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Monday, January 15th, 2007
Volume 6, No. 1
(Editor's note: {I think what follows applies, but in a more insidious way, on the political level as well}—"From time to time we all try to communicate to our unscientific friends … and we get into difficulty most often because we get confused in trying to explain to them the latest questions, such as the meaning of the conservation of charge and parity, CP, whereas they don't know anything about the most preliminary things. For four hundred years since Galileo we have been gathering information about the world which they don't know. Now we are working on something way out, and at the limits of scientific knowledge. And the things that appear in the newspaper and that seem to excite the adult imagination are always those things which they cannot possibly understand, because they haven't learned anything at all of the much more interesting well-known [to scientists] things that people have found out before." Richard P. Feynman)
5 Articles
1. Dragon-Slayer (In Three Parts, This is Part 2)
2. Pending Police State in America
3. New Christian Right in Canada
1. DRAGON-SLAYERS (In Three Parts. This is Part 2)
BY
COREY ROBIN
Looking back on 12 years of Nazi waste and ruin, Arendt wrote in 1951: ‘There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honour of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.’ There was something outlandish about the discrepancy between the size and significance of European Jewry and the war that resulted from the animus against it. Yet this would not be the last time that the world’s oldest pariah would be the focus of international attention.
Though Arendt had a long, often sympathetic involvement in Zionist politics, she was wary of the project almost from the start. ‘I find this territorial experiment increasingly problematic,’ she wrote in a 1940 letter, just one of the fascinating documents gathered by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman in their splendid collection of Arendt’s Jewish writings, many of which have been translated for the first time. In 1948, she confessed to her complete ‘opposition to present Zionist politics’. Her opposition was rooted in three concerns: the correspondence she saw between Zionism and Fascism, the Zionists’ dependence on imperialism, and her growing awareness of what she called ‘the Arab question’.
Of all the co-optations of Arendt for contemporary political purposes, none is more outrageous than the parallel, drawn by Power and others, between Palestinian militants and the Nazis. Arendt firmly rejected that analogy (in a 1948 letter to the Jewish Frontier), and few of the protagonists in the struggle over Palestine so reminded her of the Nazis as the Zionists themselves, particularly those of the Revisionist tendency, whose influence Arendt was among the first to notice.
From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had exhibited some of the nastier features of European nationalism. Drawing ‘from German sources’, she wrote in 1946, Herzl presumed that the Jews constituted neither a religion nor a people but an ‘organic national body’ or race that could one day be housed ‘inside the closed walls of a biological entity’ or state. With its insistence on the eternal struggle between the Jews and their enemies, she wrote in the 1930s, the Zionist worldview seemed ‘to conform perfectly’ to that of ‘the National Socialists’. Both ideas, she added in 1944, ‘had a definite tendency towards what later were known as Revisionist attitudes’.
Initially a minor current, according to Arendt, Revisionism poured into the Zionist mainstream in the 1940s. The Revisionists knew what they wanted and used guns to get it. Far from denying them legitimacy, their violent audacity provoked only token disapproval from mainstream Zionists, who secretly or unwittingly supported their initiative. Revisionist violence spoke to a new dispensation among the Jews, which Arendt described in ‘The Jewish State’. After centuries of settling for ‘survival at any price’, the Jews now insisted on ‘dignity at any price’. Though Arendt appreciated the shift, she also detected a secret death wish in the spirit of machismo: ‘Behind this spurious optimism lurks a despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide.’ Many Zionists, she claimed two years later, would rather go down with the ship than compromise, fearing that compromise would send them back to the humiliating days of silent suffering in Europe.
ooking back on 12 years of Nazi waste and ruin, Arendt wrote in 1951: ‘There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honour of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.’ There was something outlandish about the discrepancy between the size and significance of European Jewry and the war that resulted from the animus against it. Yet this would not be the last time that the world’s oldest pariah would be the focus of international attention.
Though Arendt had a long, often sympathetic involvement in Zionist politics, she was wary of the project almost from the start. ‘I find this territorial experiment increasingly problematic,’ she wrote in a 1940 letter, just one of the fascinating documents gathered by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman in their splendid collection of Arendt’s Jewish writings, many of which have been translated for the first time. In 1948, she confessed to her complete ‘opposition to present Zionist politics’. Her opposition was rooted in three concerns: the correspondence she saw between Zionism and Fascism, the Zionists’ dependence on imperialism, and her growing awareness of what she called ‘the Arab question’.
