ON BEING AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR OF THE TRUTH

ON BEING AN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR OF THE TRUTH

1. My Austrian born law professor Albert A. Ehrenzweig told us long ago that he could design a perfect legal system, but it would be useless unless some human community accorded it a minimum of acceptance.
2. This insight is especially relevant for those of us who look for root causes, who are willing to examine the defects of capitalism, or for those of us who wish to understand and act in the civic area on the principles of our spiritual traditions. Few persons wish to enter into such a discussion unless they are already knowledgeable, and in such cases one is preaching to the choir.
3. Holders of the truth should be neither angry nor impatient nor imperious with their truth, nor should they give up on such a human community.
4. A truth holder can be effective, if at all, only by being an active, visible, participating part of the human community, including family, neighborhood, church, local government, places of play and leisure, and national government. No one will ever hear his truth if he becomes a goat milking hermit.
5. A truth holder must keep constantly in mind a concept that E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed called “adequatio.” By this he meant that a truth holder can impart only so much of his truth as the listener is ready and willing to receive. Until the listener is ready and willing, no imparting of the truth is possible.
6. A truth holder should be confident and secure in his truth, but he must be magnanimous, caring, and understanding with those in the human community who are not yet willing to listen, and he must patiently remain a participating part of the human community. He should be self-questioning. He must be aware of his own motives and defects and his Enneagram or psychological type. He must be open to the fears, needs, biases, bigotries of others in the human community, and willing to listen, really listen! He must remain sensitive to their concerns and to their probable Enneagram types. He may be most effective by quietly raising questions instead of making dogmatic doctrinaire assertions. Truth is of no value whatever in the human community unless holders of the truth remain as available beacons to teach and to guide when people are ready to listen.

Dated: October 17, 2008

Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

CURRENT POLITICAL REALITY

MONEY-CONTROLLED TOTALITARIANISM POSING AS DEMOCRACY

INTRODUCTION: This observation about our current political reality was inspired by two new recent books and is my brief summary of them: Alexander J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power,The End of American Exceptionalism, and Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporate, Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I am indebted to retired Lawrence Livermore physicist, Manuel Garcia, Jr for the concept of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex that was outlined in his article in Counterpunch on August 8, 2008 entitled “Oiling the War Machine,” http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia071112008.html

1. We in the US now have “totalitarianism posing as a democracy” where we voters and our political parties are allowed to have our votes and conventions, but have no power. Our belief that our “voting for the lesser evil,” may do some good about our economic problems is a naïve delusion. Liberals may be able to live with this delusion, but ordinary working class voters cannot. For them, the truth is graphic and obvious: Democrats will invariably betray them. Republicans at least let them keep their guns and their religion.
2. It is a delusion to believe that we govern ourselves in a government of, by, and for the people. Ours is a government of by and for corporations. The constitutional concepts of “separation of powers,” “checks and balances,” and “a nation of laws,” have been nullified by the arbitrary power of MICC as presided over by the President.
3. We are ruled by the MICC, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
4. MICC selects, controls, and funds all elected officials including all members of Congress, the Fed and the President, including Obama and McCain. MICC just spent hundreds of billions of public money without any vote of Congress and without any votes of the taxpaying people.
5. The function of Congress is to provide our tax money to fund MICC, and to get its incumbent members reelected. To do this, Members, especially Democrats have to lie and promise that they will represent the little guy. Democrats invariably vote as MICC compels and betray the little guy.
1. Democrats can therefore not appeal to and build on the legitimate resentment of voters that their needs are not being met…can make neither a class appeal nor a so-called populist appeal. The capitalist taboo underlying the MICC prohibits that. MICC would cut off Democrats re-election money if they even spoke of this.
2. Since the resentment of voters is real and legitimate, the Republicans can successfully make a phony populist appeal and use code words such as calling the Democrats “elitist” and out of touch with the real problems of workers. This is the truth. Democrats are out of touch! Sarah Palin is a more authentic populist than Barack Obama!
3. The best example of Democratic betrayal is this: Democrats have been promising Health Coverage ever since Truman. When they do get power, their plans always include much profit for the insurance companies, and even those are not enacted. Another example is that even after 2006, Democrats continued to fund MICC’s Iraq War despite the fact that a voting majority wanted them to stop.
6. The function of the President is to act as CEO for MICC, the more powerful the better for MICC, MICC demands the suppression of popular will through repressive devices because
7. MICC seeks perpetual war and preparation for war, imperialism, and expansion of American Empire and domination of the planet as a matter of ideology and economic imperative. For those who want the economic foundation, it is through “Military Keynesianism,” public money, that MICC profits. It is also capitalism in the late stages of mutation. This domination of the planet causes deep anger and resentment among those who are dominated, and among those who do not profit. MICC thus needs repressive and invasive tools like FISA. This may account for Obama’s sudden strange support of FISA,
8. We voters have zero power to get the things we want through our votes. Our voting wishes are always trumped, thwarted, and negated by the bribes MICC gives back to Members of Congress for their reelections.
9. Every single Senator insists on maintaining the unconstitutional filibuster rule so that a 2/3 vote of the Senators is required to pass anything that the voters may want. MICC loves this because it vastly increases its power over the law making process. In reality, MICC often has to bribe only one Senator to stop legislation. Not one single Senator wishes to abolish this.
10. MICC owns and controls all of the mainstream media and also the liberal journals and sources such as PBS, NPR, The Nation Magazine and The New Republic. The media loyally and steadfastly supports everything that MICC wants or does. We have no sources where citizens and voters can get information that they need to govern themselves. Our meager information sources are no possible match for the powerful bullhorn of the mainstream media. MICC funds Academia through grants, endowments and jobs. Academia therefore also fails to enlighten us.

Dated: September 22, 2008

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

WE MUST CROSS EXAMINE CAPITALISM OR WE FALL

The powerful culture wide taboo against discussing or analyzing the dynamics of our market economy will lead to the fall of our democratic civilization. UCLA Professor Jared Diamond studied four civilizations that perished and three that survived. The civilizations of Greenland Norsemen, Mesa Verde Native Americans, Central American Mayans and Easter Island perished. The Norse settlement in Greenland perished after 400 years partly because Norsemen could not overcome their taboo against eating seal meat and fish.[1] Diamond listed two choices that those societies which adjusted and survived made while those that failed did not:

· Willingness to reconsider and change core values

· Long term planning

Our mainstream nation abides by a culture wide taboo against mentioning or analyzing the social adequacy of capitalism and its offspring of imperialism and empire. The taboo stifles discussion of a positive role for public planning. We are therefore unable seriously to reconsider and change our core values or long term public planning. We choose three current examples for the purpose of illustrating this taboo and demonstrating the danger that the taboo presents to all of us.

