Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies

By Joe Bageant

Joe,

Reading you is like drinking those bottles full of clear liquids the night before a colonoscopy. The next day I survive the test and am told that I do not have colon cancer -- yet. Still, I am getting the test in spite of the fact that I know that my pack a day cigarette habit coupled with 12 fancy beers a day is probably gonna kill me first. I've been working for a very large corporation for the last 20 years as a print advertising designer. I am on the Endangered Species list at 58. I have been playing the consumer game for the past 45 years. I've known that the whole thing was a lie since I was 13 -- before that I lived in a world that was so monochromatic that when I heard the Beatles I thought that heaven had come to earth.

I wanted to tell you my whole story, but have decided to spare you that. I have one simple question: seeing what you see, knowing what you know, what are your recommendations for how to proceed? Because I am seeing that just drinking hard enough to not think about it is no way to live. Or is it? When the best hopes being offered are simply the offerings of another corporate lackey, how does one live?

Do trips to Mexico help?

I realize as I write this that you are not pretending to be a self-help guru for baby boomers with a guilt complex. Still, I cannot help but hope that you have some thoughts for a one-time proud hippie (I marched against the war in Vietnam in Detroit in 1968 and again against the war in Iraq in 2003) who longs to extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit of years of consumerism.

I write letters to congressmen and senators and get form letter responses -- personalized, no less. So I would like you to write me back, tell me you read what I wrote, that you got this e-mail. That's all. I will be satisfied.

Yours in hopelessness,

Brad

------

Brad,

Yeah, we are on the endangered species list all right. But the rest of America, and maybe even mankind, is not far behind. Not that it's any consolation, of course. I have to smile at your mention of the Beatles being like heaven coming to earth. Me too!

In reply to your query, all I can do is tell you my experience. I don't know shit really. Certainly not the answers to other people's questions, especially those of such a serious nature. However, I do know my own experience. Sort of. So all I can do is share that.

You ask if "trips to Mexico help?" Because Mexico is my home for the time being, (I spend most of my time here now, and have obtained legal residency status) and only go back to the US when necessary, I'm not sure if "trip" is the right word. I rather feel that the world is my home now. Consequently, I do not know if "help" is the right word either. I no longer have any geographical goals, per se, other than I seem to be a better person in some locales than in others. I hope I am not running, because at this age running, physically or metaphorically, takes too much effort. I'd rather walk, with periodic rest stops -- such as this one in Mexico.

It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness, masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of "hope," and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the "work ethic," well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside. Get a different set of problems. Some nights even sickness or hunger looked acceptable, compared to the screaming, yet silent anxiety I was experiencing. I swear it was fucking unbearable. By 2005, I was in Central America for I did not know how long.

Personally, I found that the problems I encountered every day in places like Belize (and now Mexico) somehow suited my own innate sensibilities better. I had no expectations really. Which is good because both paces would have been extremely disappointing if I had. Mainly I just wanted to give up any "advantage" I supposedly had as a citizen of the "greatest nation on earth," which was, as I said, quite literally, killing me, much as it seems to be killing you.

Beyond that, I wanted to spend the remaining 10 or 15 percent of my life doing stuff with human beings, face-to-face, asshole to belly button -- babies being born, people dying, getting drunk, worshiping their gods, experiencing joy. And I wanted to do so without any mediation by soul killing American corporate culture. I did not want "security" as Americans and Europeans perceive it, and still don't. The only way to do that is to intentionally stay pretty broke. Money is a rigged game -- you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is a horribly corrupted -- especially since the advent of the "virtual world economy," a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people's hard earned wealth before they ever see it.

Well, I say, fuck their offerings. And screw childish "hope." Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don't need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an "economy" or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years. A real gypsy taught me a song yesterday and Easter is in the air in Mexico. I guess that as a burned out old hippie and a writer, I cannot imagine anything else to hope for.

I truly do understand what you are saying about consumerism. I lived it too. I still have a house full of stuff in Virginia that is the biggest bane on my life. Tons of stuff -- old paintings, family documents, guitars, stuff my kids made while growing up, art and artifacts gathered from around the world in the course of a life, file cabinets full of articles I wrote for magazines and newspapers over the past 40 years. My wife and I are paralyzed over what to do with the stuff. She retires in a year or so and so still lives up there in the middle of it all.

