Bad American

This is another topic I’ve been meaning to write about.

This column in CommonDreams

Spurred this post in response from Siouxrose, whose posts I have always appreciated reading:

1. Siouxrose May 9th, 2008 6:13 pm

   What’s really tragic about this is that INTELLIGENT PEOPLE are often clueless. I have friends who are attorneys and heads of businesses and when I see them and we have lunch together and I start going down the checklist of WHAT’S GOING ON they think I am speaking in deluded hyperboles. The LIES have so saturated so many arteries of the MSM that people have TAKEN them to be true. Many do not have the time or inclination to seek our alternative media.

   My best female friend refuses to read the majority of commondreams articles I forward her. Others have also asked me to stop! There is an aspect to the “New Age” spirituality camp that makes existence into a merely personal matter, as if each person has the OPTION to choose their “reality,” and which perceptions they intend to focus upon. A woman I otherwise admired asked me to PLEASE NOT SPEAK of these things (newsworthy events), and for Iraq blithely dismissed the agony of its citizens as “just some karma playing out.” This idea that we are FREE to enjoy OUR lives and OWN no responsibiity to others is a dangerous extension of an advertising/PR concept that has managed to sell to the lowest common denominator: the single digit consumer. How to re-weave the WEB of humanity will become the great challenge. However, communities that have been hit by dangerous weather events often DO work together. It may take hits of this and other nature to rouse the necessary compassion to rebuild the body politic, one far more HUMANE.

There are so many points in this excellent post.

First, is the ignorance organic or willful? That’s a big question. And what Siouxtrose is dealing with here are supposedly intelligent people who are supposed to know what is going on.

I’ve been of the opinion that most people aren’t really as clueless as they seem - they know in their gut there is something very wrong. But they are scared of speaking the truth for fear of losing their jobs or friends or landing up on some no fly list.

The true kool aid drinkers - the Limbaugh listeners, we’re not considering here. They have enthusiastically drank the kool aid and they like it just fine.

I found Siouxrose’s comment about friends refusing to read articles she sends them to be revealing. This has also happened to me. In my case, the people in question have pretty much given up all hope of any positive change and just want to have a little fun before they die. The longer I live the more I can understand and sympathize with that position. It just isn’t in me to do that.

But her comment on new agers is very telling. As I have written before, many people get into new age practice and philosophy as an escape from the real world. They also believe they can tap into some kind of ‘force’ like power in which they can somehow psychically separate themselves from the real world and work on their own perfection while everything around them goes to hell.

The comment from one of Siouxrose’s friends about the situation in Iraq as “some karma that is just playing out” is sadly too common. For many people, new age philosophy (increasingly an upper class affectation) is a convenient excuse to do nothing. It is the flip side of fundamentalist Christianity, which also does nothing to save the planet because the Lord will take care of everything come Armageddon time, which is always drawing near.

And of course, the average American, as she correctly surmises, doesn’t want to know because they don’t want to have to face the truth about the nation that they pledge allegiance too. AND they don’t want to be reminded of how powerless they are or cowardly, to stand up and speak out. They wish to live in their own private bubble until they die.

It can make those of us who are aware feeling quite mad. Many other CommonDreams posters feel like alien beings walking among the remnants of the body snatchers as if they had been transported into some kind of weird science fiction movie or Twilight Zone episode.

In any case, we still have CommonDreams, other lefty sites and the Internet to communicate with each other. At some point in the future, I expect the Internet to be a lot more carefully policed than it is even now.

And when that happens I’m sure there will be many who will try to save themselves and their sanity by repeatedly typing:

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is a free country

This is

Only if you also believe in Santa and the tooth fairy. . .

Deborah Jeane Palfrey

AOL News/Associated Press

TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. (May 1) - A woman police believe to be convicted Washington escort service operator Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide, officials said Thursday.

Police said the body was found in a shed near Palfrey’s mother’s home Thursday morning. There was a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents or how she killed herself.

And you may never know. Expect everything about this “suicide” to be hidden from public view like most of the names of the powerful who used her escort service:

Her trial concluded without revealing many new details about the service or its clients. Vitter was among possible witnesses, but did not take the stand.

By design of course. We know of Senator David Vitter, Harlan Ullman (Mr. “Shock and Awe”) and Randall Tobias. Can you image the others that were on the client list? Of course, the rich and powerful look out for themselves and the public be damned so we’ll never know.

This is just too convenient a ’suicide.” Palfrey was abandoned and betrayed by powerful men she naively believed would protect her. Too late she found out she was ever expendable. And, facing the clank of prison bars, she had nothing to lose by authoring a tell all from prison. So she, I believe, was silenced forever.