Retired West Point Colonel Alexander J. Bacevich, now a professor at Boston University has a new book, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism,[2] that is an insightful analysis of the current sad state of our American democracy. A conservative, Bacevich says that we American citizens with our wish for endless consumer goods purchased on credit are the root cause of an imperial presidency and American empire that aggressively pursues the War on Terror and imperialism abroad with the uncritical support and funding of a one party congress. He says that Congress’ function is to provide the funding for this imperialism while at the same time insuring the re-election of incumbent Members.[3] Our government he says is broken and dysfunctional, and is using ineffective inappropriate military power against criminal terrorists that can only be controlled by effective police work.

Princeton professor of political science emeritus Sheldon Wolin has a very persuasive new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianismin [4] in which he shows how the United States is becoming, if it is not already, a totalitarian state posing as a democracy. He says that corporate and state power are now one, and that we voting citizens are politically uninterested, infantilized, obedient, distracted, and divided, effectively controlled by our corporate masters, as they pursue imperialism. He says that both the media and academia are “self-pacifying” and thus are not critical of their corporate masters or our trend toward totalitarianism.

Former Vice President Al Gore has his alarming book An Inconvenient Truth [5]where he documents the current state of global warming and the danger that we are fast approaching the point of no return.

A citizen who wishes to be informed should read each of these books. They show that our planet is in peril and that our ballot box democracy is very nearly dead. Taken together, these authors give us desperately needed observations about our current environmental danger and the peril to our democracy. Each writes as if we citizens had sovereign governmental power and that we could control our politics and our environment if only we had the wisdom and the will to do so. Bacevich says the root problem is our own weakness, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled desire for consumer goods. Wolin says simply that we will have to get smarter. Wolin very accurately describes the current corporate rule and corporate control of our votes and thoughts without dealing with the dynamics of capitalism. Gore argues that we can control global warming within our market economy and still maintain material “progress.” Each writer fails to ask how we got into this condition. Each ignores root economic causes. Each falls into the trap of analyzing politics and political science separate from economics, when our plight compels that they be considered together as political economy. The analyses of these writers are typical American social science under the iron grip of the powerful taboo against public planning and criticism of our market economy. Because of this taboo these authors could not survive professionally in mainstream America if they were to talk about the root economic causes of our imperialism and our American Empire. Because of this taboo, Professor Wolin had to give a rather passive strange name to his book, “Inverted” Totalitarianism when the context suggests that he really means” Money- Controlled” Totalitarianism, or Capitalistic Totalitarianism.

Vice President Al Gore, Professor Bacevich, and Professor Wolin give us only half-truths when they fail to “follow the money,” namely to deal with the increasing wealth, power, and devastation that is generated from things as they are. Wolin’s journalists and fellow professors “self-pacify” for an important reason: They want to keep their jobs and their paychecks. Bacevich does not ask why Americans are addicted to consumer goods and credit. It of course has largely to do with incessant advertising, outsourcing of jobs, and inadequate pay. Gore does not talk about the powerful economic interests that must pursue short term profits and cannot survive by limiting carbon emissions. Each fails to ask: What caused us to get to our present plight? Who gets money and power from things as they are? Who has the money and power to prevent any reform by us voters? Who is thwarting and trumping our voting power to end the Iraq War right now? What is the effect, if any, of the vast disparity of wealth and power in the United States?

The fact is that we can understand and deal effectively with our problems only by analyzing both politics and economics, by “following the money.” As California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh proclaimed years ago, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” For several centuries, lawyers have ferreted out the truth during cross examination of a witness by showing that he/she was “paid off,” that he/she received payment for his/her testimony. We voters, citizens, journalists, and professors must “cross examine” our market economy, our capitalism to see who is “paid off” and who thereby derives overwhelming political power. We must not allow ourselves to be deterred by hysterical charges that we are “communistic” or “socialistic.” It is not evil for members of our human community to think, plan and work together cooperatively. It is anti-intellectual simple mindedness blindly to leave our problems to the “market” for a “solution,” especially when the capitalist market is the root cause of our problems. If we are to maintain a civilized democracy and a sustainable planet, we simply cannot avoid analyzing the dynamics of capitalism. Vast institutions of wealth and political power have created and now profit from the status quo. We cannot control or curtail this anti-social power unless we know what creates it. To understand what is going on, why corporate totalitarianism is creeping over us, why we are losing our jobs and our houses and why global warming seems out of control, we must understand how our market economy works and how it interacts with our government.

Capitalism, the accurate name for our market economy must constantly move and grow, with a dynamic something like a tornado or a fast growing cancer. There never has been and there never can be a sustainable stable capitalism, since capitalism thrives on competition testing who can be the greediest and most socially irresponsible. We have never voted to choose capitalism. It is a human creation, but it grew like a fast growing cancer side by side with our self-governing political process without any input or control from the vast majority of us.

At the root of capitalism there is

PRIVATE HIRING: A private person with money hires a person without money for the lowest possible wage in order make as much profit as possible for the person who already has money. The core axiom repeated over the decades by thousands of private employers, created a small very rich and politically powerful elite group of employers[6] while it produced millions and millions of employees who remain relatively poor with no wealth or power. The employers’ imperative to get employees at the lowest possible wage lead to the closing of productive jobs in the US and the outsourcing of those jobs and production to Mexico, then to China, and then to India. We did not vote or choose to stop being producers. We do not choose or vote to become a nation of consumers... We did not vote or choose to create global warming. The dynamics of capitalism make the choice for us, and for our employers. The profits of the capitalist employers give them means to make campaign contributions to our elected officials and to lobby them so as effectively to control them. The meager wages of employees gave us at most the right to vote which capitalist money and power then trumps. Democrats are especially guilty of lying to us when they repeatedly promise to protect the “the little guy” and give him health care and then invariably vote as the drug and insurance companies demand.

This private hiring twists into

MONOPOLY: Competition among capitalist-employers inevitably leads to the elimination of small employers, to price fixing, and to a monopoly of a few large firms, with capacity to produce more than they can sell at a profit. Henry Ford recognized this characteristic in the 1920s when he unilaterally raised the wages of his employees so that they could buy his Fords. Almost all other employers pay us employees such low wages that we cannot afford to buy what we have produced. We would lose our jobs and economic depression would result if nothing was done Capitalism thus needs public money to provide the necessary purchasing power to consume the products of capitalism. We never voted that our economy based on private hiring and competition should change into monopoly.

Monopoly then swirls to

AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CAPITALIST EMPLOYERS: Capitalism badly needs our tax money to keep going. Our Government becomes a critical component of capitalism and to an ever increasing degree, capitalism and capitalist employers control the government. We employees have less and less voting power to get what we need from our government because of the increasing power of employers’ money over our elected officials. Capitalist employers get more and more of what they want such as tax relief for the wealthy and cutting social spending for us so as to make more and more of us desperate to work for ever lower wages. We never voted for this alliance.

