Enlightenment:
A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter
cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk
when they're off their heads.
Wisdom:
So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.
If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.
I've read it and it is superb, if you want to understand how the world really operates then read this book! Click here to link to Amazon so you can buy it.
by John Perkins (Preface)
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
I should know; I was an EHM.
I wrote that in 1982, as the beginning of a book with the working title Conscience of an Economic Hit Man. The book was dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been my clients, whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits—Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.
I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop.
In 2003, the president of a major publishing house that is owned by a powerful international corporation read a draft of what had now become Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He described it as “a riveting story that needs to be told.” Then he smiled sadly, shook his head, and told me that since the executives at world headquarters might object, he could not afford to risk publishing it. He advised me to fictionalize it. “We could market you in the mold of a novelist like John Le Carre or Graham Greene.”
But this is not fiction. It is the true story of my life. Amore courageous publisher, one not owned by an international corporation, has agreed to help me tell it.
This story must be told. We live in a time of terrible crisis—and tremendous opportunity. The story of this particular economic hit man is the story of how we got to where we are and why we currently face crises that seem insurmountable. This story must be told because only through understanding our past mistakes will we be able to take advantage of future opportunities, because 9/11 happened and so did the second war in Iraq, because in addition to the three thousand people who died on September 11 at the hands of terrorists, another twenty-four thousand died from hunger and hunger-related causes. In fact, twenty-four thousand people die every single day because they are unable to obtain life-sustaining food. Most importantly, this story must be told because today, for the first time in history, one nation has the ability, the money, and the power to change all this. It is the nation where I was born and the one I served as an EHM: the United States of America.
What finally convinced me to ignore the threats and bribes?
The short answer is that my only child, Jessica, graduated from college and went out into the world on her own. When I recently told her that I was considering publishing this book and shared my fears with her, she said, “Don't worry, dad. If they get you, I'll take over where you left off. We need to do this for the grandchildren I hope to give you someday!”
The longer version relates to my dedication to the country where I was raised, my love for the ideals expressed by our founding fathers, my deep commitment to the American republic that today promises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all people, everywhere, and to my determination after 9/11 not to sit idly by any longer while EHMs turn that republic into a global empire. That is the skeleton version of the long answer; the flesh and blood are added during the chapters that follow.
This is a true story. I lived every minute of it. The sights, the people, the conversations, and the feelings I describe were all a part of my life. It is my personal story and yet it happened within the larger context of world events that have shaped our history, brought us to where we are today, and form the foundation for our children’s futures. I have made every effort to present these experiences, people, and conversations accurately. Whenever I discuss historical events or re-create conversations with other people, I do so with the help of several tools, including published documents; personal records and notes; recollections—my own and those of others who participated; the five manuscripts I began previously; and historical accounts by other authors, most notably recently published ones that disclose information that formerly was classified or otherwise unavailable. Footnotes and references are provided to allow interested readers to pursue these subjects in more depth.
My publisher asked whether we actually referred to ourselves as economic hit men. I assured him that we did, although usually only by the initials. In fact, on the day in 1971 when I began working with my teacher Claudine, she informed me, “My assignment is to mold you into an economic hit man. No one can know about your involvement—not even your wife.” Then she turned serious. “Once you're in, you're in for life.” After that she seldom used the full name, we were simply EHMs.
Claudine's role is a fascinating example of the manipulation that underlies the business I had entered. Beautiful and intelligent, she was highly effective; she understood my weaknesses and used them to her greatest advantage. Her job was typical of the cogs that keep the system on track. Claudine pulled no punches when describing what I would be called upon to do. My job, she said, was “to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire—to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. The owners of U.S. engineering and construction companies become fabulously wealthy.”
Today we see the results of this system run amok. Executives at our most respected companies hire people at near-slave wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops. Oil companies wantonly pump toxins down rain forest rivers, consciously killing people, animals, and plants and committing genocide among ancient cultures. The pharmaceutical industry denies life-saving medicines to millions of HIV-infected Africans. Twelve million families in our own United States worry about their next meal. The energy industry creates an Enron. The accounting industry creates an Andersen. The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30:1 in 1960 to 74:1 in 1995. The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet.
And we wonder why terrorists attack us?
Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.
The concept is, of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small portion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and perhaps is also the reason that conspiracy theories abound. When men and woman are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth's resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it.