Of all the co-optations of Arendt for contemporary political purposes, none is more outrageous than the parallel, drawn by Power and others, between Palestinian militants and the Nazis. Arendt firmly rejected that analogy (in a 1948 letter to the Jewish Frontier), and few of the protagonists in the struggle over Palestine so reminded her of the Nazis as the Zionists themselves, particularly those of the Revisionist tendency, whose influence Arendt was among the first to notice.
From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had exhibited some of the nastier features of European nationalism. Drawing ‘from German sources’, she wrote in 1946, Herzl presumed that the Jews constituted neither a religion nor a people but an ‘organic national body’ or race that could one day be housed ‘inside the closed walls of a biological entity’ or state. With its insistence on the eternal struggle between the Jews and their enemies, she wrote in the 1930s, the Zionist worldview seemed ‘to conform perfectly’ to that of ‘the National Socialists’. Both ideas, she added in 1944, ‘had a definite tendency towards what later were known as Revisionist attitudes’.
Initially a minor current, according to Arendt, Revisionism poured into the Zionist mainstream in the 1940s. The Revisionists knew what they wanted and used guns to get it. Far from denying them legitimacy, their violent audacity provoked only token disapproval from mainstream Zionists, who secretly or unwittingly supported their initiative. Revisionist violence spoke to a new dispensation among the Jews, which Arendt described in ‘The Jewish State’. After centuries of settling for ‘survival at any price’, the Jews now insisted on ‘dignity at any price’. Though Arendt appreciated the shift, she also detected a secret death wish in the spirit of machismo: ‘Behind this spurious optimism lurks a despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide.’ Many Zionists, she claimed two years later, would rather go down with the ship than compromise, fearing that compromise would send them back to the humiliating days of silent suffering in Europe.
In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel’s Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was ‘no ordinary political party’, she wrote. It was ‘closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’. It used ‘terrorism’, and its goal was a ‘Führer state’ based on ‘ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority’. The letter also decried those ‘Americans of national repute’ who ‘have lent their names to welcome’ the Herut leader, giving ‘the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel’. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin.
The second failing of Zionism, according to Arendt, was that its leaders looked to the ‘great powers’ for support rather than to their future neighbours. Her disagreement here was both moral – ‘by taking advantage of imperialistic interests’, she wrote in 1944, the Zionists had collaborated ‘with the most evil forces of our time’ – and strategic. At the very moment that imperialism was being challenged throughout the world, Zionism had attached itself to a universally maligned form. ‘Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours,’ she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand ‘the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco’. Self-styled realists, they were profoundly unrealistic. They ‘mistook decisions of great powers for the ultimate realities’, she wrote in 1948, when ‘the only permanent reality in the whole constellation was the presence of Arabs in Palestine.’
Arendt did allow for one imperial future, however. ‘The significance of the Near East for Britain and America,’ Arendt wrote in a 1944 article entitled ‘USA – Oil – Palestine’, ‘can be expressed nowadays in a single word: oil.’ With America’s reserves dwindling, control over the world’s oil supply would ‘become one of the most important factors in postwar politics’. After the war, America would control roughly half the world’s shipping, and ‘that fact alone will force American foreign policy to secure its own oil hubs.’ Because of Europe’s reliance on Arab oil, she added, ‘America’s future influence on intra-European matters will depend to a large extent’ on its control over an intended pipeline in the Middle East. Though she hoped that America would not pursue an imperial policy, she had no doubt that oil would be a key factor in its deliberations. And with Israel responsible for the ‘care taking of American interests’ in the Middle East, she wrote in ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, ‘the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would indeed come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’
2. IMPENDING POLICE STATE IN AMERICA
INTERVIEW WITH FRANCIS BOYLE
BY
ALEX JONES
(Francis A Boyle says 9/11 was allowed to happen, war on terror is facilitating the downfall of The Republic, concentration camps are in place and US citizens are the targets)
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Alex Jones was joined on air this week by a leading American professor, practitioner of and expert on international law to discuss his detailed knowledge of the cover up of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which he is adamant were perpetrated by criminal elements of the US government in an attempt to foment a police state by killing off opposition to hardline post 9/11 legislation.