This moves into

IMPERIALISM: When profit making opportunities dwindle at home, capitalists, using the Government, the CIA and the Military go abroad to seek new profit opportunities, new resources, additional customers, and employees willing to work for lower wages. Capitalism at home tends to move inevitably toward capitalism abroad: an American Empire, Imperialism and sometimes War. We have never voted to send or protect capitalism in other countries.

At the same time capitalism destroys our planet home by

USING UP OIL AND RESOURCES, POLLUTION, AND GLOBAL WARMING: In its relentless search for profit, capitalist employers devour oil, minerals, timber, soil, and water, and dangerously pollute the earth and atmosphere. Good places to live, and to fish and to hunt are ruined. Al Gore fails to recognize that the dynamics of capitalism compel capitalist employers to seek profit as their sole motive lest they perish in the competition with other employers. We have never voted to plunder the planet.

Voracious capitalism moves yet again to

FINANCIALIZATION: The capitalist elite, finding too few profit making opportunities making things that humans need began increasing investment in speculation by buying, selling, and spinning off existing companies to produce the short term profit upon which the survival of capitalism depends. Capitalism, in this phase thus produces nothing new: no jobs, no food, no medical care, and no highways. It produces nothing except more profit and more political power for capitalists. We never voted for this innovation of capitalism.

Capitalists use this money and political power to create

.

CORPORATE STATE CAPITALISM: Capitalism mutates so as to merge corporate power with state power so that we now have corporate state capitalism whose powers are exercised solely to create socialism for the global elite at the expense and starvation of the rest of us. As we now see from the bailouts, the elite causes the government to print massive amounts of paper money to rescue the businesses of the elite. It does nothing for us except to impose the burden of taxation and inflation on us employees. We suffer the loss of our jobs, houses and things we need cost more and more, due to uncontrolled inflation. We live in a constant state fear. We are approaching what Wolin calls “totalitarianism posing as democracy.” We certainly have never voted for this.

During all of this, in order to control our thoughts, Capitalists have been creating

THE PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE CORPORATE CAPITALIST STATE: The power elite control the main sources of information that we citizens and voters need wisely to govern ourselves. They will tell us nothing about the features of capitalism that destroy both our planet and our democracy. The capitalist elite own and control all the major print and electronic media, public relations and advertising agencies. The mainstream media is owned by those who profit from things as they are, and provide uncritical support of war, imperialism, and all activities that contribute to keeping things as they are. This includes the NYT, Washington Post, PBS and NPR as well as TV and radio. The media have the power to inflame, to manipulate, to fail to cover, to deny and to ridicule. The capitalist elite thus impose the ideas, ideology and taboos that benefit the elite upon us. Through research grants and endowments, corporate capitalism controls universities and college professors and what they research and teach. It controls reporters and journalists. It controls even what we citizens think about. We thus get no information analyzing capitalism and its effects on us. We never voted that the media should have this power. The market economy at this stage makes us employees powerless, frustrated, restless, angry, and unhappy. Lacking the truth about the causes of our plight, some of us employees turn toward racism, bigotry, jingoism, evil enemies and other false solutions. There is a risk that we employees would act negatively toward the capitalist elite.

To preserve its power and privilege the Capitalist Elite moves toward

CONTROL OF ELECTIONS, DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW, and FASCISM WITH A FRIENDLY FEMININE FACE: The power elite entertain and divert us with a non-serious circus-like election process. The government and the capitalist elite can then ignore the plunder of our planet home, ignore our lack of jobs, ignore our hunger, ignore our illnesses, and ignore our needy old ages. We employees are in effect placed into wage slavery if we have any jobs at all. If we riot, we are placed in detention camps. If we starve nobody in control cares. If we march and protest at political conventions, we are arrested as terrorists.

THE UPSHOT OF ANALYZING POLITICS AND MONEY POWER TOGETHER

We are not yet in the final state of capitalism’s mutation, but as Bacevich and Wolin show us, we are very close. We have never voted for any of these changes in our market economy. No political movement exists to stop this final mutation. Our belief that we are governing ourselves is totally illusory. Our democracy is nearly lost. Nobody is taking any meaningful effective steps to deal with global warming. The dynamics of capitalism are ongoing. The great danger is that it will mutate into fascism. The point of following the money, and of evaluating politics and economics together is to make certain that we understand and permanently eradicate the causes of our imminent fall.

As Professor Rick Wolff wrote:

“The egalitarian… society envisioned by social democracy cannot be secured so long as it leaves in place a group of people with incentives and means to prevent that.” [7]

The “means” that Wolff is talking about is simply the profits, the money that we allow capitalists to accumulate under capitalism. The tremendous disparity between the wealth of the elite and the relative poverty of the rest of us has political consequences that we now observe. We must find a way to curb that wealth and power. Shocking as it may seem, we may have to prohibit private hiring by large employers altogether. Our democracy and our civilization cannot survive otherwise. The money of the power elite nullifies our voting power. The dynamics of capitalism are devastating our fragile planet of finite resources. Our planet simply cannot support vast accumulations of wealth and power by the few unless millions of us are to be left to starve. We must learn from; the mistake of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who brought us “band-aid” solutions for the pain of the Great Depression, but left in place an economic system founded on short term greed, and small elite with the wealth power and incentive to repeal all of his reforms. Our civilization, like the civilizations of Rome, Norse Greenland, Mayan Central America, and Easter Island will fall unless we comprehend the causes of our difficulties and expose the unrecognized dynamics of capitalism. Once we do this, we will be free to re-examine our core values like material “progress” and we can begin to plan for realistic sustainable civilized alternatives.

Dated: September 12, 2008

Douglas R. Page, a retired lawyer for unions and their members dougpage2@earthlink.net

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1. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Survive, Viking Adult, 2004

[2] Alexander J. Bacevich, The Limits to Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Metropolitan Books, 2008; Also discussed in interview with Bill Moyers on August 15, 2008 at http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:9NKN7uF4QWAJ:www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/transcrip

[3] The vital role of Congress in supplying the funding for the American Empire is so important that Manuel Garcia Jr. calls it MICC, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. See Manuel Garcia Jr., “Oiling the War Machine,” Counterpunch, July 11, 2008, at http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia07112008.html

[4] Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, 2008, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J; See also Paul Street, “Totalitarianism: It can Happen Here,” Dissident Voice, August 23, 2008 at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/totalitarianism-it-can-happen-here/

[5] Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Rodale Books, 2006

[6] The word “employers” should be understood to include those who invest money in the firms of employers. We consider the emphasis by some on “corporations” as the source of our trouble to be misleading in that capitalism would function much the same if corporations were abolished and all the hiring was done by individual employers or large partnerships of employers.

[7] Rick Wolff, “Today’s Haunting Specter (or What Needs Doing),” MRzine, June 6, 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/wolff060607.html

WE VOTERS CAN BREAK THE POWER OF AIPAC

Recently each of the candidates for President of the US went before AIPAC, the unregistered lobby for a foreign government, Israel’s lobby in the US, and each stated that he/she would give Israel total support as a favored ally and almost anything else Israel asked for.