In their drive to advance the global empire, corporations, banks, and governments (collectively the corporatocracy) use their financial and political muscle to ensure that our schools, businesses, and the media support both the fallacious concept and its corollary. They have brought us to a point where our global culture is a monstrous machine that requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel and maintenance, so much so that in the end it will have consumed everything in sight and will be left with no choice but to devour itself.
The corporatocracy is not a conspiracy, but its members do endorse common values and goals. One of corporatocracy's most important functions is to perpetuate and continually expand and strengthen the system. The lives of those who “make it,” and their accouterments—their mansions, yachts, and private jets—are presented as models to inspire us all to consume, consume, consume. Every opportunity is taken to convince us that purchasing things is our civic duty, that pillaging the earth is good for the economy and therefore serves our higher interests. People like me are paid outrageously high salaries to do the system's bidding. If we falter, a more malicious form of hit man, the jackal, steps to the plate. And if the jackal fails, then the job falls to the military.
This book is the confession of a man who, back when he was an EHM, was part of a relatively small group. People who play similar roles are more abundant now. They have more euphemistic titles, and they walk the corridors of Monsanto, General Electric, Nike, General Motors, Wal-Mart, and nearly every other major corporation in the world. In a very real sense, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is their story, as well as mine.
It is your story too, the story of your world and mine, of the first truly global empire. History tells us that unless we modify this story, it is guaranteed to end tragically. Empires never last. Every one of them has failed terribly. They destroy many cultures as they race toward greater domination, and then they themselves fall. No country or combination of them can thrive in the long term by exploiting others.
This book was written so that we may take heed and remold our story. I am certain that when enough of us become aware of how we are being exploited by the economic engine that creates an insatiable appetite for the world's resources and that results in systems that foster slavery, we will no longer tolerate it. We will reassess our role in a world where a few swim in riches and the majority drown in poverty, pollution, and violence. We will commit ourselves to navigating a course toward compassion, democracy, and social justice for all.
Admitting to a problem is the first step toward finding a solution. Confessing a sin is the beginning of redemption. Let this book, then, be the start of our salvation. Let it inspire us to new levels of dedication, and drive us to realize our dream for balanced and honorable societies.
The true state of oil reserves in the world is another of the Big Lies that you are being told. Wake up and smell the (dwindling) hydrocarbons people!
by Mark Williams
If the actions—rather than the words—of the oil business’s major players provide the best gauge of how they see the future, then ponder the following. Crude oil prices have doubled since 2001, but oil companies have increased their budgets for exploring new oil fields by only a small fraction. Likewise, U.S. refineries are working close to capacity, yet no new refinery has been constructed since 1976. And oil tankers are fully booked, but outdated ships are being decommissioned faster than new ones are being built.
If those clues weren’t enough, here’s a news item that came out of Saudi Arabia on March 6, 2003. Though it went largely unremarked, the kingdom’s announcement that it could not produce more oil in response to the Iraq War was of historic importance. As Kenneth Deffeyes notes in Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, it meant that as of 2003, there was no major underutilized oil source left on the planet. Even as established oil fields have reached their maximum production capacity, there has been disappointing production from new fields. Globally, according to some geologists’ estimates, we have discovered 94 percent of all available oil.
The Saudis’ announcement arrived right on schedule—at least, once the three-year delay imposed by OPEC’s anti-U.S. embargo and production cutbacks of the 1970s was factored in. In 1969, the prominent geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that a graph of world oil production over time would look like a bell curve, with a peak around the year 2000. Thereafter, he argued, production would drop—slowly at first, then ever faster.
Hubbert had a track record as a prophet: his 1956 forecast that U.S. domestic oil production would peak in the early 1970s proved correct. Kenneth Deffeyes, who started out in 1958 as a young petroleum geologist at Shell’s Houston labs working alongside Hubbert, became so convinced by the man’s theories that by 1963 he had left the oil business, except for occasional consulting work; he is now a professor emeritus of geosciences at Princeton University. In Beyond Oil, Deffeyes takes readers through Hubbert’s analysis in a highly readable style, even boiling down the complex mathematics into a few pages of graphs.
The prognosis? Deffeyes has no doubt that by 2019, the year in which Hubbert’s theories indicate global oil production will drop to 90 percent of current rates, human ingenuity will have found replacement energy sources (see “What Energy Crisis?”, p. 19). But Deffeyes is optimistic about the long term only because he believes that by 2010, pressures will grow so intense that they’ll create the resolve necessary to develop a new energy economy. In the short term, he foresees continually rising oil prices that force industry after industry closer to the wall. He fears not just escalating resource wars around the world but also mass starvation in some countries, since the 6.4 billion people living on the earth today are fed thanks largely to the successes of the 20th century’s “green revolution,” which, among other innovations, brought petrochemical-based fertilizers into wide use.
