Fear, Procurement, Profit: Permanent War and the American Way

Here is one more to hurt your conscience if you have one.

"The ruthless attacks of Sept. 11 (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew " what we had in common was that we both read books " that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" " whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones " are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project " Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her Navy and her Army … as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here … will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes " in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense " that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization " begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

---------------------- Howard Zinn-----------------------------

This is my thread and those half backed potatoes in this forum cannot stop my views.
Freedom of speech is imbibed in my blood.

The entrance of the United States into the world war on April 6, 1917, was the greatest victory that the American plutocracy has won over the American democracy since the declaration of war with Spain in 1898. The American plutocracy urged the war; shouted for it; demanded it; insisted upon it, and finally got it.

The plutocracy welcomed the war not because it was a war, but because it meant a chance to get a stronger grip on the United States.

The plutocrats won another point - a point desired by every despot. They won the right to impose restrictions upon the freedom of speech, of press and assemblage, which are the foundation of democracy. The plutocracy bought the press, subsidized the pulpit, placed their representatives in control of the schools, and by the use of the police and postal censorship they restricted individual liberty.

Beside and beyond this economic, political and social power the Plutocracy had millions of deluded people in its grip incapable of thinking because of the fearful war madness that possessed their souls.

They aroused the people, agitating and irritating them, until they were frantically repeating the blatant lie that the real enemy of American liberty lived in Berlin. Then they stung them with high prices, filched their liberty, plunged them into war, took a million of their brothers and husbands and sons to wage a war of aggression on the battlefields of king-ridden Europe, and because nothing happened at once, they believe that they had won. They had won victory and death.

The plutocracy and the democracy cannot exist side by side. If the plutocracy wins, dollars rule; if the democracy wins, people rule. There can be no alternative and no compromise. During the past three years of struggle, the democracy has lost every move. The power of the plutocracy has been strengthened immeasurably.
http://www.bigeye.com/madness.htm

The American way of life?
Why the hell A2k had wiped out the negative judgment?

Just a few numbers which we all should read and repent.
It is about New Orleans and not about bagdad or Kabul

0. Number of renters in Louisiana who have received financial assistance from the $10 billion federal post-Katrina rebuilding program Road Home Community Development Block Grant - compared to 116,708 homeowners.

0. Number of apartments currently being built to replace the 963 public housing apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the St. Bernard Housing Development.

0. Amount of data available to evaluate performance of publicly financed privately run charter schools in New Orleans in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

.008. Percentage of the rental homes that were supposed to be repaired and occupied by August 2008 which were actually completed and occupied - a total of 82 finished out of 10,000 projected.

1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in percentage of housing vacant or ruined.


1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in murders per capita for 2006 and 2007.

4. Number of the 13 City of New Orleans Planning Districts that are at the same risk of flooding as they were before Katrina.

10. Number of apartments being rehabbed so far to replace the 896 apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the Lafitte Housing Development.

11. Percent of families who have returned to live in Lower Ninth Ward.

17. Percentage increase in wages in the hotel and food industry since before Katrina.

20-25. Years that experts estimate it will take to rebuild the City of New Orleans at current pace.

25. Percent fewer hospitals in metro New Orleans than before Katrina.


32. Percent of the city's neighborhoods that have fewer than half as many households as they did before Katrina.



36. Percent fewer tons of cargo that move through Port of New Orleans since Katrina.



38. Percent fewer hospital beds in New Orleans since Katrina.



40. Percentage fewer special education students attending publicly funded privately run charter schools than traditional public schools.



41. Number of publicly funded privately run public charter schools in New Orleans out of total of 79 public schools in the city.



43. Percentage of child care available in New Orleans compared to before Katrina.



46. Percentage increase in rents in New Orleans since Katrina.



56. Percentage fewer inpatient psychiatric beds than before Katrina.



80. Percentage fewer public transportation buses now than pre-Katrina.



81. Percentage of homeowners in New Orleans who received insufficient funds to cover the complete costs to repair their homes.



300. Number of National Guard troops still in City of New Orleans.



1080. Days National Guard troops have remained in City of New Orleans.



1250. Number of publicly financed vouchers for children to attend private schools in New Orleans in program's first year.