Dr Francis A. Boyle literally helped write the law with regards to terrorism, as he was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bush Snr.
Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia- Herzegovina at the World Court.
The professor started off by explaining the motivation behind the October 2001 anthrax attacks:
"After the September 11th 2001 Terrorist attacks, the Bush administration tried to ram the USA Patriot Act through Congress, that would have, if already had not, set up a police state. And we know for a fact that the Patriot Act had already been drafted and was sitting on Ashcroft's desk as of September 10th.
Senators Daschle and Leahy were holding it up because they realised what this would lead to, indeed the first draft of the Patriot Act, they would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus. And all of a sudden out of nowhere come these anthrax attacks. And at the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either with respect to September 11th or the anthrax attacks, but then the New York Times revealed that the technology behind the letter to Senator Daschle. A trillion spores per gram, special electro-static treatment.
This is super-weapons grade Anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly proclaimed programs, and we had one before Nixon, had never developed before. So it was obvious to me that this was from a US Government lab, there is no where else you could have gotten that."
Dr Boyle proceeded to call a very high level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counter-terrorism, Spike Bowman, whom he had met at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
He told Bowman that the only people that would have the capability to carry out the attacks were people working on US government programs on Anthrax and with access to high level a bio-safety lab. Dr Boyle went through all the names, the contractors and the labs for Anthrax work with the FBI's Bowman.
Bowman then informed Dr Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick on the matter, to which he responded that Fort Detrick could really be the main problem.
It was documented at the time that the anthrax strain used was military grade. This was widely reported in 2002 in publications such as the New Scientist.
"Soon after I had informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorised the destruction of the AMES cultural Anthrax database." The Professor continued.
The destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant destruction of evidence as it meant that there was no way of finding out which strain was sent to who to develop the larger breed of anthrax used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal.
"Clearly for the FBI to have authorised this was obstruction of justice, a federal crime. That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the fingerprints right there. It later came out of course that this was AMES strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letter."
At that point Boyle says it became very clear to him that there was a cover up in operation by the FBI. He points out that later on on reading one of David Ray Griffin's books on the 9/11 attacks, he discovered that Agent Bowman was the same FBI agent who sabotaged the FISA warrant for access to Zacarious Moussaoui's computer, which contained information that could have facilitated the prevention of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Later on Bowman was promoted and given a decoration, presumably because he did such a fine job on Moussaoui's computer and also on the anthrax.
So it was to be that the Patriot Act was rammed through, because the opposition from Leahy and Daschle, whom they had tried to kill, disappeared. Congress and even the House itself officially shut down for the first time in the history of the Republic. The Senate refused to shut down. Dr Boyle commented that he believes this to be one of the biggest political crimes in the history of America.
The professor agreed that actions such as this and legislation such as the Patriot Act and the new Military Commissions act are the precursors to a military dictatorship.
"And remember that the first draft of the Patriot Act sat on Ashcroft's desk before 9/11, and also remember that Ashcroft was flying around in a private jet because he was told that there was going to be a terrorist attack with airplanes, so all this had been planned.
They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is all that really separates us from a police state. And that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants."
With regards to 9/11 itself the professor asserted that it is clear Bush, Rice, Tennet, Ashcroft and other Bush Administration officials all knew a terrorist attack was coming and that the attacks were at the very least allowed to go ahead.
"They let it happen because they wanted a war and they wanted a police state, all the elements for a war against Afghanistan were there in place, even the military force in the gulf were there on the scene, there were massive military forces in the gulf, in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, in the Arabian Ocean before September 11th poised for an attack, whether it was going to be Afghanistan or Iraq would be decided by Bush and the rest of them."
The professor pointed out that it is now being argued by lawmakers that the 14th amendment does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that under the Military Commissions Act any US citizen can be stripped of their citizenship and thus be labeled an enemy combatant.