Because 15 years ago we failed to begin developing the new energy sources and technologies we need now, Deffeyes argues, in the immediate future we’ll have to rely on what we’ve got. In Beyond Oil, he examines how we might optimize the use of our geologically derived energy sources.
Deffeyes suggests that coal will make a comeback and that Fischer-Tropsch conversion—the process by which the Nazi regime turned coal into gasoline to keep its Panzers running during WWII—might become commonplace. He grants that there’ll be an outcry over the ecological costs of burning coal; similarly, there’ll be much agonizing as nuclear power plants are again rolled out. But Deffeyes believes that M. King Hubbert, whose 1956 paper predicting the U.S. oil production peak is titled “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” was right: nuclear power will be part of our response to decreasing reserves of oil and natural gas, as necessity overrides any political opposition.
Ultimately, says Deffeyes, we may just have to resign ourselves to relying more on coal, wind, and nuclear fission for electricity and switching to high-efficiency diesel and hybrid automobiles in order to ration our remaining oil reserves for as long as possible. Abundant energy from fossil fuels was a one-time gift, Deffeyes concludes, that lifted humanity up from subsistence agriculture and has led to a future based on renewable resources.
The problem with History is that it is always written by the victors. If you examine in detail what you learned at school most of it starts to come apart very quickly indeed. I'm not denying that the holocaust happened but there are a lot of people who think that the numbers were a bit off.
A thought-provoking new anthology edited by English historian Vivian Bird casts stark new light on what really happened at Auschwitz during World War II. As the evidence shows, the official "facts" just don't add up.
In the summer of 1997 I was invited to speak at a California college seminar about my book, Final Judgment, which contends that Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, played a front-line role in the JFK assassination conspiracy alongside the CIA. Almost instantaneously I was hit by a media barrage orchestrated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a lobby for Israel.
The ADL told the press I was "a Holocaust denier" and, for that reason alone, I should not be allowed to discuss my book (which, incidentally, never once mentions the Holocaust). Evidently the ADL was determined to shift the focus away from what my book really does address, so they determined the best way to discredit me was to smear me as "a Holocaust denier" (which I am not).
The ADL's tactic succeeded, setting off a firestorm of opposition-a "holocaust," so to speak-and the seminar was canceled, illustrating one point most clearly: The Holocaust has become a powerful propaganda tool for the state of Israel.
And what is important to remember is this: What did-or did not-happen at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland is, in fact, integral to the foundation of the basic story of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz is central to the Holocaust legend. If it can be proved that the official stories we have been told about Auschwitz are not true, the entire fabric of the Holocaust ultimately has to unravel. What, then, did happen at Auschwitz?
On April 18, 1945, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, The New York Times reported that 4 million people died at Auschwitz. This "fact" was reported over and over again during the next half-century, without being questioned.
However, on January 26, 1995, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, both The Washington Post and The New York Times itself reported that the Polish authorities had determined that, at most, 1.5 million people (of all races and religions)-not "4 million"-died at Auschwitz of all causes, including natural causes.
Yet this was not the first time this drastically reduced figure appeared in the major media. Almost five years previously, on July 17, 1990, The Washington Times reprinted a brief article from The London Daily Telegraph. That article stated:
Poland has cut its estimate of the number of people killed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp from 4 million to just over 1 million . . . The new study could rekindle the controversy over the scale of Hitler's "final solution"
The squaddies involved should NOT be the ones on trial! Your basic soldier doesn't take a crap without getting an order so it is their superiors, INCLUDING TONY "The Warmonger" BLAIR, who should be on trial for putting the troops into Iraq ILLEGALLY and allowing this sort of abuse to happen in the first place by ORDERING THEM TO DO IT. These images are sick, pornographic and disturbing but they shame us all so the least we can do is look at them because this shit is being done in our names! This is not a symptom of a "few rotten apples" this is a systemic problem in a society which is corrupt, violent, heartless, cruel and rotten to the fucking core!
Image 22 of 22 Lance Corporal Cooley "simulating" a punch to
The Chain of Command
Prime Minister Tony Blair Tony Blair, who has suffered a serious backlash over taking Britain to war, yesterday condemned as "shocking and appalling" the photographs of alleged abuse by British troops.
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon Has yet to make any statement.