The spectacle each of our Presidential candidates promising to yield to the wishes of a foreign power becomes especially alarming to those of us who want peace and withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the Palestinian West Bank when one examines the past and present policy positions of Israel:

· Israel lobbied to get the United States to attack Iraq in the Gulf War in 1990

· Israel lobbied to persuade the United States to invade Afghanistan in Iraq in 2002.

· Israel lobbied to persuade the United States to invade Iraq in 2003

· Israel is at this instant lobbying to induce the US to bomb or invade Iran

· Israel lobbies against any cut in funding for the Iraq War.

· Israel lobbies against any cut in US troops in Iraq and against any timetable for withdrawal.

· Israel continues the steady addition of new Jewish settlers in the West Bank, even during peace negotiations, and after “agreements.”

· Israel opposed every two state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict so far proposed.

· Israel lobbies for ever more monetary aid, loan guarantees, and armaments for Israel

· Israel urges and compels the US to veto all UN Resolutions that require Israel to comply with International Law

· Israel opposes peace groups in the US and labels them naïve

· Israel opposes any US brokering, intervention, or even handed mediation of the conflict with Palestine

American Jewish voters do not support these objectives, but when AIPAC tells them to vote for or against a particular candidate, these Jewish voters then tend to vote as AIPAC suggests. We therefore must inform ourselves about the true extremely hawkish objectives of AIPAC. We voters who seek peace will have to investigate Zionist candidates for public office very carefully. The power of AIPAC is eroding. Time Magazine writer Joel Klein is now challenging AIPAC and its goal of attacking Iran.

We seek here to unravel and confront the complicated influences of Israel on voters. We hope voters will consider our analysis. We also seek to immunize our selves against the inevitable and false charges that we are “anti-Semitic” or that we are“self-hating Jews.”

In taking these extreme hawkish positions, Israel is politically allied in the United States with the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, the Christian Right, the Neocons, the Republicans, and Bush and Cheney. A candidate or office holder or voter thus cannot be heard to say that he/she opposes the policies of Bush and Cheney, when that same person supports Israel.

WHAT IS THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND WHERE DOES IT GET ITS POWER?

The Israel Lobby for purposes of this discussion is AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, although there are many other satellite Jewish groups with which it works in tandem that constitute the Lobby. AIPAC is controlled by a “Gang of Four” being 3 conservative Republican hawks, Robert Asher, Edward Levy, Meyer Mitchell, and Larry Weinberg, a conservative Democrat. AIPAC’s Director is Howard Kohr, a conservative Republican. AIPAC is mainly funded by very wealthy Wall Street lawyers, stock brokers, heirs to family fortunes and real estate developers, including at least one on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.

AIPAC gets its power by using the money of very wealthy right wing Zionist American Jews to elect or to defeat candidates for public office. In the last 25 years AIPAC has been responsible for the defeat of the following Members of Congress and Senators because they suggested even-handed treatment of Palestinians, failed to support AIPAC sponsored resolutions, or were critical of some of the acts of Israel: Senator J. William Fulbright; Senator Charles Percy; Congressman Roger Jepsen; Congressman Pete McCloskey; Congressman Paul Findley; Congressman Earl Hilliard; Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. When Adlai Stevenson III ran for Governor of Illinois after serving as U.S. Senator until 1981, AIPAC worked actively to defeat him. Elected officials are thus terrified of AIPAC. Criticism of Israel or sympathy for Palestinians has become the “third rail of American politics.” The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in a series of articles about AIPAC dated 10-28-05 raised the question: “Who is afraid of big bad AIPAC?” and answered: “Nearly everybody.” In Congress, every person, Democrat or Republican, with one or two exceptions votes the way that AIPAC requests. AIPAC drops its financial support and supports an opponent of any elected official who seeks to oppose illegal settlements, or who seeks an even handed brokering of peace, or who supports a viable state for Palestine.[1]

Since the votes and the power of American Jews who follow the recommendations of AIPAC now affect the safety, peace and security of every human on the planet, how and what American Jews think, believe and vote becomes the business of all of us. We hope that American Jewish Voters, recognizing the failure of current policies to bring peace and security for any of us, Israelis included, will consider this analysis and critique it.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A JEW?

There are Jews of all races, and skin colors, so the Jews are technically not a race. There are atheistic Jews, so Jews do not all have the same religion. The Bible and the Torah speak of Jews as a “tribe.” Some Jews speak of themselves as a “clan.” Jews are a group of people, spread around the world, who share the following attributes:

· A Jewish mother (or a Jewish maternal grandmother)

· A shared fear, (according to Gilad Atzmon) imbedded in ritual and belief, existing for over 3000 years that Jews as a group, tribe or clan, will not survive. (Note this fear is apparently not just a fear of individual death. It is a fear that the Jewish tribe will cease to exist.) Thus to maintain the group, Jews oppose marriage with non-Jews, and keep Kosher, eating only prescribed foods and not eating forbidden foods.[2] This fear was graphically compounded by the Holocaust that added a nightmarish current reality to this long standing inner fear.

· A group memory and history of Christian hatred of Jews ever since the Crusades and of pogroms where Christians slaughtered Jews, mirrored in many Jews by a secret reciprocal hatred of Christians.

· Jews love Israel. Thus no matter what Israel does, an overwhelming preponderance of Jews love Israel. This love of Israel is at the inner subjective level of faith and of non-debatable religious belief. It is like super-patriotism. (and thus subject to easy manipulation) The maintenance of Israel has become a powerful secular religion, reinforced religiously by right wing fundamentalist Jews, by Zionists, and by those Jews who greatly profit from the market economy. This manipulation makes use the fear that Jews may not survive. It is also rooted in flat out prejudice:

· Jews believe that they are God’s “chosen people.” Thus they are “one up,” exceptional, better than, superior to, all other people on the planet. It follows that Jews tend not to believe the secular political axiom that all men are created equal nor in the religious concept that God created all people and loves all people equally.

Important comment on the foregoing characteristics of the tribe of Jews:

While it is not technically correct to call Jewish people a race, the above tribal characteristics, discrimination on the basis of tribe membership is just as evil. These discriminations are: the belief of Jews that they are chosen and superior, the evils of love of self, prejudice against others, privileges and a State for Jews only, and abuse of others such as Muslims. The very core of racism is the denial of equivalent humanity. It is thus accurate to view Israel as racist and accurate to state that Israel maintains apartheid regarding non-Jews. Israel does this as a tribe and not as a race. Many Jews do not see Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as equally human.

THE INNER PSYCHOLOGY OF JEWS IN ISRAEL AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL

Someone said: “Psychology is the study of lies that we tell ourselves and others.”