When I am there, we sip wine and savor the memories connected with acquiring those things together, the 18th Century drawings we bought together at Covent Garden in London, the love we felt in Venice. And when I am in Mexico, I understand that the freedom of my austere life here is of greater value than any of those things. Which does not keep me from missing them from time to time. But in my heart I know that, for the most part, I have beaten American consumerism (though I'll always be a sucker for good imported booze).

The other thing I know for sure is that the only way for a man to "extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit" is to extricate himself. Walk away. There is no plan one can make to do so while living in the belly of the beast. The beast of American capitalism will not let you, but will encourage the belief that you can. As my webmaster Ken, who left America over a decade ago say, "The only way to do it is to just get up and do it."

Also, I believe it can still be done while remaining in America, once one rises above the "learned helplessness" that comes with being a captive of the empire. But it still entails giving up most of what you know, and more importantly, what the society around you believes is reality. It means becoming a renunciate. Giving up everything in a society that believes the very things that are destroying it are necessities. No car, no processed foods, no cell phone, few clothes, little or no technology, no media entertainments, refusal to own investments, no more than five or six hundred square feet of living space, dedicated hours each day for reflection on the little things one does to maintain one's self, such as cooking or bathing, or gardening -- but especially renunciation of technology.

Technology not only carries the disease, but is its most virulent aberrator of human consciousness. In fact, even at its best, it colonizes and mutates human consciousness, just as this laptop stands between you and I, distorting our communication as much as it facilitates it. Is an exchange of digital packets between two human beings, each isolated at the end of a cybernetic node, really human communication? Of course not. (Yes, I know how much shit I'm going to get for that statement.)

Anyway, I try to limit myself to owning only one piece of high technology -- this laptop. I don't own a camera phone, or a cell phone (much to the ire of publishers, friends and some family members). To my shame, I do have a television in my little casita. I missed my wife so much at first, that I bought it just so I'd have distraction in the lonely evenings, which of course, did not work. It was a stupid American thing, an ignorant knee-jerk consumer reflex, as if the voice of Larry King were going to substitute for the words "I love you" when night falls. I'm learning all the time to beware of what is available around us.

Regarding writing congressmen, I never bother. It's just part of maintaining the appearance of democracy. Everybody writes their congressmen on both sides of an intractable, polarized and deadlocked system dedicated to preserving iron fisted capitalism, no matter what happens. No matter how the vote on a piece of legislation goes down. I have absolutely no faith in the American political system. Or ultimately, in any political system for that matter. Ain't no saviors of the people up there on Capitol Hill. Just powerful men and women who don't have a clue but have plenty of ambition and ego and avenues to feed both -- with a few exceptions like Dennis Kucinich.

I am convinced we all have to find our own way, and find it alone, most likely at great cost -- that great cost being the loss of all that we thought we knew about the world. I am coming to understand that as Americans, we were born into a powerfully induced mass illusion. An infantile consciousness of "I-want-I want," which drives the machinery of war, waste and profits, and which colonizes our minds and souls from birth like a progressive disease. I say "coming to understand," because, as an American I can never truly understand. My consciousness and neurosystem are far too mutated to ever understand. But I find great relief in the effort.

And also pain. Some nights I drink, and cry inside for both the world as I have known it -- youth tasted so good -- and for the kingdom of mankind that might have been, but really never could have been. Because the kingdom is truly within each of us, never in the clamorous throng.

But in the morning the roosters crow, and wood smoke stirs in the air, and this village wakes up, and does all those ancient things decent people do in so much of the rest of the world. Old women sweep the street in front of their doorways, men uncomplainingly go in search of a day's labor, and young mothers nurse babies in the courtyards, full knowing that what they see around them is all there will ever be for them, and that the Virgin of Guadeloupe blesses each morning. Just as their mothers and grandmothers knew it. Already they are tired for the world. But not joyless.

And neither am I.

Lately, I've had a spate of emails saying how bleak and hopeless some of my writing has become, in the estimation of many readers. This comes not so much as criticism, but as observation. I am no longer taken aback by it. To me, it's simply a kind of reporting on the world as best I can.