And she wasn’t the only one:

One of the escort service employees was former University of Maryland, Baltimore County, professor Brandy Britton, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. She committed suicide in January before she was scheduled to go to trial.

Doesn’t this all seem just a little too convenient?

Bet the rest of the women will keep their mouths shut now if they know what’s good for them.

There are many ways of assassinating people and making it look like a suicide. The pros know how to do it and our government’s security services are full of them.

Some years back in Cleveland a big call girl ring was broken up too after too many loose ends started to appear. Cleveland Police at that time seized the services’ “black book” which was kept in the strictest of confidence and, throughout all the court proceedings, never ever saw the light of day.

There’s one law for you and a totally different law for the people who count. The everyday mopes nailed on such shows as “Cops” for being johns aren’t important enough to be shielded from public shame.

i.e. to be kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

Glenn Greenwald

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Of course one looks for solutions. There are few. How do essentially powerless people destroy the power of the media and the military-industrial complex through a rigged ballot box? Many have brought up how easy it is for the media to marginalize candidates like Kucinich, Gravel and Paul. The American people do exactly what they are told. They are allowed to grumble, but they are kept powerless.

Katrina VandenHeuvel is trying to speak truth to the totally bought child of privilege Cokie Roberts and George Will on my TV. Good luck with that. Cokie says America wants to win. Will wants Iranian blood. And VandenHeuvel is the only real voice of sanity and is outnumbered 3-1 on this panel. And even she doesn’t go far enough.

We are all complicit in this when we keep silent.

When the blood is spilled in Iran, we will deserve what we get. We have opted to remain willfully ignorant. We have opted to remain greedy and stupid.

There is no solution short of absolute catastrophe. I wish it were otherwise but I see no hope for any reasonable, rational, peaceful solution. The powerful want what they want. And they will not go down without a fight.

CommonDreams

Despite recent acknowledgements from the likes of Alan Greenspan, Gen. John Abizaid, and others that oil and permanent (or, if you prefer, “enduring”) military bases were among the main objectives, Frontline avoided any real discussion of such delicate factors. Someone not already aware of how our media has become a tool of the Bush administration might have been shocked at how Frontline could have missed one of President George W. Bush’s most telling “signing statements.” Underneath the recent Defense Authorization Act, he wrote that he did not feel bound by the law’s explicit prohibition against using the funding:

“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or

“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

So the Frontline show was largely pap.

Well what did you expect? The Military-Industrial complex largely gutted the life out of PBS which is now almost wholly dependent on the sponsorship of big oil and other industries to underwrite their major projects.

And the rest of the so-called ‘liberal media’ really isn’t and therefore you will not see anything substantive on the nets.

Der Spiegel interviews Lawrence Wilkerson

OF COURSE you didn’t see this! Our ‘liberal’ US media protects you from the news people of other countries get every day about the USA. You might lose your religion patriotism. And we all know you MUST love your country unconditionally or you’re a bad American.

Anyway, Wilkerson was Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the weeks leading up to the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. You can read the whole interview (DO YOU DARE?!?! Has it been ‘vetted’ by CNN?) but the salient point is here:

SPIEGEL: Do you ever think that Powell was set up?

Wilkerson: Well I am increasingly convinced that, for a part of the Bush administration, the argument “weapons of mass destruction” was just a camouflage, just subterfuge for their real goals and reasons of the war.

SPIEGEL: What are they?

Wilkerson: I am convinced that the vast oil resources of Iraq weigh heavier for me now when I do the strategic analysis as reasons for the war than I thought back then.

SPIEGEL: Who do you mean specifically? George W. Bush?

Wilkerson: I am not sure. But I would be very interested to look at the documents chronicling Dick Cheney’s pre-war conversations with leading figures of the energy business and with oil magnates. Maybe one day historians will be able to get their hands on those documents and come to a judgment about that — if and when the classified documents become open to the public.

As I have repeatedly said and wrote ad nauseum, it is my steadfast belief that the so-called “energy conference” Cheney held with industry and defense representatives was first and foremost to find out the questions to the following questions: (1) how much oil is left and (2) how do we get our hands on it?

Period. It’s called Peak Oil. Google it.

What you’ve been experiencing for the last five years is the result of the answers Cheney got to those questions, the minutes of which remain above top secret.

When people like Glenn Beck get a show on CNN.

I know, Beck is like a bete noir (look that up conservatives) for people like me but since stupidity is being raised to a form of cult worship in the United States its best to back statements like that up with facts.