Israel, AIPAC, and most Jewish people tell themselves a host of lies and Israel uses many techniques to impose these lies on us in the Western World as well.

Joel Kovel, a Jew, a former psychoanalyst, and author of many books including Overcoming Zionism[3] provides the insights that follow: Jews who love Israel inevitably have an inner conflict of the following, perhaps repressed truths:

· The basic true purpose of Israeli Zionism was and still is the capture of ever more land to be held only for Jews. This is Israel’s real policy today. It has always been governed by Zionists with this objective.

· The basic beginning truth about the state of Israel is that the land was stolen by Zionist Jews from Palestinians who had occupied the land for centuries, often using terror. Despite the ongoing Jewish obsession with being the victim of Nazi terrorism, three of Israel’s first prime ministers were themselves terrorists in the sense of having commanded major military and paramilitary operations in Palestine whose purpose was to sow a climate of fear and panic among Palestinian civilians so as to cause them to flee. These three are Menachem Begin, Ytizhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon. These terrorists are honored by Jews. The captured land that resulted from this terror is gratefully accepted and even worshipped.

· The Jewish people accurately see themselves as having a powerful and honorable ethical tradition of loving kindness, compassion, and a “universalist” caring for all humans, not just Jews.

Most Jews thus have an inner conflict that Kovel calls a “Bad Conscience.” It is locked within, unexamined, and denied, and therefore all the more powerful. This Bad Conscience exists because of unsatisfactorily resolved conflicts in the minds of Jews.

Kovel says:

“Broadly, we see on the one side, the powerful ethical component to Judaism, and on the other, the commission of dreadful crimes, and the honoring of those who have done so. These incompatible elements need to be arranged so that the national project (of building and maintaining a Zionist Jewish State) can go forward….”

Zionist Jews “patch over” these incompatible conflicts by various untruths: lies about the origin of Israel, outright denial of historical facts, claims that the Palestinian land was unoccupied, claims that the Palestinians are evil, subhuman and undeserving, claims that God gave the land to Jews as God’s chosen people, claims that maintaining Israel is an implementation of God’s will, claims that the Holocaust justifies this permanent special treatment of Jews, claim that Jews are innocent victims of Palestinians, and a claim by Rabbi Lerner’s that the Palestinian people did not welcome Holocaust victims as they should have.

These “patch overs” do not really relieve or heal the inner conflict. The pressure and the pain of the conflict is temporarily relieved by aggression, hate, lies, denial, thinking of the victims as sub human and evil, and thinking of them as fit only to be exterminated or taken care of by Muslim nations. With these “patch overs,” there can be no mutual recognition of common humanity, no reconciliation, no forgiveness, and no “making things right.” Instead the unresolved bad conscience moves in the opposite direction toward hatred and aggression and makes things constantly worse. It creates more and more millions of Muslims and Arabs who hate Jews and hate Israel. It leads to the repetitive cycle of retaliatory suicide bombings by young women and by massive retaliatory collective hate and collective punishment by Jews

These attitudes and beliefs of human beings become especially dangerous when they are imbedded in the policies of a nation-state, Israel with its attendant flag and patriotism, a modern army, F-16 Jets and a store of 200 nuclear bombs.

Kovel says:

“Since we are talking about a moral dimension here, it is important to identify this patchwork as a species of collective conscience, that is to say a device to define, organize and guide the morality of a nation state, with its needs for legitimacy.”

Israel is desperately anxious to be seen as a legitimate democratic state at least in the eyes of its ally and patron, the United States. Its “legitimacy” is founded on lies. The United States right wing shares the same lies, so there is little hope for right winger voters. However we voters in the US who are not right wing fanatics are simply brainwashed. Israel is no more a legitimate democratic modern state that South Africa was before the end of apartheid, and no more a legitimate democratic state than was the Confederate States of America before and during the Civil War. We are also intimated by the unremitting false charges of that we are anti-Semitic and that we are self-hating Jews.

MANIPULATING FEAR IS THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL IN POLITICS

The actual processes involved in manipulating fear were brought to our attention by Thandeka who is associate professor of theology at Meadville Lombard Theological School. She wrote an article entitled ‘The Confidence Man” that appeared in the magazine Tikkun in the May/June 2004 issue. According to Thandeka, three scholars, including W. Russell Neuman, conducted studies to determine which emotional attitudes are the most powerful in politics. They found that anxiety was the most powerful determinant of how a person would vote. These three scholars wrote a book, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment published in 2000 by the University of Chicago. One of the scholars, W. Russell Neuman became an advisor to President Bush and works on information and security technology policy at the White House. According to Thandeka, it works as follows:

A controlling elite group:

1. Takes an issue that causes anxiety among some voters (Note: Like “terrorism,” 9/11 or “fear that Israel will be driven into the Sea” or fear of anti-Semitism)

2. Amplifies and augments this fear turning it into a high anxiety issue for most voters

3. Presents a candidate who guarantees hope and who promises that he will end the threat by massive military power

4. Gains new political capital from voters because of this new confidence in the leadership ability of the politician to end the threat

5. The candidate of the power elite wins the election but the candidate does not reduce the threat. He augments it because it serves him and the power elite. He then privatizes public works, give tax relief to the rich, and in all ways serves the interests of the power elite.

It is a con game on all of us played by the powerful elite.

It is apparent from the right wing manipulation of 9/11, terror, anthrax threats, airline security threats, the true facts about the Iraq War and the like that this technique is very successful in the United States. It is also apparent that right wing, fundamentalist, wealthy elite groups in Israel and the US manipulate and augment the fears of Jews to gain votes for pro war candidates in both Israel and the United States.

.

PRESENT DAY ISRAEL DOES NOT MERIT THE SUPPORT OF ANY PERSON WHO SEEKS PEACE

Thousands of Jews choose to leave Israel each year.

Israel is no longer a promising democratic paradise of Kibbutzim, socialist enterprises, and a state that benefits all Jews:

Education and health care have been privatized.[4]

One in three children is hungry.[5]

State owned enterprises have been privatized and nineteen very wealthy families now control Israel. As Roni Ben Efrat wrote in Challenge on May 28, 2008, Mammon now dominates Israel.

“Mammon in Zion

What’s happening today is Marx’s revenge. Marx taught us that ideologies often serve as a superstructure camouflaging the real issues. Today there is no more camouflage. Mammon stands before us nakedly proclaiming: ‘I am thy God, O Israel!’”

This is not a citation from a leftist visionary, but rather from Israeli attorney Yaakov Weinroth, interviewed by Gidi Weitz in Haaretz on May 9, 2008. Weinroth, an orthodox Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist, is famous for defending powerful figures accused of corruption. Is Zionism too, we wonder, an ideology camouflaging other interests? The evidence is now in the affirmative.