Others ask me the best way to escape America to Belize or Mexico. How to plan a breakout from the empire to these places as I have described them. Once in a while I reply, even though I know better. Each person's conditioning and perceptions are different. And surely their experience would be different, were they to do what I have done. That's a given. In the end, all I can tell you is that you will have to act according to your own inner lights then be willing to live with the results. And even then, I'm not sure that's true. But it seems true at this day and hour, in this little stone courtyard on a hillside under a spring sky.

Podemos ver el mundo con ojos de fría y un corazón caliente.

In art and labor,

Joe

Canadian asks: Who you gonna bomb next, eh?

Joe Bageant

Hi Joe,

Greetings from one of the attic dwellers in Canada. We've been mocked as being eternally uninvited to the party going on downstairs. However, lately it seems more like someone has called in the cops to break up the bash. Canadians probably obsess over "America" even more than the Europeans and pretty much every other country, and why wouldn't we? You guys are the 800-pound gorilla in the global room, and when thing start going to shit down there, you can bet it's going to hit the fan up here too.

I was a year old when Vietnam ended, and I'm wondering how low the national mood was back then compared to today. Vietam was obviously an epic American ass-kicking, and the sense I get from some of your articles is that many Americans are finally waking up to the fact that they've been getting kicked in the teeth by their own governments and corporations for another 35 years since then. In clinical terms, you would be looking at a major PTSD patient whose shattered delusions of grandeur have been twisted into an ugly rage spiral -- all of which is now being expressed in, um, the Tea Party Movement?

Joe, many questions come to mind, but one of the most pressing is this: can you point readers to some kindred spirits of yours on the web who write in the same mold?

And, do you see any Hunter-esque gonzos coming down the pike? If he sensed a new rot creeping into the scene back in the early 80s, his ashes must be doing the funky chicken over Obama not even bothering to coat the horseshit with honey these days.

Little Bush made it easy for Obama to give away the store. The Cheney-Rove brain trust decided to put it all out in the open, damn the torpedoes, and the trick worked. Official White House policy, officially posted on the official White House website, officially listed criminal government actions that would have put Nixon in a fucking gas chamber. You don't have to know much about the system to realize the powers that be always have the ability to simply move the goalposts when it suits them. But BushCo seemed to be saying something else altogether, something to the effect of: "The goalposts don't even exist. And, for any of you legal Luddites who think the 'rule of law' does exist, or at least should exist, well, it only exists insomuch as our legal flunkies interpret that it exists. Which is to say, the rule of law doesn't exist in any other way than we say it exists. Try to think of it as the Rule of the Rulers of Law. Or something like that. Whatever floats your boat. We don't fucking care anyway."

Following an act like that, Obama can now take one long, protracted piss on the American public, and he doesn't even have to call it rain.

It could all lead to electoral disaster, but if Dems are going to rule like Repubs anyway, does it really matter all that much?

One last question Joe, just wondering where you're at with the Doomer type stuff out there these days -- obviously impossible to predict timelines for these sorts of things, but if it does go bad at some point and the food trucks stop running, where do you see all that American civilian and military firepower gunning for first?

Cheers,

Ryan

------

Ryan,

Well, in 1975 when the war ended, America was a different country. Damned near everyone was quite happy to see it over, some because they were glad to see an end of the horror and expense, others because it had become boring television. All we have left to document that war for your generation is what the media said at the time. Which is rather hyperbolic and full of gaps. Many of us who protested and whatever, felt that ending the war was a pyrrhic victory. Sixty thousand dead, 160,000 wounded and at least a million on the other side. Not to mention the wasted resources that could have done so much to lift the American people toward what we could have been, an educated, self-realized people. I feel my generation, or at least the best among them, were on the cusp of that before the war.

Anyway, the right wing ideologues and their following made big noises about "if we had only put more resources into it, and turned the generals loose to fig -- yada, yada." They spread that shit around until most knee jerk non-thinkers had it stamped on the tip of their tongues as their official answer to any question regarding the war we couldn't win.

You could go down to the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars club and listen to ‘em piss and moan about how the politicians fucked up what should have been a certain victory. Even then, about half of us at the VFW and the American Legion Halls were out back smoking pot. And mocking the old guys saying all that shit, mostly the World War II vet set, whom we called "Big Vet."