"So in other words they are taken the position that in some point in time if they want to, they can unilaterally round up United States native born citizens, as they did for Japanese Americans in World War Two, and stick us into concentration camps. That is correct. They haven't actually yet done it but my guess is that the papers have been drawn up... and we know that the FEMA camps are out there.
So it's clear that the Bush people, I guess they are waiting for some other terrorist attack, another anthrax attack, who knows what, and then they will proceed to invoke these emergency orders."
Dr Boyle believes that the domestic police state is a seen as a must by the neoconservatives who are pushing for dominance in the middle east in order to quell dissent from an American public who, the informed majority of, clearly will not stand for such aggression in their names.
The professor then went on to talk about the sickness of the neoconservative sympathizers who are pushing for the practice of torture to be made legal. Legislators such as John Yu and Professor Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. Dr Boyle believes that there is a move afoot to infiltrate both the legal profession and legal education with opinion and legislature that subverts long established US law. His warning is stark:
"The Nazis did the exact same thing too. They had their lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst and he was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the founder of the neoconservatives. So the same phenomena that started out in Nazi Germany is happening here and I exaggerate not... we could all be tortured, we could all be treated this way."
Dr Boyle stressed that in order to seek justice over the anthrax attacks it is vital to keep the pressure on Senator Leahy who will apparently be becoming the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy will have subpoena power and investigative power, and if anyone would have motivation to try to get to the bottom of the attacks, it would be him.
Dr Boyle ended by urging readers and listeners to become informed and spread this information. He also admitted that in the Summer of 2004 he was interrogated by an agent with the CIA/FBI joint terrorism task force. The agent tried to recruit Dr Boyle as an informant to provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When he refused the FBI placed him on all of the government's terrorism watch lists and he now finds it very difficult to travel in and out of the US.
3. NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT IN CANADA
BY
CHRIS HEDGES
When things get bad in the United States it is reassuring to turn to Canada, a country with a high standard of living, a small military and a national healthcare plan. Canada always seemed to be, if a bit duller than America, also a bit saner.
But this is changing. The new Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, inspired by the neocons to the south, appears determined to visit the worst excesses of George Bush's presidency on his own country. He plans to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol and expand military spending. He defended Israel's massive bombing of southern Lebanon, even as Israeli warplanes bombed a clearly marked UN observation post, killing a Canadian peacekeeper. He was the first world leader to cut off funding after Hamas took over the Palestinian Authority. The decision was made despite Hamas having taken power after winning democratic elections that not only were recognized as free and fair but fulfilled demands made by the West. Harper has extended the mission for the 2,200 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, where forty-two have died so far. He has slashed $1 billion in funding that assists the most vulnerable Canadians, including cuts in adult literacy programs, legal aid to gays and lesbians, and measures to assist unemployed youth, despite a near-record surplus of $13.2 billion for 2005-06. If the Bush Administration launches an attack on Iran there is little doubt that Harper would line up behind Washington. When the Canadian prime minister was asked about Iran before his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, he called Iran "the biggest single threat the planet faces." And he sneers at Canada's long tradition of antimilitarism and generous social services, once calling Canada "a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its...social services to mask its second-rate status."
But that is not the worst of it. The prime minister, who has begun, in very un-Canadian fashion, to close his speeches with the words "God Bless Canada," is also a born-again Christian. And Harper is rapidly building an alliance with the worst elements of the US Christian right.
Harper, who heads a minority government, is a member of the East Gate Alliance Church, part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination with 400,000 members that believes in the literal word of the Bible, faith-healing and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
Women cannot be ordained in his church, homosexuality is a sin and abortion is murder. Canada, however, is unused to public displays of faith, and Harper has had to tread more lightly than George Bush. But many fear the prime minister is taking a cue from the Bush Administration and slowly mobilizing Canada's 3.5 million evangelicals--along with the 44 percent of Canadians who say they have committed themselves to Christ--as a power base. Harper has spent the past three years methodically knitting a coalition of social conservatives and evangelicals that looks ominously similar to the American model.
"While the Ottawa press corps has been preoccupied with Harper's ability to keep the most blooper-prone Christians in his caucus buttoned up, he has quietly but determinedly nurtured a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, and conservative Jews that brought him to power and that will put every effort into ensuring that he stays there," wrote Marci McDonald in the October issue of the Canadian magazine Walrus.