Zionists claim that Israel arose in order to provide the Jewish people with a national home. But decade by decade, it has become ever clearer that Israel is not a state of, by and for the Jewish people. It is rather a state of, by and for a sprinkling of families, 19 in all, whose income amounts to $70 billion — 88% of the national budget.

This budget is a stumbling block to the poor. All levels of education have been devastated. On the books there is universal health care, but many can’t afford to buy medicines. Israel’s socio-economic inequality, as measured by the UN Development Program’s Gini Index (0.0 = perfect equality), has worsened steadily from 0.222 in 1982 to 0.392 in 2005, making it the most unequal of Western democracies with one exception: the United States (Gini = 0.408).

Poverty is no longer confined to the jobless. The government has lowered the unemployment rate, indeed, to 7.6%, but there is a trade-off: working people make up 37% of the nation’s poor. The country’s much vaunted economic growth is way off kilter. It is high in high-tech, which supports very few, but scarce in traditional industries and services, where most people work.

This steady impoverishment of the population has not just “happened.” It has happened because of laws and decisions that sold the country’s assets to the 19 families at bargain-basement prices, all in the name of the free market. As Weinroth said to Weitz: ‘Power is no longer a separate entity. Money is power. Money rules all, it flows through every hidden vein of the society.’”[6]

CONCLUSION

The point of all of this is that Israel, like the United States, is now dominated and controlled by a tiny, wealthy, hawkish, Zionist power elite. Both countries are in the grip of an unregulated, out of control, market economy and an armaments industry. The resulting acts and policies of the United States and Israel are not in the best interests of most people. The power elite in both the United States and Israel uses its media power to augment our fears and manipulate our love of country and our patriotism so as to cause to vote for persons who will serve this wealthy power elite in both countries. Naturally, the power elite in Israel is allied with the power elite in the United States. So Israel is now very much like the United States. In both countries there once was the promise of democracy, but there is little now to “love.” Both countries seek to dominate lands outside their borders. Both countries rapidly create more and more terrorists by their acts and policies. Both countries officially and illegally use preventive war to implement their policies. Both countries use illegal torture as the cutting edge of their policies. Both countries are making millions of human beings desperately miserable. Both countries are actively increasing the danger of World War III. The truth is that Israel is not a safe haven for Jews. Israel is a lighted fuse that at worst will set off World War III, and at best will create millions of anti-Semitic Muslim terrorists who will be active for decades.

It is our hope that all of us can speak the truth about our plight and act together to solve our problems. Obtaining peace requires that we first deal with truth and with justice.

The key to all of this is that American Jews and all of us who are brow beaten and intimidated by charges of “anti-Semitism” and “self-hating Jew” must be wary of those who would manipulate our fears, must be realistic about what Israel is and what Israel is not.

We must encourage our elected officials to ignore AIPAC’s demands. We must encourage our elected officials to be even handed and creative about seeking a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We must stand behind our officials who dare to take a position that AIPAC opposes, like Representative Jim Moran of Virginia. We must vote against AIPAC’s candidates at the polls when they try to defeat an elected official who is doing what is right.

Dated: August 2, 2008

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net This article can also be found on Doug’s
Blog at http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/

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[1] Nathan Jones, “National Capitol Insiders Vote AIPAC, Israel’s American Lobby, Second Most Powerful Interest Group in Washington,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan-Feb 1998, 65-66

Ari Berman, “AIPAC’s Hold,” The Nation, August 4, 2006

[2] Gilad Atzmon, “From Esther to AIPAC,” Counterpunch, March 3-4, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon03032007.html

[3] Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism,2007, Pluto Press, London

[4] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975290.html

[5] http://www.israelnewsagency.com/israelpovertychildrenyomkippur4831210.html

[6] Roni Ben Efrat, “Mammon in Zion,” Challenge, May-June 2008 http://www.challenge-mag.com/en/article__211

CONNECTING THE DOTS: CONGRESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR

We expected a resistance and defunding of the war from the Democrats after 2006. Instead, Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, representing one of the most liberal and secure Congressional Districts in the nation, took impeachment off the table, fully funded the war meeting Bush’s every demand, and passed FISA. Despite our wishes to get out of Iraq, our “peace” candidate Barack Obama wants to make additional war in Afghanistan as well as to maintain it in Iraq. We are again betrayed, impotent and frustrated. We have no power whatever over the powerful forces that insist on more war. On Sunday in an interview by Tom Brokaw, Al Gore made the urgent point that we must do very significant things to stop Global Warming within the next decade or we will be past the point of no return. Al seemed to assume that we could do something about Global Warming, and that we somehow have effective power. We clearly do not.

There are obviously forces influencing elected Democrats that are far more powerful, influential and effective than any ballot box force that we as voters can muster. What are those forces? I for one do not wish to be victim of the “fool me once…fool me twice…” syndrome.

The clearest analysis of our current impotence was written by retired UC Lawrence Livermore physicist, Manuel Garcia Jr. in a recent Counterpunch article entitled “Oiling the War Machine.”[1] His analysis is a great starting point to connect the dots that result in our voting impotence. Garcia’s own summary which he presents as a “thesis, without any claim of proof,” is:

“A military-industrial-congressional-complex (MICC) owns the US government and runs it as a mechanism of self-aggrandizement, as evident by the proportion of tax revenues that flow into military accounts

The self-serving purpose of the MICC’s militarized foreign policy (i.e.,war) is to expand its degree of control over all others, to achieve hegemony by the US, which is simply a vehicle for this clique.

The strategy for maintaining hegemony has 3 goals: 1, to secure hydrocarbon fuels for the US military;[2] 2, to control the access to hydrocarbon fuels by all others; 3, to control the economics of energy commerce.”

This is my own augmentation of the ideas of Garcia’s thesis summary:

· MICC includes Wall Street, the mainstream media including NYT, Washington Post, PBS and NPR, the Intelligence Agencies, and Academia, since all of these institutions support the complex, almost without question.

· MICC’s purpose is perpetual war, not only to maintain itself, but to maintain our fragile capitalistic economy that is in constant danger of depression and extensive unemployment.

· Congress is a critical part of the complex since congress must fund the MICC with the needed tax money obtained from us voters.

· By “the economics of energy commerce,” Garcia is talking about capitalism and the imperative need to maintain the dollar as the dominant currency of the world. He says that maintaining the dollar as dominant currency, is in effect like owning a casino and being able to take a cut of the action.

Garcia is writing about the real workings of present day capitalism as he observes it:

“How The Racket Is Set Up.

The owners of the dollar capitalist system use the power of the US government to extract wealth from the world.

The purpose of US military power is to keep other nations in the economic corral defined by the US dollar capitalist system. The military achieves this purpose by controlling as many of the source regions and trade routes of the fossil hydrocarbon fuels trade as possible. Control can be exerted by posing a credible threat: subsidizing Israel, Navy task forces in the Persian Gulf, overseas military bases and carefully placed missile defense radars; and control can be overt, as with the occupations of Iraq and Okinawa.