General Sir Mike Jackson Chief of the General Staff (head of the Army). Had overview of the Iraq military operation, but control on the ground was left to Air Marshal Burridge. General Jackson said on Tuesday he "utterly condemned" all abuse.
Air Marshal Brian Burridge UK commander in Iraq. In control of 45,000 UK forces. Based at US Central Command HQ. Ex-Nimrod pilot has since been promoted to Air Chief Marshal.
Chief of Staff Major-General Peter Wall Chief of Staff to Air Marshal Burridge, he was in charge of battle strategy in Iraq, directing operations, including those undertaken by the Fusiliers. He would not have been expected to be involved in the day to day running of units.
Major-General Robin Brims Commander of the UK Ground Forces in Iraq, consisting of 16 Air Assault Brigade, 3 Commando Brigade, and 7 Armoured Brigade. Later awarded a DSO.
16 Air Assault Brigade: 6,000-strong. Based in Colchester. Aviation and parachute capabilities.
3 Commando Brigade: 3,500-strong. Fighting force of the Royal Navy. Trained for combat in extreme conditions
7 Armoured Brigade: Desert Rats, commanded by Brigadier Graham Binns. Part of 1 UK Armoured Division, 17,000-strong in Iraq.
Lt Col David Paterson Senior officer in the 7th Armoured Brigade, in charge of the 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. Reportedly approved Major Taylor's Operation Ali Baba to tackle looters. Awarded an OBE after Iraq war.
Major Dan Taylor: Assigned to the humanitarian aid camp Camp Bread Basket near Basra. Under his command, 100 British soldiers set out to capture looters to "work them hard". Court martial heard operation apparently breached the Geneva Convention. Due to give evidence today.
Lance Cpl Darren Larkin: Aged 30 from Oldham. Admits one charge of assaulting an Iraqi civilian and denies another of forcing two Iraqi males to undress.
Lance Cpl Mark Cooley: Aged 25 from Newcastle upon Tyne. Faces two counts of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline and a further charge of disgraceful conduct.
Cpl Daniel Kenyon: Aged 33, from Newcastle upon Tyne, faces total of six charges. Among them is the charge that he allegedly forced two Iraqis to strip and simulate sex acts.
posted by ewar @ 2:43 PM
Iraq Abuse Pictures
Right click the link above and copy the location to link directly to this article.
Damn right we do! Bush is the most scary fucking human to inhabit this planet since Adolf Hitler and Joeseph Stalin! That ignorant twat calls it "a sign of hope for freedom-loving people everywhere" and shows us that he is living in La-La Land with the munchkins. It's not a sign of hope and he clearly doesn't even know what the word "freedom" means! The lies and corruption are plain for all to see and still the bastards deny it!
George Bush will be sworn in as president of the United States for a second term today in a lavish Washington ceremony, amid mounting international concern that his new administration will make the world a more dangerous place.
A poll of 21 countries published yesterday - reflecting opinion in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe - showed that a clear majority have grave fears about the next four years.
Fifty-eight per cent of the 22,000 who took part in the poll, commissioned by the BBC World Service, said they expected Mr Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, compared with only 26% who considered him a positive force.
The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general.
Tony Blair, in an interview with the Guardian, expressed hope that Mr Bush's second term would prove to be more consensual than the first.
He said there had been an evolution in US policy, witnessed by him in successive conversations with Mr Bush.
"Evolution comes from experience," he said.
Mr Blair said that, as part of a learning process that began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the US administration had reached the conclusion that "in the end, we can take security and military measures against terrorism but... the best prospect of peaceful coexistence lies in the spread of democracy and human rights".
Asked if Mr Bush had become a multilateralist, Mr Blair said he could not speak for the president but "it is significant, in my view, that he is coming to Europe as his first foreign visit".
Mr Bush is due in Europe at the end of next month.
The inauguration is taking place amid unprecedented security in Washington as luminaries from across the country converge on the capital.
Mr Bush spent the eve of the ceremony to mark the start of his second term shuttling between a series of events: from three candlelit dinners to thank his biggest campaign donors through to a "Celebration of Freedom" fireworks concert.
He described the elections in Afghanistan late last year and in Iraq planned for next week as "landmark events in the history of liberty".
Mr Bush also proclaimed his inauguration as "a sign of hope for freedom-loving people everywhere".
Spreading freedom and democracy like wild-fire through the Middle East...
"The soldiers are doing strange things in Fallujah," said one of my contacts in Fallujah who just returned. He was in his city checking on his home and just returned to Baghdad this evening.