As might be expected, all the New York intellectuals were doing their usual jerking off about the "meaning" of the war. As if any war meant anything but death for the anonymous "little people," both yellow and Caucasian, and profits for the big dogs. People like Norman Mailer were making essentially the same arguments you mentioned, that Nam shattered illusions and was a blow to white masculinity and all that stuff. The average American scarcely knew who Mailer was. Only intellectuals worry about such things as American masculinity, as if all of our peckers were linked together in some sort of sort of unified field.

To my mind the most important effect of the Vietnam War was that the 14-year war conditioned Americans to accepting ongoing warfare as an ordinary backdrop to their lives. Since then we've always been at war somewhere to some degree or another. It's language has penetrated the way we think. Corporations launch a marketing "offensive," We declare a "war on drugs." Likewise, the language of capitalist finance and war meld. Twenty thousand dead civilians become "collateral" damage. The aggregated corpses become "damage." The cumulative result has been the Orwellian Newspeak so nicely summed up by Gore Vidal in the phrase "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace."

The history of the era had to be rewritten to keep the military industrial complex and its associated rackets in business, lest we all end up unarmed, peace loving, educated people. So staring with lest the countercultural movement, starting with Newt Gingrich, the Heritage Foundation, et al, tens of millions were spent rewriting the Sixties era as the beginning of the end of America. Since then the neocon forces have perfected misinformation to the point of stirring up more meanness in this country than I would have ever thought possible Even the John Birchers are making a comeback.

And the Teabaggers? Looks to me like its national base, if it really has one -- it's hard to tell how much is neocon media manipulation and how much is real -- are pretty much the same ignorant characters as always. The frustrated, ill educated uninformed people who want to less government but more benefits, and to pay for operating the country with tax cuts.

Writers in the gonzo-esque mold? I really don't know any more than you do on that matter. I'd say James Howard Kunstler for one. You may not think of Jim that way, but if he were writing his stuff in 1970, he would have been seen as gonzo. But I'm not sure just who is out there. I really don't cruise the web as much as you might think.

But Hunter was one of a kind. Realistically speaking, Matt Taibbi is probably as good as Hunter was in many respects. But Hunter was the first. Taibbi is better than Hunter in nailing down the facts, but strains too hard at times to be entertaining (who doesn't?) Still, I have a lot of respect for Taibbi. Also, Hunter's political position inasmuch as he had one other than personal freedom, might be called armed and drugged-out libertarian. It was a different era. If Hunter were starting out today, I doubt Hunter could get published by mainstream mags and book publishers. Publishers' legal fears and all.

Regarding "rulers" who do not give a fuck: Nobody in either party has cared for the past 30 years. Only the Democrats feel compelled to keep up the charade. You are wrong about the way the legal system of lackeys works. When it comes to twisting the interpretation of the law so you can steal from the people, violate privacy or otherwise move the Constitutional goalposts, don't blame that on the politicians. We have a Supreme Court for that purpose.

I don't know why everyone seems so outraged at how we've been pissed on by the Obama administration. Actually, it's a long standing tradition. The same old crew of elites has always been pissing on the citizenry down here. They've just had different presidents holding their dicks for them. I wouldn't worry too much about it "leading to electoral disaster?" Our electoral process IS a disaster. The electoral college is designed to thwart the popular vote. And regarding "If the Dems are going to rule like the Republicans anyway." Neither party rules. Corporations do the ruling. Politicians conduct the public sing-along about democracy.

Like anyone else who has soberly observed this age of peak everything, and the avaricious clowns in charge of our future, I'm a doomer. Even if Abe Lincoln, FDR or Gandhi were in charge at this point, I'd be a doomer. But with enough booze, I can gut it out in relative cheer. As for making predictions, I try to avoid it. You see, I am in the racket of appearing as if I might know these sorts of things, so publishers will pay me money. It's a delicate balancing act. Readers believe way too much of what I say, and my wife doesn't believe anything I say. Fortunately, my dog is a good listener and never comments, unless there is bacon involved.