6,982. Number of families still living in FEMA trailers in metro New Orleans area.



8,000. Fewer publicly assisted rental apartments planned for New Orleans by federal government.



10,000. Houses demolished in New Orleans since Katrina.



12,000. Number of homeless in New Orleans even after camps of people living under the bridge has been resettled - double the pre-Katrina number.



14,000. Number of displaced families in New Orleans area whose hurricane rental assistance expires March 2009.



32,000. Number of children who have not returned to public school in New Orleans, leaving the public school population less than half what is was pre-Katrina.



39,000. Number of Louisiana homeowners who have applied for federal assistance in repair and rebuilding who have still not received any money.



45,000. Fewer children enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare in New Orleans than pre-Katrina.



46,000. Fewer African American voters in New Orleans in 2007 gubernatorial election than 2003 gubernatorial election.



55,000. Fewer houses receiving mail than before Katrina.



62,000. Fewer people in New Orleans enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare than pre-Katrina.



71,657. Vacant, ruined, unoccupied houses in New Orleans today.



124,000. Fewer people working in metropolitan New Orleans than pre-Katrina.



132,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the City of New Orleans current population estimate of 321,000 in New Orleans.



214,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the U.S. Census Bureau current population estimate of 239,000 in New Orleans.



453,726. Population of New Orleans before Katrina.



320 million. The number trees destroyed in Louisiana and Mississippi by Katrina.

368 million. Dollar losses of five major metro New Orleans hospitals from Katrina through 2007. In 2008, these hospitals expect another $103 million in losses.

1.9 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to metro New Orleans for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered.

2.6 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to State of Louisiana for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered

Bill is a human rights lawyer, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans

On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States. Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.

Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff happens."

On December 2, 2004, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to General Tommy Franks, the overall military commander in Iraq at that time, for his meritorious service to the country. (He gave the same award to L. Paul Bremer III, the highest ranking civilian official in Iraq, and to George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided false information about Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Congress and the people.)

In the five years since the initial looting and pillaging of the Iraqi capital, thieves have stolen at least 32,000 items from some 12,000 archaeological sites across Iraq with no interference whatsoever from the occupying power. No funds have been appropriated by the American or Iraqi governments to protect the most valuable and vulnerable historical sites on Earth, even though experience has shown that just a daily helicopter overflight usually scares off looters. In 2006, the World Monuments Fund took the unprecedented step of putting the entire country of Iraq on its list of the most endangered sites. All of this occurred on George W. Bush's watch and impugned any moral authority he might have claimed.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/

Outrageous CEO Salaries Are a Nationwide Scandal -- Where Are the Politicians?

By Sarah Anderson, AlterNet. Posted August 25, 2008.

Obama and McCain are both taking whacks at overpaid CEOs, but their solutions fall short.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/96199/outrageous_ceo_salaries_are_a_nationwide_scandal_--_where_are_the_politicians/

Rolling through virtually any reasonably populous city or town in America, one encounters a surreal landscape blighted by grotesque temples to America's twin gods of Capitalism and Consumerism. As an increasing number of individual proprietors are driven to extinction, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and hundreds more leviathan corporations continue their rapid construction of more houses of worship to serve their zealous congregation. Once inside, many Americans gleefully sacrifice an abundance of their greenbacks at altars attended by Consumerism's unwitting acolytes.
For appallingly meager wages and benefits, the cashiers tending the sacred Churches of Capitalism and Consumerism gather the offerings which enable their fellow faithful to reap the fruits of practicing their devotion.

Good little Consumers can receive a veritable cornucopia of "blessings" which include working in jobs amounting to indentured servitude, obesity, insurmountable debt, insularity from the rest of the world, unwitting support of a merciless militaristic regime which is evolving into fascism, idolatrous worship of celebrities and money, facilitation of obscene concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, and participation in the severe desecration of our environment.

They may exist in a spiritual wasteland, but at least those Americans who are fortunate enough to find themselves in the shrinking middle class have access to basic human necessities, some creature comforts, and relative stability and safety (at least for the short term). However, a growing number of Americans find themselves wandering in a barren desert, lacking both sustenance for the soul and the corporeal "blessings" bestowed upon the middle class wage earners by the high priests of Capitalism and Consumerism.

