “no choice. I’m a little man, a citizen, one of the people, but I’ll do what I have to. I’ve heard the voice of my conscience and there’s nowhere to hide…yes, it’s there all right. I’m all right. I do see the monster. I’m part of the system. I signed this form. Only now I am reading the rest of it. This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me…Who else knows? Who has seen? Who has heard?”

“A working prophet, is able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away; the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place. The means of surveillance in Winston Smith’s era are primitive next to the wonders of computer technology-most notably the Internet.”

“Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins and although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy-all the fighting nations lost moral considerations. The unlimited destruction of civilian populations with atomic bombs; can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?” [Ibid]

The atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a baby step compared to the 21st century slaughter that can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with capacities to wipe out 100% of a country within minutes. The Corporate Industrial Military Complex cranks out new weapons about every five years and soon those minds driven mad with doublethink-“war is peace”- will create 100 or 1,000 megaton bombs.

Orwell illuminated the illusion that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war and that Leader’s have only one aim: maintaining power!

We waste income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and we close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy the world as we now know it and annihilate Mother Nature and all of Creation.

1. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11170.shtml

2. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198

Our Corrupt and Incompetent US Congress: Both Parties

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid represent leadership incompetence at its zenith, its peak, its pinnacle. They prove the “Peter Principle” works at all levels in Western society whereby a person continues advancement until he or she reaches his or her highest level of incompetence. Once they ascend to that level, they cannot fulfill their job descriptions because they do not possess the intellectual or physical tools. Pelosi and Reid prove Mark Twain’s famous saying, “Suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress—ah, but I repeat myself.”

Those two incompetent people continue funding an absurd war in Iraq and Afghanistan while pretending that the ‘surge’ worked, or that the current ‘surge’ works in the latter country. Come on! The most powerful army in the world cannot stop the suicide bombings in Iraq weekly. They cannot stop ‘insurgents’ from transporting explosives into the country and blowing up Baghdad on a regular basis. They cannot stop the Taliban from maintaining itself in all of Afghanistan. They cannot stop the idea of ‘terror’ because they cannot stop the Islamic religion from flourishing its disciples worldwide.

Yet, we import over 2,000 Muslims from the Middle East every 30 days! How much sense does that make? Our own Muslim immigrants make plans to blow us up in our own country as witnessed by the Denver bomber named Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born immigrant. Or, the Muslim U.S. Army Major Nadal Hasan. Or the nut cases in an FBI shootout in Detroit, Michigan that want to turn our country toward Sharia Law. Can’t wait for the next incident, can you?!

ALL THE WHILE, US BORDERS AS OPEN AS A 24 HOUR MALL

So far in the Middle East, we suffered 4,000 U.S. soldier deaths and over 35,000 wounded in those two wars. How about the growing suicides of American soldiers? How about the 2.5 million Iraqi refugees? We’ve blown about $1 trillion on death and destruction. What do we have to show for it? Absolutely nothing! Little known to the U.S. public, after we killed 53,300 American troops in the fraudulent and bogus Vietnam War, another 150,000 to 175,000 military vets committed suicide after their service in that inane war. That’s not to mention the twisted minds, divorces, fatherless children, and alcohol and drugs that eased the pains for millions of military veterans—but at a horrific price of addiction. Then, think of the millions of civilians in Vietnam that suffered more bombs than were dropped in WWII on Europe. And, Agent Orange that poisoned all of Vietnam for decades to cause birth defects and worse!

The Nazi Hermann Goering said, “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson worked it to a T with his “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”. George Bush II worked his magic with, “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Barack Obama worked it like enchantment after his Nobel Peace Prize by saying we must keep fighting “bad people.”

Who are we fighting in Afghanistan? A bunch of goat herders and poppy seed farmers! That country doesn’t own a military helicopter, tank or fighter jet! Yet, we find ourselves stuck over there for eight years! Does that mean out U.S. Army can’t fight its way out of a paper bag? You be the judge!

Have you ever heard of the “Military Industrial Complex” that promotes war and, in fact, thrives on war? Why? Money, lots of it! How do you suppose our military continues fighting against two third world countries with no armies for eight friggin’ years and we still haven’t won anything?!

Pelosi and Reid do not stand alone. The other 533 members of Congress may take a bow for egregious incompetence in the areas of health care, immigration, war, poverty, hunger, prisons and failure to represent American workers and interests. Those members, over the years, outsourced, insourced and offshored millions of American jobs. They killed our textiles, our industry, our steel manufacturing and a hundred other productive enterprises—by sending the work and jobs to China, et al.

Result: We stand $12 trillion in debt. Today, we see 15 to 20 million unemployed Americans. Another 35 million Americans subsist on food stamps. Black and Hispanic unemployed run into the millions and 13.4 million minority children live below the poverty level. Schools in big cities run as high as 76 percent flunkout rates such as Detroit, Michigan and Los Angeles, California. An astounding 40 million Americans cannot read. Another 52 million cannot read past the 4th grade level!

After 39 years and over $1 trillion bequeathed to the War on Drugs, Pelosi and Reid allow over $100 billion of illegal drugs to continue flowing into the USA annually. They allow 900,000 U.S. kids to become dealers and hundreds of our kids have been killed in our streets. How do Reid and Pelosi do that? They command 572,000 military personnel on 120 bases around the world, but they won’t put 50,000 on our borders to stop the drug smuggling or illegal aliens crossing by the millions.

All the while, over 20 million illegal aliens reside, work and leach off our country and its taxpayers. We pay out $346 billion annually (Source: www.thesocialcontract.com) to illegal aliens and their kids—all of that money voted on in Congress to support criminal aliens across 15 different agencies.

With 15 to 20 million unemployed Americans and only 95,000 new jobs being created each month according to Katie Couric at CBS—our Congress imports 100,000 new legal immigrants every 30 days. This year, as last year, our Congress will import another 450,000 immigrant workers with green cards. We cannot possible employ our own citizens let alone the 100,000 new immigrants monthly plus the 450,000 green card holders.

But, when I wrote my U.S. House Rep Mike Coffman to lower legal immigration to 100,000 annually instead of 1.2 million annually, he replied, “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the United States to limit legal immigration to 100,000 individuals annually. It will place America at a competitive disadvantage moving forward. For that reason I do not support eliminating H-1B and H-2B visas.”

Is he crazy or am I crazy? Can he work simple math or not? Does it make sense to import 100,000 people who need jobs every 30 days or is Coffman completely out of his mind?

Nope! He’s a U.S. Congressman and we suffer another 534 just like him. The corruption and incompetence set the benchmark of the 21st century. November 4, 2010 cannot come soon enough. We must elect another batch to displace the current troglodytes in the U.S. Congress.

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