And finally, your question as to who we Americans bomb next will bomb next. The possibilities are endless. Given that up there in Canada you don't carry guns, I kinda like the idea of bombing you guys. Maybe we could win a war for a change. Barring that, maybe Australia. The place is so big and empty I doubt we'd hit anybody. Hell, it would take 'em a year to notice it.

But I'm sure God, Wall Street and the Pentagon and will let us know when the time comes.

In art and labor,

Joe

9/11 AND CURRENT ATTEMPTS TO COVER UP AN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Today, John Avalon wrote a piece for the Daily Beast describing those who are asking for a new 9/11 investigation as “wingnuts.” What he fails to tell us is that he used to work for Rudy Guliani, a man whose former chief of staff is now doing time as a Mafia “bag man.”

The prisoner in question, Bernie Kerik, was supposed to head Homeland Security. Think about a character from the movie Goodfellas nation’s chief law enforcement official and you an idea where John Avalon comes from. The only way of going further would have been to put the ghost of the “dapper don,” John Gotti himself into the Whitehouse.

Avalon is a tool, an “asset,” but whose? Who profits from his story? When the 9/11 Commission itself asked for prosecutions of those who perjured themselves and presented false documents and have, quite frankly, stepped away from their own findings, a massive movement to reopen the investigation has grown worldwide. Top intelligence officials, military officers, scientists and engineers, in numbers far exceeding any of opposing opinion, are clamouring for a new investigation.

It has become so powerful that the “assets” are coming out of their holes. Avalon’s approach is classic:

“It is appropriate that Ahmadinejad used the phrase the “big lie,” first coined by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf to explain the psychology behind propaganda campaigns of misinformation. “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” Hitler wrote, because “It would never come into [most people's] heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Avalon doesn’t tell us what “truth” is being distorted but he drags out Hitler, Mein Kampf and the very suspect Ahmandinejad of Iran, a veritable “kitchen sink” of unrelated references in what is unavoidably part of a misinformation campaign almost exactly as he himself is describing.

Avalon is describing a conspiracy. Who is the “wingnut” here?

Exactly what group is conspiring together? Who is financing the “9/11 truth” propaganda campaign that is part of the massive conspiracy that Avalon is referring to? What is their goal? So far, the “9/11 truth” movement is what it looks like, people unsatisfied with the explanation they got, scientists, scholars, politicians, world leaders and a few crazy people, all loosely tied to one idea, finding the truth, a truth that key members of the 9/11 Commission have said is not in their report because of a “criminal conspiracy” to mislead them.

If anything, the “9/11 truth “movement is the victim, a victim of smear campaigns and it is increasingly reported that their organizations, which number in the hundreds, have come under investigation by security agencies and their membership has been heavily infiltrated much as with the militia movements of the 80s and 90s.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, the militias disappeared. It is claimed they had one last meeting. It went like this:

“We’ve been putting this off for awhile but its time we faced up. OK, I have a question for the membership. Will all FBI informants please step forward. OK, will all of you please step back where you were. Meeting adjourned.”

Avalon’s article appears to be a small and very stupid part of the “truth debunking” movement, clearly tied to “insiders,” and there is no more of an “insider” than Rudy Guliani. Is someone figuring that if we are drowned with enough baseless charges of conspiracy, the real conspiracies can go unchallenged? This is a very common “psy-ops” deception ploy meant, frankly, to be wielded by a greater intellect and with greater skill.

Do the terms “truth debunking” and “obstruction of justice” mean the same thing? We should think about this.

These aren’t armed radicals and nothing is being threatened other than a “cover story” that fell apart years ago. If the “9/11 truth” movement is being investigated as a criminal conspiracy, as seems to be the case, using extraordinary means, even to the point of applying Patriot Act “counter-terrorism” provisions, what does this mean?

Do we have two conspiracies now or is it three? Can anyone keep track? We certainly know Avalon’s story is part of something, the smell is outrageous. Is it a conspiracy? Does working for Rudy Guliani, now rumored to represent many of the world’s most vicious dictators as a lobbyist, make people simply “go bad?”