The actual script of his show Thursday from Media Matters:

BECK: Hillary said that if she becomes president, the federal government will take more of an active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market.  (yeah, like the subprime mess you greedheads got this country in you asshole - ed.) Wow. That sounds pretty Left. But just in case you haven’t had enough, it gets much, much worse.

She also said she wants to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market. OK. That sounds like the Soviet Union. (No, it sounds like a liberal democracy, what we used to be you stupid freak - ed.)

And to top it all off, Comrade Clinton has railed against the excesses of the offensive executive pay packages and an out-of-whack tax code that favors the wealthy while holding down the middle class. I can’t imagine anybody putting it more plainly than that.

Hillary Clinton is a liberal fascist. (What does that make Obergruppenfuhrer Giuliani? -ed) She is somebody who wants to redistribute the wealth in this country the way she believes is good for everybody. It is the new New Deal, and it is what kept this country in a depression for 10 solid years while the rest of the world recovered. (absolute bullshit but I bet your audience believes it because they’re as stupid as you - ed)

Hillary, I just want to point this out. Executives earn big money because it’s their skills that help their companies earn even bigger money, you know, so they can hire more employees, et cetera, et cetera. And if the companies don’t like it, they should fire them and lower the pay scale. (Because companies have God like intelligence and morals, eh Glenn? Hey, check out this corporate saint - http://apnews.myway.com//article/20080125/D8UD6FVG0.html; and while were at it, let’s see what else our sainted corporate overseers like to get away with - http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/25/6610/; Glenn you have to practice hard being a corporate dumbshit shill or does it just come naturally to you? - ed)

And you don’t hear me crying when your husband takes home a million-dollar speaking fee. I, instead, say, God bless America. I can’t believe somebody would pay that.

And finally, businesses need tax breaks because they need capital to grow the business, hire more employees, and that expands the economy. Not food stamps. (And how many of them have outsourced the middle class out of a job Glenn, because Americans can’t compete with slave labor wages in the third world - but I bet you think its great because, well, hell, you’re doing allright - ed).

I like to call this Economics 101. You know, and it’s fine if you want to prance around like Robin Hood, promising to steal from the rich and give to the poor, but that doesn’t mean it works. The only reason it worked for Stalin is because he killed 50 million people to force them to live that way. (again, to think that the USSR practiced anything like modern socialism is an uneducated opinion. Stalin was a genocidal tyrant that used the trappings of collectivism to gain and keep power. Think Sweden or France for better examples, but that’s beyond the narrow range of your intelligence - ed).

We are the greatest country on earth because of our capitalist system, not in spite of it. (bullshit - ed)  So, thanks, Hillary. Just in case people weren’t sure why they shouldn’t vote for you, your fiscal ideas are plenty reason enough. Unless you’re Hugo Chavez.

[...]

BECK: Why is — why is John Edwards in the race? I mean, at this point?

LAURA SCHWARTZ (Democratic strategist): He is passionate about his ideas, and I have to tell you –

BECK: Come on.

SCHWARTZ: — I’m with the group that says he shouldn’t drop out. I mean, this guy has at least 15 percent. If he drops below 15 percent nationally –

BECK: Wait a minute.

SCHWARTZ: — this guy will have some second thoughts.

BECK: OK. Wait a minute. If he’s so passionate about his viewpoints, why are they so different from the last time he was in the race? He was running as a moderate. Now, put a red star on his furry head. He’s a communist.

I saw the GOP debate last night where a bunch of rich white men moaned and groaned about how unfair the tax code was to the poor, poor big corporations. And how if THEY were president, the big corporations would be protected.

I know it really doesn’t matter anymore who gets to be President since the whole scam is rigged, but it amazes me that there are actually breathing human being who enthusiastically support the GOP and people like Glenn Beck who are the REAL fascists in America today. But hey, one person’s fascism is another person’s ‘free market economics.’ With a mailed fist, of course.

In any case, I’m fast losing any hope that this country can rise above its innate greed, violence and stupidity to become anything resembling a nation living up to its founding creeds. When absolute slobbering fascist-apologist morons like Glenn Beck are given respectability in the mainstream media, we are near endgame for this nation.

In a straight up debate, I’d kick his ass. But that’s why people like me are weeded out of media jobs before we can get to that level. Talent means nothing; slobbering obedience to corporate vassals means everything. And Glenn Beck knows which side his bread is buttered on.

For my previous three item roundup for I Read the News Today Oh Boy, on the Rabble Podcast Network (Canada, where you can speak more of the truth on the airwaves), I wrote the following and should have posted something here. That error will now be rectified:

The Times of London reports that Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, has alleged that high ranking members of the US State Department may have arranged the sale of America’s nuclear secrets to foreign terror groups.