Speaking on condition of anonymity he continued, "In the center of the Julan Quarter they are removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were. Why are they doing this?"
According to him, this was also done in the Nazal, Mualmeen, Jubail and Shuhada'a districts, and the military began to do this after Eid, which was after November 20th.
He told me he has watched the military use bulldozers to push the soil into piles and load it onto trucks to carry away. This was done in the Julan and Jimouriya quarters of the city, which is of course where the heaviest fighting occurred during the siege, as this was where resistance was the fiercest.
"At least two kilometers of soil were removed," he explained, "Exactly as they did at Baghdad Airport after the heavy battles there during the invasion and the Americans used their special weapons."
He explained that in certain areas where the military used "special munitions" 200 square meters of soil was being removed from each blast site.
In addition, many of his friends have told him that the military brought in water tanker trucks to power blast the streets, although he hadn't seen this himself.
"They went around to every house and have shot the water tanks," he continued, "As if they are trying to hide the evidence of chemical weapons in the water, but they only did this in some areas, such as Julan and in the souk (market) there as well."
He first saw this having been done after December 20th.
Again, this is reflective of stories I've been told by several refugees from Fallujah.
Just last December, a 35 year-old merchant from Fallujah, Abu Hammad, told me what he'd experienced when he was still in the city during the siege.
"The American warplanes came continuously through the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even for a moment! If the American forces did not find a target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked everyone was."
"In the mornings I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lives in it," he'd said, "Even poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah-they used everything-tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground. Nothing is left."
As America crowns her new Emperor the world watches with nervous eyes and pounding hearts. Please spare a few moments to think of all the kids getting killed in Iraq for lies, oil and the corporatekleptocracy.
Celebration of Exploitation
by Manuel Valenzuela
At the apex of the highest mountain stand the facilitators of human corruption, in proud self-adulation, glorification and ego-driven debasement readying themselves with a forty million dollar celebration of pomp and circumstance, enjoying the comforts of luxury and unfettered power spun by the web of exploitation, for victorious do they see each other, this power-addicted and profit-hungry cabal of corporatist and elitist vermin, extolling both the virtues of immorality and policies of unscrupulous undertakings that have laid waste billions of lives in the present while condemning billions that have yet to exist. For like vultures attacking a dead carcass they have descended upon Washington to further empower humankind’s enduring romance with its self-corruption and the continuing decline into our moral abyss.
Basking in the glow of power, partying to the tunes of extravagance, rubbing shoulders with their fellow immoral brethren, this minority of humanity exclusively invited to descend upon the realm of political prostitution in order to mingle, cajole, bid, wage, bribe and buy the services of the legions of whores in governance could care less about the shattered world they have both created and profited from. Dressed in the pageantry of tuxedos and designer gowns, feasting and entertained with the best money can buy, surrounded by lavish environments and barren morality, expensive taste and indigent honor, the small entity known as the Establishment continues riding the chariot of flourishing circumstances while trampling the lives of billions of humans not granted the luck of being born into privilege and fortuitous circumstances, silver-spoon fed, from the cradle to the grave destined to grip the whips of power, wealth and perpetual exploitation.
At the expense of the corporations and the royal executives they sell their souls to, these members of aristocracy will continue experiencing life without knowledge of what their actions help unleash upon the globe or without a care in the world of the effects on billions of human energies, including 290 million Americans. They are in Washington to crown the corruption of humanity, after all, in lavish celebration to the debauchery their kind have wrought to all corners of the globe, their institutions, tentacles, tools, policies, businesses, actions, laws, military might and power hijacking the world entire, corrupting the minds and bodies of American soldiers subjected to the horrors of war; corrupting the very foundations of society of one of the oldest civilizations to ever exist; corrupting and making bereft of honor, integrity and truth the media, once a shining beacon and protector of democracy, now but a blatant propaganda mechanism; corrupting, polluting and making toxic the environment we inhabit and the bodies we own through the products they manufacture and sell; corrupting and destroying billions of lives worldwide and at home for billions in profits using the centuries old exploitative tools of feudalism and slavery; and corrupting the future lives of our children through the abandonment of long-term foresight, short-term concern and historical hindsight.
Through the crowning of an emperor with no clothes, the crowning of Establishment failure and mediocrity, and the crowning of the corporatist controlled marionette smearing an entire world with the feces-stained incompetence of the elite, the Establishment can once again be seen for what it has systematically done for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization enriching and empowering itself through the exploitation and suppression of the rest of us, genetically passing down through the generations the torch of diluted blood saturated with the oils of entrenched power.