The economic cycles within the US corral are constructed to produce profits to the owners of the dollar capitalist system. Nations and populations that seek to leave the corral and cycle their natural wealth through non-dollar and non-capitalist economic cycles, to further their own domestic development, are seen as losses to the wealth extraction expectations of the MICC, and worse still as bad examples that could incite further rebellion, inspiring other client states to leap over the corral fence. These "bad apples" are subjected to threats (of increasing severity as they are decreasingly powerful), and in some cases overt aggression, in efforts to return them to their assigned roles in this system of wealth extraction.

The US dollar is a fiat currency backed by the threat of military force. Our Legions roam the Earth and everywhere our paper is accepted in exchange for tribute in the forms of natural resources and debt forbearance. The Arabs send us oil, the Central Americans send us coffee and bananas, the Chinese absorb our war indebtedness and shelter it as their savings account. Those who deny value to our currency do so at their peril, witness Iran, and recall the hostility to the former Communist bloc. Some imagine China has power over the US because it holds such a large quantity of US dollars, the stored monetized equivalent of the collective output of a vast and deeply exploited labor force. These dollars were exchanged for the gargantuan torrent of goods poured down the maw of American consumption. But it is China that is bound. If they were to withdraw their endowment of value to their US paper, by dumping US dollars on currency markets, they would only precipitate a collapse of the US dollar and thus simultaneously wipe out their own savings (and their prime export market). The Chinese people have had enough of a taste of money these last thirty years, even if at a modest level for most, that they are not prepared to go back to an agrarian Third World national lifestyle just to accommodate the political gesture of bankrupting the US currency. They would revolt, and this is far too great a threat to the Chinese Communist Party, the MICC of China, to risk provoking. So the US MICC is reassured that its bastard, American war debt, will be lovingly nurtured in its Chinese foster home.

… So, is the Iraq War a Peak Oil war, a resource-grab because of diminishing supply?, or is it a "favor to Israel" war engineered by an Israel Lobby, which must then be assumed to have controlling power in the US? The Iraq War is neither a simplistic "oil war" nor a simplistic "favor to Israel war." It is both an oil war and a favor to Israel because each of these is a contributing factor of this particular war to the larger purpose, the expansion of US MICC control over global energy resources and trade. The Iraq War is an attempt to increase political control over economic rivals by exercising superior military power.

Military control, over global energy resources and energy commerce, creates political power over economic rivals.

…. Within the MICC, the 2008 election is a contest between Barack Obama of the Democratic Party, and John McCain of the Republican Party, to determine who should take over the management of the unchanging prime directive. Each of the two potential executives will try to convince members of the MICC that they have the better business plan to achieve the goal they all agree upon: MICC world hegemony. Here, the Israel Lobby is seen as a constituency within the MICC. Because the management of the public mind for social control is now one of the major assignments of the national chief executive, and Barack Obama has demonstrated a flair for this, …, Obama is presently favored by popular opinion within the MICC. …”

(Emphasis Added by Doug Page. Obama is fully controlled by MICC, as is Congress, as is the Democratic Party.)

HOW DOES MICC MAINTAIN ABSOLUTE CONTROL OVER OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS NO MATTER WHAT A MAJORITY OF US VOTERS WANT?

1. MICC maintains its grip on Congress by bribes, euphemistically called “campaign contributions.”

The profits from oil, arms manufacture are immense. We know that money is “the mother’s milk of politics.” MICC gives members of Congress enough money to induce them to overlook the wishes of voters.

2. Our market economy is extremely fragile, vulnerable to a major depression, and is the source of our jobs for which we are totally dependent for our survival.

Despite tax breaks and concession, little or no regulation, and massive public spending, Capitalism is extremely weak and fragile, on the precipice of a major depression. The domination of our paper currency is maintained by existing and threatened military force. Forcing capitalists to halt CO2 emissions would bring us into a deep depression. Already existing levels of joblessness would become much worse. The fact is that we are in big trouble under existing status quo assumption and ideology, and there is neither political knowledge nor political will to change them. There are no plans on the shelf for sustainable, stable alternatives. Nobody wants to face the fact that capitalism is in death throes. Every individual, every culture and nation is the Western World is dependent for daily survival on the existing status quo and war. We cannot risk any change that might cause the loss of our jobs.

3. Senate Democrats, in secret contempt of voters, and in violation of the Constitution, intentionally maintain Senate Rule XXII thus making it impossible for Congress to implement majority will of the voters.

The Senate maintains a formal rule, Senate Rule XXII that requires the votes of 60 Senators, far more than the “majority of a quorum” to end debate and bring a nomination or proposed legislation before the full Senate for action.

There also exists in the Senate a procedure and a precedent for bringing a matter up for vote by the full Senate by vote of a simple majority of a quorum to end a so called “filibuster.” This procedure nullifies Senate Rule XXII. Most recently, it was the Republicans who threatened to use this Nuclear Option. The Democrats wanted to maintain the rule requiring 3/5 of the full Senate or 60 votes to cut off debate and to bring a matter up for hearing so badly that they yielded to Republican demands. Senate Rule XXII requiring the affirmative vote of 60 Senators to bring a matter up for hearing by the full Senate violates the Constitution which states in Article I, Section 5:

“…a majority of (the members of the Senate) shall constitute a quorum to do business.”

The House, governed by the same provision, has always cut off debate by vote of a simple majority. Senate Rule XXII thwarts majority rule in the United States, and requires a supermajority of 60 Senators to stop debate so as to be able to pass legislation. Our nation is polarized, almost equally divided on most issues. Because of this Rule, voluntarily maintained by all Senators, the will of a simple majority of voters cannot be implemented by Congress. We cannot get peace. We cannot stop funding the War. We cannot get fair taxes. We cannot get health care. This rule makes it far easier for MICC to control Congress and to ignore majority will of the voters. Ordinarily MICC thus has to bribe one Senator to stop legislation,[3] and if there is much public concern about particular legislation, MICC has only to bribe 41 Senators.

In 1993, Senate Rule XXII was used by Republican Senators, for the first time in Senate history, as a partisan tactic to obstruct majority will.[4] This writer, a retired lawyer, acting as a voting citizen and seeking effective voting power for his vote and the votes of other Democrats, filed suits against all 100 Senators seeking a formal Declaration of the federal court that Senate Rule XXII was unconstitutional.[5] All 100 Senators, including my own two California Senators, on two separate occasions, voted to have the Senate Legal Counsel appear in Court to defend the Rule. The Senators did not deny that the Rule was unconstitutional, and simply relied on an arbitrary rule established by Justice Scalia that the federal courts could deny “standing” to a voting citizen to bring such a suit. Under this standing rule, the Court can arbitrarily decide what it will hear and what it will not hear. So the United States Supreme Court as well as the Senate is determined to thwart majority rule of voters in the United States and to support MICC.