How did this nightmare evolve?

http://www.naturalnews.com/019402.html

The following pathetic picture is all pervasive and not only in USA.

Social injustice is killing on a grand scale around the world’



Sarah Boseley







The report from a World Health Organisation commission headed by a British professor, Sir Michael Marmot, says a toxic combination of bad policies, economics and politics is in large measure responsible for the majority of the world’s people not enjoying the good health that is biologically possible.

The consequences of social injustice are most marked in developing countries, where the poorest struggle even to survive. Average life expectancy in some African countries is below 50 years. But the underlying issues are similar all over the world.

“In rich countries, low socioeconomic position means poor education, lack of amenities, unemployment and job insecurity, poor working conditions and unsafe neighbourhoods, with their consequent impact on family life. These all apply to the socially disadvantaged in low-income countries in addition to the considerable burden of material deprivation and vulnerability to natural disasters,” the report says.

Rapid change is possible, it says. Greece and Portugal had child mortality of 50 per 1,000 40 years ago. Now they are not far behind Iceland, Japan and Sweden, which have the longest life spans in the world. In the same period, Egypt has gone from 235 to 35 per 1,000.

But change in the other direction can be equally rapid. Adult mortality in the Russian Federation since the political, social and economic upheaval of 1992 has risen.

The commission wants every government policy and programme to be assessed for its impact on health. Above all, it says, governments should invest in high quality education with a focus on intervening in the earliest years, from womb to age eight. " © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008
http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/30/stories/2008083056441100.htm

(((some of this English is too much for some of the A2K intellectuals.
But my language is not commercial but critical( faulty but not nasty)
Able to know is a forum to sshow tolerance and critical.
Show is over.
Is USA's verwaltung understand my Marshal Language?)))
Yes we can
Change and hope seek elsewhere but not in USA.
Drama is over.
Learn some decent democatic virtue elsewhere but not from USA.
Enjoy
RamaFuchs

I enjoy my own thread and i am satisfied to find my individuality among the mobs or cowds.
Issues are aplenty not in the country where WE vegitate and struggle but elsewhere.

Read if you can
Rethink if you wish
Reject if it hurts.
here is one more cut and paste for those who are critical .
Not for those fans who controlls their intellectual faculties .


The Slow Death of Democracy and the Rise of the Corporate Hydra
By Siv O'Neall
Aug 28, 2008, 14:53



What has happened to the common sense of Americans? Has it completely gone down the drain with the propaganda of U.S. superiority?

Don't they see the millions and millions of people who have died and are still dying across the world, due to U.S. empire illusions and the firmly established greed and power of the Big Corporations? Don't they see that the lone superpower as a taken-for-granted is a fiction?

Yes, the United States was once a powerful nation, and a nation that people in the world looked up to, but it lost all its good points on the aggressive stand all over the world. Its go-it-alone, we're-the-leaders-of-the-world mentality is the way this 'superpower' has been living it up at least since World War II. The more it has been crushing and killing, the more it has lost its credibility in the world. The more its corporations intruded on the sovereignty of other states, the faster did this country lose its favorable standing in the world.

And Americans themselves, how do they see the world at this point? From a distance it seems as if they are beginning to open their eyes. One big BUT however. The everyday American is not capable of giving up on his deeply indoctrinated faith that the United States is the greatest country in the world. They 'know' that they are basically moral, highly civilized, good people who want to confer their way of life to the whole world since the rest of the world is so uncivilized, so poor, living in such precarious conditions.

There is no doubt in their minds that the United States is the foremost democracy in the world. Since they don't know anything about the rest of the world, it's easy to propagandize them into believing just about anything you want to make them believe. And besides, don't the every-two-year elections prove that they are the ones who select the leaders and so they have a voice in what's being done in their names? A majority of U.S. citizens are most certainly taken in by the belief that they participate in the running of the country.