After dragging out Hitler, Avalon then went after poor and long dead Osama bin Laden. While in Pakistan last week, meeting with Lt. General Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani intelligence agency and General Aslem Beg along with Col “Imam,” coordinator of military activities against the Soviets, I was able to verify the December 2001 death of Osama bin Laden. This was also confirmed at the highest government levels, levels that regularly brief our own government.

Not only has bin Laden been dead for years but the CIA’s own translation of bin Laden’s tapes shows him denying all involvement in 9/11. What does Avalon do? He brings out the transcript of a long discredited “phony bin Laden” tape received from former Israeli Defense Force member, Rita Katz and her organization Site Intelligence, a group that downloads things from conspiracy sites on the internet, something Avalon must know alot about.

Here is what Avalon had to say:

“Alternately, you can just take Osama bin Laden’s word for it. He’s repeatedly taken credit for the attacks, including on a videotape where he recounts the planning process and his wish for maximum damage: “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. … Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we hoped for.”

Of course, bin Laden never said any of this. This is a fabrication. Why would someone write something like this unless there was something to hide? Who teaches people to write like this? Did writing speeches for Rudy Guliani suddenly make a political propagandist into a journalists?

This is the CIA’s version of Mr. Avalon’s story:

DECLASSIFIED TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

FOREIGN BROADCASTING INTERNATIONAL SERVICE:

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

Usama: In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the earth as an abode for peace, for the whole mankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to the Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and Momin [true Muslim] people of Pakistan who refused to believe in lie of the demon. I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children, and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam.

Is the CIA now involved in a plot to discredit, well, exactly who? If you wondered why Osama bin Laden had never been charged with any 9/11 related crimes, this statement and a rather telling lack of evidence might help you with your conclusions, unless, of course, you think that the FBI is involved in a plot against Avalon and Guliani also.

We, long ago, had written off journalism as an honest profession. Were I to make a living out of accusing others of being “wingnuts,” I might, first of all, learn to write. Beyond that, I would learn to get one or two facts straight and, if I were to try using cheap propaganda tricks, I would be alot better at it. This is lame.

BRINGING SUSPICION ON THEMSELVES

After billions have been spent and 9 years has past, no proof of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 has been presented. However, we have had attempts to lie to the 9/11 Commission and more than a few stories like this one, inaccurate, cheap propaganda that smell of something.

What?

Always ask, why would someone write something this blatant unless they were serving some purpose? Are articles like this proof of a conspiracy themselves? The “9/11 truth” movement is only asking for an investigation. It isn’t making statements of having proof of “false flag” operations against the United States by the Bush administration or Israel.

Would an investigation head that way? What would be found? Why try to stop an investigation whey, obviously, a new one is required? What is being hidden? What agenda does Avalon’s article serve and who is he tied to?

How much money have so many made off 9/11? Names like Chertoff, Silverstein, Guiliani, Ridge, Haliburton, Blackwater and dozens more, all friends, political allies, always come up. I don’t know if all the coincidences make up a massive conspiracy against the United States, a conspiracy that killed thousands and put us into two wrongful wars.

Can I prove this article is part of a conspiracy or just dumb? The dumb part is obvious. The ties to Guliani, who sits at the heard of any conspiracy theory, is, if anything, a demand for an investigation.

There wouldn’t be articles like this, not so many, unless there is a conspiracy, like the one Avalon accuses other of, but one he is serving himself, knowingly or not. Is it a conspiracy to save Americans from learning something unpleasant about the nature of their own government and what kinds of things it is capable of?

This is what most Americans think. Are they right? Do they have the right to know?

These are the questions and articles like John Avalon’s make the point for asking those questions and perhaps using some of those Patriot Act powers, the waterboarding, the detentions, the renditions and the special tribunals for something other than silencing dissent.

War Is A Racket

Most decorated US Marine General: All US wars are for insiders’ personal profits

video live at source: http://tinyurl.com/ycghwnu

Smedley Butler (and here) was the most honored man in Marine Corps history. He wrote and spoke that the purpose of US wars is millions and billions in profits for America’s leading “bankers, industrialists, and speculators.” War is a “racket:” a deception whereby its purpose of blood money from American taxpayers to “insiders” is always disguised as noble and necessary ventures to keep Americans propagandized into paying again and again.

General Butler in his summative book, War is a Racket, on the costs of war to ordinary Americans:

“This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations….