4. The MICC controlled major media that fully support MICC and deprive American voters of alternate views, real analysis, and the truth.

I consider this point to be self evident to those interested in the rest of this analysis. We need only remember the recent history of the New York Times in its enthusiastic, uncritical, un-analytical reporting of the War in Iraq.

E. AIPAC and the votes of most American Jews support MICC.

Israel is MICC’s largest military base in the Middle East. For reasons associated with the Holocaust and a form of post traumatic stress syndrome, American Jewish voters love Israel. They deny or ignore the fact that MICC uses Israel, Israelis, and American Jews as its capo. Jews world wide are vulnerable to hawk stimulated PR that the existence of Israel is threatened. The real rulers of Israel are right wing hawks, allied with right wing hawks and MICC in the US. Israel uses its Lobby, AIPAC to corral the votes of 5 million American Jewish Democratic voters to support MICC.

F. The influence of dope profits resulting from military operations covertly laundered into our economy and used for campaign contributions.

We remember from the days of Iran Contra and Oliver North that dope running and dope sales were an important component of our involvement in Nicaragua. Vice President Cheney and other persons involved then, are in power today. We know that profits from heroin and cocaine are immense. Who gets that money? Where does it go? We know that that money is laundered and invested somewhere. We can know little else for certain. There are some important clues:

According to Peter Dale Scott, where ever the US has gone for oil whether in Indo China, Columbia, or Afghanistan, the US has also been covertly involved in the dope trade.[6]

Reuters reported on June 26, 2008:[7]

“Narcotics supplies have increased sharply in parts of Afghanistan and Colombia where insurgents are in control, helping them fund their activities, the United Nations said on Thursday.
While cultivation of the opium poppy stabilized or dropped in many parts of Afghanistan, five southern regions controlled by Taliban militants produced enough poppy to double the world's opium output between 2005 and 2007, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its World Drug Report 2008.

On the other side of the world in Colombia, coca cultivation rose by 27 percent in 2007, though coca leaf and cocaine production were concentrated in just 10 of the country's 195 municipalities, the Vienna-based UNODC said.
Afghanistan remained the world's top heroin producer last year while Colombia was the foremost producer of cocaine.”

Afghanistan produces 95% of world’s opium as of 2007[8]

UN Report shows Western Europe cocaine use is high.[9]

Michael C. Ruppert wrote in 2004:

“From 1994 to1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to the Christian Science Monitor and Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 percent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney’s Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying US troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia to this day.”[10]

G. Democrats lack a sufficient majority since many Blue Dog Democrats are really hawkish Republicans

We have forgotten that the Democratic Party has always included hawkish right wingers, some of them racists. We used to call them “Southern Democrats,” but not all of them were in the South. The racists have left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. We are left with Blue Dog Democrats who steadfastly vote with the Republicans in support of MICC.

H. The total absence of a moral compass in American politics.

The MICC has manipulated and exaggerated the dangers in the world so as to increase our fear, reduce our capacity for calm and moral judgment, and has unleashed the hate of others, the patriotic nationalism, the lies, and the suppression of dissent that constitute “the dogs of war.” It is now inconceivable that the US could hold a War Crimes Trial as we did following WWII. It is the US that is now guilty of war crimes. The US and its ally Israel now torture captured individuals and engage in preventive war as a matter of course. The US no longer pretends to care about people outside its borders nor the poor and middle class people in the US. We no longer attempt to put ourselves in the shoes of others. We do not believe that all men are created equal. We no longer care about the moral axiom that it is wrong for some to have more than they need when others are needy. “Evil is the absence of empathy.”[11]

.

HOW DID CAPITALISM AND OUR DEMOCRACY GET OUT OF CONTROL SO AS TO MUTATE INTO A PERPETUAL WAR MACHINE?

Capitalism is fundamentally in conflict with voter controlled democracy. Capitalism’s power depends on its money to bribe elected officials, whereas democracy’s power is dependent on majority will of voters. The explanation starts with private hiring for the lowest wage possible in order to make as much profit as possible. This leaves some people unemployed without money to buy. Even in periods of full employment, employees are not paid enough to be able to buy all that capitalism produces. So capitalists shut down production periodically and a depression results. Capitalists tend to join together in monopoly to keep prices up. This makes things worse. Meanwhile, the accumulating money of the employers and those who invest with them, results in more and more political power and capitalists are able to get more and more public tax funds to keep things going in building highways and dams or in producing armaments. Capitalists then venture overseas seeking profit making opportunities, cheap labor and resources. They run into conflict with other capitalists from other nations seeking the same things. They call on the government for more armaments and for use of those arms abroad. Capitalists get richer and richer and use their money and power over the government to get more and more armaments and more protection abroad. Meanwhile, voter employees are staying even just surviving with their votes. Capitalism mutates into corporate state capitalism and finally into a political economy dominated by MICC whose purpose is perpetual war.[12]

Dated: July 26, 2008

Douglas R. Page, Tucson, AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net

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[1] Manuel Garcia Jr, “Oiling the War Machine, Counterpunch July 11, 2008 http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia07112008.html

[2] Maintaining fuel for the military is apparently a top Bush policy. Bush until recently continued to purchase 750,000 gallons of oil per week for the Elk Hills military oil storage facility. Bush did this despite the escalating price of gasoline and Bush also ignored pleas to release some of the stored oil to hold down prices. Michael Hudson, “How Bush has Pushed up Oil Prices,” Counterpunch, June 16-30, 2008, page 1.

[3] A single Senator can now place a “hold” on a nomination or on proposed legislation. His political party then backs him, and blocks a hearing without long speeches. “No longer does a Senator hold the floor for long impassioned speeches. Now they log their filibusters with the leadership, and the Senate pretends to hold them. Bill Dauster, “Its Not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Washington Monthly, November, 1996, p.34.

[4] 51 Congressional Quarterly 907,908 (April 10, 1993)

[5] Page v. Dole, Civ. Action No. 93-1546 (JHG)(D.D.C. August 18, 1994)

Page v. Shelby, Civ. Action No. 1:97CV00068 (D.D.C. January 13, 1997)

[6] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 2004,, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Oxford, England

[7] http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USN25191109

[8] http://www.dawn.com/2007/08/21/top15.htm

[9] http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:F4uaHppHy0EJ:www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2006/unisnar264.html+afghanistan+cocaine+dollars&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[10] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, New Society Publishers, 2004, page 71

[11] Ernest Partridge, “Evil as the Absence of Empathy,” Counterpunch, July 26, 2008, who apparently got this idea from Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert, a psychologist hired by the US to study the minds and motivations of Nazi War Criminals.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/evil-as-the-absence-of-empathy/

[12] For more complete analyses of the dynamics of our market economy, see the author’s blog at http://www.thenewliberator.blogspot.com/