According to Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com, Edmonds said Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-2005 helped arrange the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkish intermediaries. Grossman is now vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen. Grossman has denied being a bagman for foreign agents.

Edmonds contends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

Here’s Daniel Ellsberg’s commentary:

For the second time in two weeks, the entire U.S. press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch’s London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt U.S. officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the U.S. Congress and the courts.For the last two weeks — one could say, for years — the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds, quoted in the London Times on January 6, 2008 in a front-page story that was front-page news in much of the rest of the world but was not reported in a single American newspaper or network. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.

Just as important, there must be pressure by the public on Congressional committee chairpersons, in particular Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Patrick Leahy. Both have been sitting for years on classified, sworn testimony by Edmonds — as she revealed in the Times’ new story on Sunday — along with documentation, in their possession, confirming parts of her account. Pressure must be brought for them to hold public hearings to investigate her accusations of widespread criminal activities, over several administrations, that endanger national security. They should call for open testimony under oath by Edmonds — as she has urged for five years — and by other FBI officials she has named to them, as cited anonymously in the first Times’ story.

And this is the time for those who have so far creditably leaked to the Times of London to come forward, accepting personal risks, to offer their testimony — and new documents — both to the Congress and to the American press. I would say to them: Don’t do what I did and waste months of precious time trying to get Congressional committees to act as they should in the absence of journalistic pressure. Do your best to inform the American public directly, first, through the major American media.

But perhaps today the alternative media and the international press are a necessary precursor even to that. It shouldn’t be true, but if it is, it’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They printed them then. Would they today?

The short and sweet answer: no.

A cowed and controlled government,

A cowed and controlled political process

A cowed and controlled media.

Game, set and match. Hillary or John/Mitt? Makes no difference, really.

Read the comments and the links at the end of the Ellsberg piece. It makes for very illuminating reading. Remember - that next mushroom cloud over a US city may have come from - our own military!

Who is next, Alex Jones?

A little noticed story (by the mainstream) from Mark Potok on Alternet:

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Railing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is one serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll.

On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

The FBI declined comment. “Longstanding FBI policy prohibits disclosing who may or may not provide information,” Agent Richard Kolko of the agency’s press unit said. Reached in New Jersey, Turner also declined all comment.

Having read and heard Turner previously, this was absolutely no surprise to me. No one, and I mean, no one, can get on the airwaves and say the outrageous crap Turner said without being protected by the government. You simply can’t advocate the assassination of judges on the air, and other Federal officials, without landing up either in prison or dead. Not in the age of the Patriot Act.

For heaven’s sakes, look what happens to you when you decide not to pay your Federal income taxes!

And no one touched Hal Turner?

Of course he was on the government payroll!

While no one loses any sleep over a nutbar like Turner and all the other nutbars drawn in to his little faux hatefest, this story DOES raise a very important issue:

How many other media figures are on Uncle Sam’s payroll?

Don’t laugh, its more common than you think.

From PSYOP soldiers working for CNN (the perfect merger of government and media) to Armstrong Williams (now back in the saddle because you can’t keep a reliable mouthpiece down!), there are probably many others in the media doing the bidding of the government for whatever reason.  No, not just Limbaugh, although if the government didn’t care for him, he’d land up like Mike Malloy.

Talent means little. Reliability and ‘playing ball’ mean everything. Trust me, I caught a glimpse of how the vetting works.

And it goes to prove that if its on the national mainstream, its probably not believable at face value. That goes for political, business and lifestyle reporting.

Now more than ever, the requirement for intelligent citizenry is to develop a finely honed discernment of everything you hear and, to put it a little more vulgarly, a good bullshit detector. It’s not always what people are saying it is WHO is saying it and WHY are they being allowed the PLATFORM to say it.

Another great Channel 4 documentary from Britain which looks at the manipulation of the masses by so-called liberal parties in both the US and Britain.

In the end, you are left with the distinct impression that we are, at core, pigs.

That if we were honest about our aspirations, vis a vis politics, we would vote for a candidate who had a basic message: “fuck the poor; I want mine.”

If you doubt that and you are over 40, you might consider that candidates from both parties NEVER discuss the poor in America anymore. The days of Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are long gone. The poor have completely disappeared from the American political discourse. Now the system talks only of saving the middle class. Twenty or third years hence, who will be left to ’save?’

The central message is the system had turned politics from ideology to another form of crass, business-driven commercialism. This has given us what we have now: a system built on selling the public unrealistic lies for the sake of power. And power ultimately for whom?