Harper's Conservative government, for the first time since the January 2006 election that brought him to power, is tied in the polls with the Liberal Party, which is locked in a leadership battle that includes frontrunner Michael Ignatieff, a prolific author on ethnic conflict, a former Harvard professor and a vocal supporter of the Iraq War. A poll done for the Toronto Globe and Mail and CTV News has the Conservatives and Liberals tied with 32 percent support, although no date has been set for new elections.
Harper's combination of bellicosity, slash-and-burn attitude toward Canadian social programs and religious fervor makes many Canadians nervous. Unfortunately for Canada, Harper has a lot of American help. James Dobson has set up a Canadian branch of his Focus on the Family three blocks from the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The organization, called the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, provides political expertise to and otherwise supports Harper's allies in the bid to turn Canada into an Americanized Christian state. Dobson, who rails against Canada's defense of gay rights and legalization of same-sex marriage, buys radio time in Canada to attack the nation's tolerance of gays and calls for legislation to roll back these measures. The proliferation of new Christian groups is dizzying, with organizations such as the National House of Prayer, the Institute for Canadian Values and the Canada Family Action Coalition, whose mission is "to see Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada," publishing election guides, working with sympathetic legislators and mobilizing Canadian evangelicals in local and national campaigns. These groups turn frequently to American Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, who came to Canada two years ago for an "Emergency Pastors Briefing" to rally 400 evangelical ministers against a bill before Parliament that included a provision making it a hate crime to denounce homosexuals. Other stalwarts, like former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and televangelist John Hagee, have come north to spread their toxic message to the newly energized Canadian evangelical church. And in the Harper government they have found not only a willing convert but an important ally.
Harper's hold on power, like that of George Bush, is shaky. He too has no clear mandate to transform Canada, but this has not stopped his minority government from steadily undermining social programs and a once enlightened foreign policy that liberal Americans could only envy. The tools he is using are familiar to many Americans, who stood sleepily by as Pat Robertson and other religious bigots hijacked the Republican Party and moved into the legislative and executive branches of government. As I walk the windy streets of Toronto I wonder if those who push past me will wake up and see in Harper's government our own malaise or watch passively as Canada becomes a demented reflection of George Bush's America.
4. CASH COWS OF PERSONAL DEBT
(The Credit Card Industry and Predatory Capitalism)
BY
CHARLES SULLIVAN
The booming credit card business is one of the most profitable and destructive industries to ever emerge from the inventive capitalist mind. Citibank is raking in more money than Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Obscene profits are realized without lifting a finger to perform any physical work. In 2004 a single credit card company—the MBNA—realized 1.5 times the profits of fast food industry giant McDonald’s. Collecting on credit card debt is a very lucrative business.
With origins in South Dakota, the modern credit card industry began realizing obscene profits as a result of deregulation. The Supreme Court also played a pivotal role in expanding banking industry profits by lifting limits to the amount of additional fees credit card companies could charge their customers. The sky is the limit now. Industry deregulation has resulted in the systemic fleecing of consumers by practices that can only be described as willful and predatory in nature.
It is variously estimated that debit cards will account for 26% of retail sales volumes between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays this year, up 3% from 2005. The busiest shopping period of the year does not occur on Black Friday, as is widely reported, but between the 11th and 17th of December. During this span Americans will likely spend $34 billion on credit and debit card purchases; and nearly $86 billion between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Billions more will be spent on store issued credit cards. In total, Americans will accrue $135 billion in additional credit card debt this holiday season.
To date, credit card volume is running 11% percent higher than last year. The National Retail Federation estimates that over $454 billion will be spent by American consumers during the holiday season this year, including cash purchases. That represents a 5% increase over the previous year, while VISA USA estimates overall retail sales for the 2006 holiday season to increase by 7.5%.These are truly staggering numbers that are not easily grasped.