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face”! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.”

…Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.”

General Butler on war propaganda:

“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”

…At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that “We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.” Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.”

His recommendation to end war is to remove its profit motive:

“Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers – yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.”

The ChannelofLiberty’s Channel provides the below 8-minute artistic video from General Butler’s work.

It’s time.

It’s time for our men and women in government and military to choose: either stand with the US Constitution you’ve sworn to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC, or remain complicit in ongoing Wars of Aggression, mass murder of our soldiers and our fellow humans in other lands and throwing trillions of our tax dollars to do so, pushing the world ever-closer to an apparently planned and desired nuclear Third World War (and here), and guilty of what Dr. Martin Luther King called “Silence is Betrayal” before the US government assassinated him according to the only trial conducted for his murder.

It’s time for our men and women in the military and government to refuse all orders associated with our unlawful wars and preparation for unlawful war with Iran over one gram of medical isotope worth $75,000 in 20% enriched nuclear fuel. It is hard to imagine a more ridiculous case for war.

It’s time for our men and women in the military and government to refuse all orders associated with our unlawful wars and preparation for unlawful war with Iran and stand with the American public who declare in a ratio of 9 to 1 that our government no longer represents them under the US Constitution.

It’s time: exercise your 1^st Amendment right to freedom of speech and press, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Please provide this article to all Americans if you find it helpful to stop current and future unlawful wars.

Over 5,000 US soldiers have been killed so far as pawns of the civilian and military brass tyrants. Multiples more have been crippled physically and emotionally. There is no end in sight to current wars; indeed, the US is expanding them into Pakistan and Yemen and threatening more war with Iran. The dead are comforted by God; their families are devastated by the loss of their loved-ones. The crippled and their families face a range of challenges; many so severe that a total of 6,000 US veterans commit suicide every year. One-third of all US homeless men are veterans.

Our military was duped into these wars with calculated “Big Lies;” our trusting young men and women took an Oath to support and defend the US Constitution that supersedes the Nazi insert of “placing the mission first.” The Claus von Stauffenberg faction of US military and government must act to end this soulless mass-murdering; this loveless series of unlawful wars and unlawful orders, if we want a future we’re proud to build.

This choice is up to our men and women in uniform and government for leadership. I provide:

• Explanation of the rules of lawful war omitted from their military training that proves beyond any doubt that current US wars are unlawful.
• Analogies that the rules of war are almost exactly like those for an individual’s use of force on the street.
• Documentation of lies that were known to be lies as our political “leaders” told them and our war-whore corporate media mimicked to propagandize for war in Iraq.
• Proof beyond doubt that the speech of Iranian President Ahmadinejad never threatened Israel.
• Documentation that IAEA verifies all of Iran’s nuclear material and has only and always been used for legal and peaceful purposes.
• A reminder that you love virtue, American values, and love of your fellow human beings.

And, our men and women in uniform must take action as they see best; as will our men and women in government and citizenry. As a teacher of government and law, I conclude our government leadership is guilty of treason against the American public, and guilty of mass murder against our soldiers.

Choose well; our collective future, and your future, depend upon it.

It’s time: please share this article with all who can benefit. If you appreciate my work, please subscribe by clicking under the article title (it’s free). Please use my archive of work to help build a brighter future.

I appreciate your attention to these facts and encourage your further study and action consistent with your own self-expression. My recommendations:

Policy response: Gandhi and Martin Luther King advocated public understanding of the facts and non-cooperation with evil. I’m among hundreds who advocate:

1. Understand the laws of war (and here). These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. The current US wars are not even close to being lawful and are legal treason against the US. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. To fulfill their oath they must immediately refuse all orders associated with unlawful wars and military-related constant violation of treaties, and arrest those who issue unlawful orders. The Oath of Enlistment to the US Constitution supersedes the fascist insertion of Nazi propaganda to “always place the mission first” of blindly following unlawful orders.
2. Employ the obvious and simple solutions to end our economic controlled demolition and evolve to a civil economy. End poverty through global cooperation to achieve the UN Millennium Goals by developed countries investing 0.7% of their income (not that the UN is serious for their accomplishment, but the goals are what we should invest to produce). Support global security through cooperation, dignity, justice, and freedom. Create a US Department of Peace to help.
3. Communicate. Trust your unique, beautiful, and powerful self-expression to share as you feel appropriate. Understand that while many people are ready to embrace difficult facts, many are not. Anticipate that you will be attacked and prepare your virtuous response in the spirit of competition, just as you do in other fields.
4. Prosecute the war leaders for obvious violation of the letter and spirit of US war laws and constant lies to engage in further wars. Because the crimes are so broad and deep, I recommend Truth and Reconciliation (T&R) to exchange full truth and return of stolen US assets for non-prosecution. This is the most expeditious way to understand and end all unlawful and harmful acts. Those who reject T&R are subject to prosecution.