It's doubtful if there are many Americans who see the National conventions that have just started as the fool's gold that they are. The most expensive circus that ever was and that the people pay dearly for. Just another Disney World to fool the people into believing that something important is going on and that they matter. "We don't have a moment to lose or a vote to spare," [Hillary] Clinton said. "Nothing less than the fate of our nation and the future of our children hangs in the balance." [1]

What is hanging in the balance is hard to see since both presidential candidates are saying pretty much the same things, except that their styles are different. Ok, Obama/Hillary now say Healthcare for all, but that is to be seen once the corporations get into the game. The arms manufacturers telling the new administration what they 'need', the HMO's, the pharmaceutical industry, all the corporate giants telling them of their sine qua non. Nothing so far has indicated in the least that either Hillary or Obama is against privatization or the free market. Disaster capitalism, as Naomi Klein says, is the name of the system and democracy is the victim. Regulation is a non-concept. How can corporations develop and maximize profit if they are being regulated? Starve the people but don't you ever think of strangling the corporations that are making the world go round. Profit is king and the people be damned.

So how do Americans see their country's criminal aggressions and the callous greed? First of all, greed is a good thing in the American credo. God rewards the hard workers and the ones left behind have no reason to complain. Socialism is a dirty word and welfare is only good when it's for the benefit of the Big Corporations.

Instead of seeing that the United States invades or buys every country that does not agree with their methods of running business, the gullible U.S. citizen is firmly convinced that the U.S. comes to the aid of every country when it is in trouble. They support the evil dictator and things calm down. Nobody ever lets them know that what the U.S. is doing is in the interest of its own global hegemony and that the indigenous people are beaten down and suffering even worse after the United States gets in on the side of the dictator. For every social uprising in Central America, from the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954 in Guatemala on through the Reagan years, the United States has intervened with an iron fist, bombing and killing, usually through mercenary death squads, until the leftist struggle for justice is totally crushed and the U.S.-supported dictatorship can go on doing the bidding of the Empire.

Inside the United States, the increasing inequality and vanishing civil rights are forcefully backed up by the Big Corporations who see that state of things as the only way of meeting their goal of ever increasing dividends to the shareholders and multi-million bonuses to the CEOs. Furthermore, this is the way of life that is considered by them as the normal way of running the economy. Ethics do not exist. Those who were born to grab from the others will do so no matter what they were taught in Sunday school about doing good to their neighbor.

So why don't the U.S. governments try to rein in the greedy corporations? Because the corporations are the ones who run the show, who tell the so-called rulers what to do " in all countries more or less, not just in the United States. The lawmakers and the heads of governments are all puppets dancing on strings, unless the so-called rulers actually have a foot in each camp. They pretend to run the country but they are actually looking after the corporations they are tied to and their own interests. In this last administration, this has been the case more than ever before.

It is certainly not in the interest of the ruling elite to give in to demands of fair treatment from the poor sections of society or even from the middle class. Starving the beast is a prerequisite for controlling the populace, for setting the rules of the game. A population that is ignorant, apathetic from tiredness and overwork, dumbed down from infotainment and antiseptic television shows " that is exactly what suits the greedy money makers. No insurgency, since there's no energy left for such a thing as a fight for better conditions. No knowledge about the rest of the world, and so Americans can go on believing that they are the best, no matter what the rest of the world might feel about that unquestioned rule of faith. So the world doesn't love us any more. It's because of the war in Iraq. It's that simple.

Creeping totalitarianism, the people losing one civil right after the other, and their voices not being heard or paid attention to. This is what has become of 'America the beautiful'. And all the while through non-stop propaganda the citizens are made to believe that they live in a democracy.

In this police state there is no need to make Jews scrub the sidewalks. There is no need for ostentatiously depriving a section of the population of their freedoms and making them the scapegoats. Poverty will serve the purpose of creating a marginal group that can be exploited. No need for arm bands with the star of David. The poor people and in particular the immigrants have their backs sufficiently bent to serve the ever-existing need of a class to look down on. In spite of the age-old history of racism in America, this is not a war on race, it's a class war, and it's getting more and more extreme. The so-called free trade system, which is far from free, is only benefiting Big Money.

Desperate poverty has been increasing all over the world ever since the organizations that set the rules for the economies of third world countries promised to solve the crisis of hunger and poverty in the world. In fact, what they were gearing up to do was finish off the plunder of the poor countries that depended on their high-interest loans. You might well ask yourselves if this neocolonialism is not even more disastrous for the third-world countries than the former kind that was very gradually ended after World War II, at least in a legal sense.