By paying only the monthly minimum payments, as so many struggling families do, it may require more than thirty years to pay off a dress or a power tool that was purchased at the local mall on Black Friday. That makes for a pretty expensive gift and every year additional debt is accumulating upon the old, making extrication very difficult, if not impossible. But that is the whole idea behind predatory capitalism. Industry insiders refer to the small percentage of card holders who do not carry a monthly balance as ‘dead beats.’ Consumer traps are engineered into the system that all but guarantees that card uses will be late making their payments or exceed their credit limits.
When card users are late making payments, as the complex algorithms used by card issuers predict they will, interest rates rise dramatically and multiple user fees are added to the monthly bill. Millions of card users spend most of their income paying exorbitant user fees, without reducing the balance or reducing it only minimally. The bankers are raking in billions, while working class families are becoming debt slaves to the predatory capitalists of the credit card industry. This was made possible with the blessings of Congress operating under the influence of the corporate lobbyists that swarm on Capitol Hill like maggots on a corpse.
Bankruptcy laws that once provided working people a way out of debt are no longer available to them as an avenue of escape. It should be noted, however, that bankruptcy courts remain open to corporations and provide them with debt relief, a chance to start over with a clean slate.
Thus the banker thieves will continue to rob working families until death do them part; and then the debt burden is passed on to the next of kin. More than a cash cow designed to bilk the people of their hard earned income, credit card debt is also a way to control the debtors and keep them in line; and it is a major battle front in the class war that rages across the continent.
Like genetically modified poultry with abnormally large breasts, the American consumer is bred to consume and to be consumed by predatory capitalists. They are taken in by seductive advertising campaigns that nourish the urge to consume, no matter how destructive to the self or to the planet.
Credit card agreements are so complex and deliberately misleading that few consumers, or even lawyers can fully comprehend them; and they are mined with hidden traps and pitfalls guaranteed to produce lifetimes of debt.
From the previously cited statistics it should be clear that the people stand naked and vulnerable before the predatory capitalists and their cohorts in government. Massive personal debt is yet another example of a profit driven system that does not work for the working people of this nation. The trust that should prosper between people and government no longer exists, leaving the majority of citizens without representation. Predatory capitalism creates enormous wealth for a privileged few by exploiting workers who are trying to survive by working multiple jobs that yield non-living wages, and few or no benefits.
Virtually all of the financial institutions in this country, including the Federal Reserve, are arrayed against working families. Congress is working for big business rather than working families, as evidenced by their policy decisions and voting records. Let us be clear about whose side they are on.
Ever more creative methods of fleecing the people are being crafted in the corporate board rooms of America and dutifully written into law by Congress. Millions of working people thus find themselves buried under an avalanche of debt from which they will never escape. Debtors are a cash cow for the credit card and banking industries whose supply of milk is without end. Eventually we will be required to work until we die, as our creditors and Congress work in concert to bleed us to death and gorge themselves on our labor and our suffering.
The low esteem by which workers are held in America by the ruling Plutocracy underscores the reality that there is no one looking out for our interests. But we must remember that we comprise about 95% of the population. Our low placement on the economic rungs of the ladder assures that we will remain bottom feeders, either surviving or perishing on the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich, thereby guaranteeing our continued serfdom to them. It also demonstrates the necessity of organizing as a class and rising together against the corporate predators that are bleeding us of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Dear Mr. President: Send Even MORE Troops (and you go, too!) ...from Michael Moore
1/10/07
Thanks for your address to the nation. It's good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.
Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain't gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We've already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean... bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this -- BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!
You've got to show some courage, dude! You've got to win this one! C'mon, you got Saddam! You hung 'im high! I loved watching the video of that -- just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!
Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you're in. As Ricky Bobby said, "If you're not first, you're last." And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.
Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you're out of combat-ready soldiers -- so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million -- Iraq -- is to send in at least 28 million! Here's how it would work:
The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.
Now, I know you're saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:
1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where there vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don't believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them -- while they hide here in America.
2. Start a "Kill an Iraqi" Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I'm sure you'll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.
3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war -- and many of them are already trained from having been "embedded!" If that doesn't bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel.
Mr. Bush, do not give up! Now is not the time to pull your punch! Don't be a weenie by sending in a few over-tired troops. Get your people behind you and YOU lead them in like a true commander in chief! Leave no conservative behind! Full speed ahead!
We promise to write. Go get 'em W!
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