Local perspective: Part of my professional duties as a teacher of economics and government is to produce competent adult citizenry. This includes realization that our nation’s policies and money are managed at a broad community level, and these issues have tremendous local impact. Of course, we all want human beings to be individually successful and enjoy their unique, beautiful and powerful self-expressions. Concurrently, we recognize our commitment to local success is strongly dependent upon the success of the community, and that government policy and economics are drivers.

Our status in early 21^st Century human history is that we suffer from a long history in government and money of human interrelationship well-described as vicious antagonism. Governments frequently use war as a foreign policy, despite its illegality and dependent upon public ignorance, with horrific consequences. Economic policy is still created within a “Robber Baron” paradigm to concentrate money to an elite few families. Two examples:

1. National taxes effect you dearly, especially the tax to pay interest on the national debt. This costs the American public over $400 billion every year. This is $4,000 per year for every $50,000 of income. Do the math to understand your household’s tax burden for a monetary policy invented by banks for banks to create our money supply as debt. Your competence in this area contributes to our collective voice to simply shift monetary policy to easily pay the national debt, enjoy full employment, collectively save us over a trillion dollars every year, and finally realize what our brightest American minds have been advocating for centuries beginning with Benjamin Franklin. This would have unprecedented local benefits, and requires collective power to accomplish.

2. Ending poverty everywhere on our planet would cost just 0.7% of our income and save a million children’s lives every month. This human accomplishment will cause unimaginable joy at our local level.

To consider:

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in the world. Now the judgment of God is upon us and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

–Inscription on Dr. Martin Luther King’s statue, Moorehouse College, Atlanta

“The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth, there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.” — poet Federico García Lorca

Comments policy: I welcome questions and comments that are civil and pertain to the article topic. Impolite and impertinent comments will be deleted.

Please consider that I’m among hundreds of writers who have documented our own government’s disclosure of propaganda programs to support their wars. I suspect my articles are under such propagandistic attack from comments that use typical rhetorical fallacies to distract readers from the facts. I invite readers to sharpen their ability to discern such propaganda. They are characterized by a combination of: never addressing the facts, diverting attention through unsubstantiated belief in an alleged expert, irrelevant data, straw-man attack that distorts the facts, ad hominem attack of insults to the messenger, vile comments to repulse readers, and lies of omission and commission.

I will use such comments to point-out the propaganda or delete them at my discretion. Again, all relevant and polite questions, and factually accurate comments are welcome. As a professional educator I’m in agreement with my experience and research: we learn best from multiple perspectives in mutual commitment to understand the facts, see those facts from diverse points-of-view, and consider various policy proposals of what we should do.

For those involved in support of US government-sponsored disinformation, I invite you to consider the quality of human relationships you wish to work toward. National security and a brighter future is not a function of fear, manipulation, and control. Our best security follows cooperation, justice under the law, dignity, and freedom. Working for your best imagined self-expression of virtue may include a unique contribution from the inside of your agency. Public attraction to the stories of Star Wars and the Harry Potter books/movies recognize that our society’s jump to civilized relations for all of us might require support from people within the “dark side” acting as covert agents for building a brighter future. Another option is becoming a whistle-blower; Project Camelot is a popular venue for people in sensitive positions. Ultimately, I recommend a Truth and Reconciliation process to exchange full truth for no prosecution, explained in detail at the link. Please consider the wisdom of your own “Scrooge conversion” to act for the benefit of all humanity rather than your self-proclaimed controlling, manipulating, and loveless “masters.”

“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”