9/11 was a windfall for the neocons since, whoever orchestrated it, it paved the way for the totalitarianism that we are now witnessing. It made the invention of the 'war on terror' possible. A war president can allow himself to commit aggression in the name of the people that would meet with violent protests in a peaceful era. Fear is the ever efficient means of keeping a population under control.

Little did they see that the ambitions of the neocons went much farther than the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the control of its oil resources. The aim was much higher. To begin with they wanted control of the whole Greater Middle East. Then what was going to follow was clearly control of the planet and possibly outer space. However, it now seems obvious that their ambitions will be cut short, since other big powers are rearing their heads in different parts of the world.

Also the 'war on terror' has been proven to be a worn-out cliché, a nonsense word, mainly because all this so-called war is doing is increasing the resistance to the United States and its aggressive march across the world's continents. Even the U.S. citizens are aware of this counter-effect.

So what the neocon regime is now aiming at is a renewal of the cold war. Russia is going to be the enemy No.1 once again. They make the people believe that things are calming down in the Middle East. Iraq is moving towards a democracy, is what they try to make people believe. What is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan is hushed up. They have the media on their side, which has of course been essential in winning the support of the people that they have had so far.

The question is now: Will le capitalisme sauvage (as the French say) win the life or death game or will the people finally gather strength and a voice and manage to throw them out? To the corporations it's a game, to the people it's a matter of sheer survival.

All the ballyhoo about the American dream is just that and as for Bill Clinton's words about restor[ing] America's standing in the world [2], that's for megalomaniacs and dreamers. We will be lucky if the planet survives, and it will take the rising up of the people, a forceful attack on the prevailing corporate system by the people all over the world to make that happen. The world is under attack from U.S. corporatism, ecology, economy, inequality, injustice, and it's not just American citizens who have to speak out and act out. It's the people of the world.
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_28125.shtml

In a recent column in Market Watch, Dr. Paul B. Farrell asserted that Americans secretly love their war economy. Farrell is the author of The Millionaire Meditation: Stress Management for Wall Street, Corporate America, and Entrepreneurs. In his column titled “America’s Outrageous War Economy!” Farrell offered some startling facts and statistics, mostly about Pentagon waste, and asked three questions: Why do Americans love their outrageous war economy? Where's the outrage? What will it take to wake America up?
Answers to the first two of Farrell’s questions seem obvious enough. Wealthy, powerful corporations and special interest groups regularly and systematically misinform and deceive Americans and manipulate public opinion with massive disinformation campaigns. The wealthy and powerful, and the so-called news and entertainment corporations they own, largely control the flow of information to the American public, vital information that shapes decisions Americans make in almost every area of their lives. Never before in history have so many human beings been so heavily influenced by so few through the power of mass media. As increasingly powerful corporations have usurped speech rights intended for ordinary citizens, and commercialized and commoditized American life, almost everything, even war, has become a product to be marketed to passive, ill-informed consumers. Active, thoughtful, well-informed American citizens have rights and responsibilities; passive consumers exist only to be manipulated.
War is enormously profitable for some of America's biggest and most powerful corporations. American capitalism can be a ravenous beast without a soul, a beast that far too often feasts on the pocketbooks of American taxpayers and on the blood and the blasted, broken bodies of innocent and defenseless civilians, subsistence farmers mostly, in poor Third-World countries that represent no threat whatsoever to the legitimate national security interests of the United States of America. Some 60,000 Americans died fighting the Vietnam War a generation ago, along with somewhere between two and four million Asians, many of whom were carpet bombed. In their thousands, others succumbed, and some still suffer and die decades later as a result of birth defects and cancer, to the effects of chemical weapons, herbicides and defoliants including Agents Orange, Purple, Pink, and Green manufactured by Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Diamond-Shamrock, which contained dioxins. Millions died. For what? The USA lost that war, and today the US government negotiates with the Vietnamese government over important matters like the wholesale price of shrimp. That’s right, the price of shrimp. North Vietnam never represented any significant threat to the legitimate national security interests of the USA. More recently, over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and by some estimates as many as 100,000 Americans have been wounded. Authoritative reports estimate that over 1.25 million Iraqis, ten times the number cited by mainstream U.S. media organizations, have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. For what? To learn that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that Bush administration neocons and well-heeled mainstream media stenographers claimed he had? Or to feed the insatiable appetites of the America’s corporate-military-industrial complex?
The conviction that corporations, unrestrained capitalism, and nation-state governments can solve this world’s problems with more sophisticated and more destructive weapons systems, cleverer psy-ops and disinformation campaigns, wars, and repressive police state tactics bolstered by high-tech surveillance devices is irrefutable evidence of spiritual blindness and depraved indifference to human suffering.
The wealthy and powerful captains of America’s corporate-military-industrial complex have sailed into a storm of unprecedented magnitude. Their embrace of science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality has brought them at long last, and, because their actions often have such dire and far-reaching consequences, all the rest of humanity along with them, to circumstances perhaps best described by this unequivocal statement of fact: “A lasting social system without a morality predicated on spiritual realities can no more be maintained than could the solar system without gravity.”
A morality predicated upon spiritual realities has at its center the ethic of reciprocity, perhaps most helpfully articulated for Western audiences by Jesus himself who said, according to some records, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and according to others, “You must not forget the great law of human fairness which I have taught you in positive form: Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do even so to them
http://europe.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/54256