One thing that I keep coming back to in this documentary is that despite all the mewling about the ‘forgotten middle class’ the Democrats did nothing for them - in fact they irreparably harmed the American middle class in several key ways. First was NAFTA and GATT and then the other pro-monopoly movements that followed from that including the gutting of media restrictions which consolidate the voices of the media into a few corporate hands.

Bill Clinton was the best friend the plutocrats ever had.

And indeed, what most Americans fail to realize is despite all the focus group mania, how little their actual needs and desires actually matter in the grand scheme of things. They are sold a bill of goods that are never delivered, since both political parties are controlled by powerful corporate forces whose main aim is to manage the population, as one would manage cattle, for the benefit of the moneyed classes.

But Americans have bought into the ‘I feel you pain’ level of politics, as evidenced in the latest episode with Hillary Clinton’s tears. People want desperately to relate to someone on a level higher than themselves on a human level, when in fact, no such connection exists. It may sound profoundly cynical, but the masters that these politicians serve could care less about sharing any of their largess with the masses; rather, they seek to continue to squeeze those masses while at the same time, convincing them that they are somehow in charge of both their personal and cultural destinies.

When you consider what is being brought forth in this documentary, it seems clear that the vast majority of people have no realization of how completely they are manipulated by these corporate-political forces and the puppets that serve in their stead.

What makes the whole system work is the historical and cultural brainwashing that operates on several different levels. First is what I have referred to as the Cult of America - a wholesale belief in a fantasy history of this country and an almost childlike belief in its inherent goodness, as if any such massive political undertaking could be a force for moral good on anything other than an anecdotal basis.

The second is the Myth of Upward Mobility and Self-Determination. This is the belief often portrayed as the ‘bootstraps’ theory that works hand in hand with the Cult of America: if you only work hard enough and believe in the system, you too can be a millionaire or better. And although the casualties of this belief lie scattered everywhere, we are taught by the system’s educational arms that that the economic system, i.e. capitalism, is never to blame. If you are poor and struggling, it is wholly your own fault.

The Third is the Myth of Non-Inherent Self-Worth. This is simple: you are what you own. As a corollary to the above, if you are wealthy its is because you are inherently a better person, either intellectually or morally, than those who are not wealthy. This is also the overarching myth that subsumes the Myth of the Self-Made Man. Again, the communitarian ideal that ‘no man is an island’ is dropped for the belief system that encourages people to believe that they and they alone are wholly responsible for their own success.

The Fourth is the Myth of Christianity. This is perhaps the most pernicious and most key element in the whole scheme of control. Merely having the organs of the state claim a moral high ground based on the three elements I’ve outlined above is not nearly enough to assert complete control. After all, these are the ideas of men. But, if you can exert control based on a supernatural belief system that encompasses the whole personal core of an individual, this would bind people to the system of rewards and punishments that our society is based on - literally - in perpetuity. What has been done on several fronts is to dilute and destroy the message of Jesus Christ in the Gospels (perhaps best illustrated in the Beatitudes) and replace it with what satirists have called the theory of the supply side Jesus in which the Lord truly helps only those who help themselves. What is sold is a ‘prosperity Gospel’ which allows believers to assuage their guilt over wealth with justifications that the poor do not need to be helped because (1) they will always be with us and (2) who can determine if they are deserving?

So here we are again with more of the same. The Matrix we live in is real but the glittering prizes it holds just out of reach of the masses, and the psychological manipulation which it massages their fears, will, as Morpheus might say, cause most people to defend that system to the death against those who would try to liberate them from it.

There’s nothing very complicated about figuring it all out. The only truly difficult part is facing the truth.

If watching this video doesn’t make your blood boil, nothing will:

I met Medea Benjamin in St. Louis and I congratulated her on her bravery. When people tell me that I shouldn’t or they couldn’t possibly put their ‘American dream’ at risk to speak truth to power, I can only think of Medea Benjamin whose bravery and chutzpah surpasses all of the Democrats currently serving in Congress. She is a 1776 patriot.

All she wants to know is why the fascists have put this ‘harmless woman’ on a list which makes sure she can’t get into Canada. Look at the government cockroaches run away. See how arrogantly they act toward a citizen who wants to know why she has been blacklisted. This is the face of American government 2007. I’m so proud.

If you’re not angry at this, you’re part of the probleBad American › Edit — WordPressm.

And yes, I use the term ‘fascist.’ It’s time somebody does. Because that it was it is.

More Medea Benjamin videos on this You Tube link.