To President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid, I say to you, if you move forward with your plans for world war or for establishing a police state in America, for the purpose of seizing control of the world's energy sources and creating an illegitimate world government, then the revolution awaits you, with all its fury.

America's illegitimate power can no longer be maintained. America's military and other powers of persuasion can no longer contain the actions of the other governments of the world. Killing is not the solution, the saving and improving of all life is the answer. This country has amassed the largest debt that the world has ever witnessed, for the sake of empowering the military machine used to dominate the world. This debt will never be repaid.

In the time America has left to continue operations under this debt-based system (before our creditors decide to pull the plug on our borrowing) we must move away from war, towards the path of reconciliation. In a world of near-total chaos, brought about by our double-dealing "diplomacy" and our own military and economic aggression, America will find itself broken and alone. If we have any hope of being allowed back into the world community after it begins to recover from the great collapse, then it will only come about by our trying right now, to repair the damage that we have wrought, before it becomes impossible to do so.

This requires that we stop our war of terrorism and devote a large portion of those funds dedicated to waging the war into an international re-building effort, to begin to repair the nations we have destroyed and to alleviate some of the human suffering we have caused. In the new world economy, the illegitimate power of capitalism, which can only be maintained by military force, will have been broken itself. This breakdown will cause unimaginable suffering to intensify, as the food distribution chains break down, as well. What would an investment equivalent to one year of the Pentagon's budget (or the amount spent on new weapons systems in one year) do towards insuring that more people do not starve because of America's mistakes?

Americans must reconcile themselves to the horrendous truth about what has been done to the world in our name.
We must face the ugly truth that we have allowed our government to rampage through the world like some rabid beast, devouring the weak and wounding the strong.
We have allowed our government to assume illegitimate power to a level that rivals all predecessor progenitors of evil.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20684.htm

The War on Terror is much more than a colossal waste. It is the most potent threat Americans face to their liberties and security. With one spectacular blow al-Qaeda managed to exploit the fantasies of a “New American Century” cabal inside the Bush administration and sucker the American people and its leaders into a response that serves its interests. The overstated, but publicly honored, “War on Terror” and the catastrophic invasion of Iraq associated with it rescued the jihadi movement from oblivion by convincing most of the Muslim world that jihadi propaganda about the “infidel Christians and Jews” was actually correct.

At home, Americans have been so bamboozled by the hysterical imagery of the War on Terror that the absence of evidence of a truly serious terrorist threat cannot even be a topic of public discussion.
Politicians, the news media, rival government agencies, defense contractors, lobbyists of all kinds, universities, and the entertainment industry battle ferociously to increase revenues and pump up reputations by posing as more committed to winning the War on Terror than their competitors.
Frustrated by their inability to find any evidence of serious terrorist activities in the U.S., law enforcement and related agencies escalate techniques of pre-emptive prosecution and entrapment to justify their enormous budgets.

Terror is a problem, but the War on Terror, because it turns U.S. power against America, is a catastrophe
http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=28

A Prayer For
Corporate Board
Membership

Lord,
Please get me a seat on the board.

I won’t blow no whistles, oh no, not me,
I’d play for the team, never disagree.

My knowledge is shallow, my attention fleeting,
But I’d dress real well, never miss a meeting.

About company affairs I may be hazy,
But the night before a meet I’d read up like crazy.

You need bigger perks for the CEO?
You pays for quality, that much I know.

With me, there’d be, no personal rubs,
All hassles we’d settle over drinks at our clubs.

I’d sure never join a reforming rabble,
This is my second job, at most I’d just dabble.

Lord,
Please get me that seat on the board;
(And throw in liability coverage,
Against charges of fraud.)

********

©2008 Michael Silverstein


The Slow Death of Democracy and the Rise of the Corporate Hydra
By Siv O'Neall
Aug 28, 2008, 14:53
What has happened to the common sense of Americans? Has it completely gone down the drain with the propaganda of U.S. superiority?
Don't they see the millions and millions of people who have died and are still dying across the world, due to U.S. empire illusions and the firmly established greed and power of the Big Corporations? Don't they see that the lone superpower as a taken-for-granted is a fiction?
Yes, the United States was once a powerful nation, and a nation that people in the world looked up to, but it lost all its good points on the aggressive stand all over the world. Its go-it-alone, we're-the-leaders-of-the-world mentality is the way this 'superpower' has been living it up at least since World War II. The more it has been crushing and killing, the more it has lost its credibility in the world. The more its corporations intruded on the sovereignty of other states, the faster did this country lose its favorable standing in the world.
And Americans themselves, how do they see the world at this point? From a distance it seems as if they are beginning to open their eyes. One big BUT however. The everyday American is not capable of giving up on his deeply indoctrinated faith that the United States is the greatest country in the world. They 'know' that they are basically moral, highly civilized, good people who want to confer their way of life to the whole world since the rest of the world is so uncivilized, so poor, living in such precarious conditions.
There is no doubt in their minds that the United States is the foremost democracy in the world. Since they don't know anything about the rest of the world, it's easy to propagandize them into believing just about anything you want to make them believe. And besides, don't the every-two-year elections prove that they are the ones who select the leaders and so they have a voice in what's being done in their names? A majority of U.S. citizens are most certainly taken in by the belief that they participate in the running of the country
The arms manufacturers telling the new administration what they 'need', the HMO's, the pharmaceutical industry, all the corporate giants telling them of their sine qua non. Nothing so far has indicated in the least that either Hillary or Obama is against privatization or the free market. Disaster capitalism, as Naomi Klein says, is the name of the system and democracy is the victim. Regulation is a non-concept. How can corporations develop and maximize profit if they are being regulated? Starve the people but don't you ever think of strangling the corporations that are making the world go round. Profit is king and the people be damned.
So how do Americans see their country's criminal aggressions and the callous greed? First of all, greed is a good thing in the American credo. God rewards the hard workers and the ones left behind have no reason to complain. Socialism is a dirty word and welfare is only good when it's for the benefit of the Big Corporations.
Instead of seeing that the United States invades or buys every country that does not agree with their methods of running business, the gullible U.S. citizen is firmly convinced that the U.S. comes to the aid of every country when it is in trouble. They support the evil dictator and things calm down. Nobody ever lets them know that what the U.S. is doing is in the interest of its own global hegemony and that the indigenous people are beaten down and suffering even worse after the United States gets in on the side of the dictator. For every social uprising in Central America, from the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954 in Guatemala on through the Reagan years, the United States has intervened with an iron fist, bombing and killing, usually through mercenary death squads, until the leftist struggle for justice is totally crushed and the U.S.-supported dictatorship can go on doing the bidding of the Empire.
Inside the United States, the increasing inequality and vanishing civil rights are forcefully backed up by the Big Corporations who see that state of things as the only way of meeting their goal of ever increasing dividends to the shareholders and multi-million bonuses to the CEOs. Furthermore, this is the way of life that is considered by them as the normal way of running the economy. Ethics do not exist. Those who were born to grab from the others will do so no matter what they were taught in Sunday school about doing good to their neighbor
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_28125.shtml

December 21, 1998
Unconstitutional wars gravest of crimes
Congress must reclaim from president power to declare war
No proposition is more serious than placing in harms' way the lives of our nation's soldiers. Wars are instituted by governments, but it is the youth that pay the ultimate price.

It is for this reason that the Constitution speaks clearly about where the power for engaging troops in battle must rest. In Article 1, Section 8, the Constitution gives the power to "declare war, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water" solely to the House of Representatives. The reason for this is clear; the House is the branch of the federal government closest to the people, standing for election the most often, and therefore the most accountable.

When our young men in uniform were sent into battle last week by the president (regardless of whether for honorable or dishonorable reasons), it was in direct contradiction to the United States Constitution, in keeping with the history of the past half-century.

Despite the thousands of Americans who have died in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and other locales, there has not been a declared war since World War II. Each of those actions occurred without the constitutional requirement of a declaration of war. In reality many of our nation's young men died in the pitch of battle and war, but in the coldness of the law, they fell -- depending on the case -- in "police actions," "peacekeeping missions" or "support operations," with the authority usually coming from the United Nations, rather than the US Congress.

In what should be regarded as the gravest of all crimes, these citizens were sent to their deaths unconstitutionally. And, it should be noted, for actions we lost. We lost those wars simply because they were not matters of urgency in protecting our national security, but political battles waged to appease one interest group or another. Without the full resolve of Congress and a declaration of war to protect our security, our military must deal with such vague politically correct objectives as "reducing the ability" of a foreign leader to potentially do something. How does one define a "reduced ability," let alone bring such an objective to fruition?

It is commonly, but incorrectly, assumed that a president has the authority to send troops into battle, though under our Constitution, the highest law of the land, he does not.

Sadly, though, Congress has abdicated -- unconstitutionally -- its solemn responsibility in this matter. Members of Congress are eager to let presidents drop bombs on foreign nations for many reasons, though the underlying one is that it relieves them of personal responsibility while giving each a sense of strength and power.

An attempt was made to rectify this situation in the early 1970s, with the introduction of the War Powers Act, following the Korea and Vietnam fiascoes. The legislation originally would have moved us closer to the Constitution. What passed, however, has made things far worse in the intervening 25 years. Now the law allows presidents to send troops into any battle, anywhere, for any reason, without Congress having any chance to voice even opposition until long after lives have been endangered.

Under the War Powers Act, a president can send troops into battle to honor a UN request or to divert attention from personal problems.

Often, of course, the military industrial complex and their allies in Congress push for meaningless resolutions supporting the action, even if the action is objectively wrong. Remember, these are not war declarations, but resolutions rubber stamping presidential actions. The rhetoric used, then , is that one must vote for these resolutions to "support the troops."

Never addressed, of course, is the absurdity of how one can "support" soldiers by sending them into unconstitutional battles where they will die for causes other than protecting our security interests.

Most recently, the Congress interrupted the important impeachment debate to pass a two-part resolution. The first half simply offered support for our troops, and was unobjectionable. The second half, though, encouraged the president, praised his unconstitutional actions, and recommended that he engage in further unconstitutional actions by trying to topple the leadership of Iraq and replace it with what would amount to a US taxpayer supported puppet regime. Of course, voting against the second part is depicted as the fans of unconstitutional war as opposing our troops. Nevertheless, I voted against the resolution because I cannot sanction abuses of our Constitution.

Congress should support the troops by taking them out of senseless danger, not encouraging a soon-to-be impeached president to risk further the lives of enlisted men.

The gravest crime against our Constitution is the one never addressed: the senseless slaughter of our soldiers, our best and brightest. Perhaps one day Congress will reclaim its constitutionally mandated power of sole authority over matters of war. Until then, more young men will die senseless deaths.
http://ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=77
a conservative but a rational one.

Usa#s political system is below the barbaric system.
Any rational humabeing who uphold the USA's system is either innocent or criminals.

Vote me down and you cannot enjoy without me.