Corruption Through Control
At the expense of the masses and the common plebian, namely you, me and billions more, the elite of society, those few at the top, whether in ancient Egypt or Sumeria, imperial Greece or Rome, whether in feudal Europe or medieval Arabia, in Renaissance times or Enlightenment eras, whether in dictatorships, tyrannies, fascist regimes, communist systems, democracy charades or fictional freedoms, have maintained power through the overthrow of the will of the people, through the evisceration of the communal interests of the many as well as through the control of all aspects of governance and society.
For what is society composed of but the mechanisms of control the Establishment places at our feet, shackling our ability to rebel and revolt under the oppression and exploitation befalling our ancestors, ourselves and our descendents to come? Since humankind rose to perceived greatness castes and social classes have been in place, forever condemning untold human beings to a hierarchical system of perpetual exploitation that robs talent, ability and opportunity. From ancient times the priest classes deemed themselves conduits of the gods, proclaiming themselves direct manifestations of unseen deities, exploiting the ignorance and primitiveness of the masses who were made to cater to high priests and their families, thereby enriching, empowering and forever setting apart this group of corrupters from those now ruled and exploited. In time rose kings and royalty classes, again conniving the people into subservience by proclaiming direct relation with gods and metaphysical manifestations of fantasy, using the blood, sweat and tears of the masses for the abundant and ever-growing power and wealth destined for the ruling nobility.
Whether Caesars or emperors or pharaohs or popes or kings or nobility or generals or politicians or corporations or capitalists the exploitation by the ruling class of the masses has never stopped. It has breathed life since our beginning, living inside our society, giving rise to the vast number of inequalities, injustices and wasted lives now ruining our civilization. The control the Establishment uses is all encompassing, from the religions that inculcate in us primitive ideology no longer useful to the world of modern man, conditioning us to believe in invisible fantasy and obey the false prophets who preach them, controlling and oppressing the mind and maintaining ignorance; to the education that brainwashes, dumbs down and fosters allegiance to the ruling elite; to the social classes that segregate, alienate and exasperate; to laws that serve to benefit those in power and wealth; to the work we must perform in order to survive which robs us of energy to care or the will to fight and resist; to the television that manipulates and re-wires human brains to the dictates of government and the corporate world, creating the escapism of entertainment to divert attention away from the exploitation that is our lives; to the charade of democracy and elections that serves only to distract and divide; to the media designed to confuse, manipulate and disseminate propaganda; to the credit card, mortgage and loan whose sole purpose is to control through debt and interest payments; to social security numbers that make of you but a mere number to the government, your entire history easily traceable and apparent; to the launching of wars to create enemies, thus taking our eyes away from the real enemy; to jingoism designed to foster rabid nationalism and blind patriotism; to government itself which is a mechanism of, by and for the ruling elite; to the exploitation of fear planned so that we acquiesce to the erosion of freedoms and rights at home and the immoral wars of aggression and war crimes abroad.
Everywhere one looks control can be seen. Everywhere one stares corruption of humanity by the Establishment can be found. The pyramid of exploitation, where the elite stand alone at the top while the masses suffocate together at the bottom must be maintained, lest the elite lose power and control. Social classes are purposefully kept the way they are because from the poor and working classes the elite find their serfs, slaves and automatons. From the middle class they find their buffers and protection from the lower classes, as those in the middle, whether lower middle to upper middle, become easily controlled through the illusion of dreams and the complacency of materialism.
Capitalists need minimum wage earners from which to exploit, paying cheaply to profit mightily. They need undereducated masses to fill dead-end jobs and assembly-line chores, transforming a plethora of blue-eyed babies into blue-collar workers and brown-eyed humans into burger flipper slaves. The corporate world of today’s crony capitalism thrives on social engineering, depending on the masses for labor, production and mass consumption. The masses cannot be allowed to find liberation through education, nor free-thinking minds through enlightenment, nor be allowed to escape the caste predetermined for them, for they are needed to push the buttons and the levers of the capitalist division of labor and operate the tools and the machines of the corporation. Thus, real education, as emancipating to the mind as it is, will never reach the mass of society, for in knowledge there is power and in ignorance there is control. This is the story of organized religion throughout history, and now it is the sad chapter of modern man’s dive into the abyss called capitalism.
Feudalism revisited, or feudalism evolved?
Threats to the Establishment are never allowed to prosper lest the majority stand up and expropriate power away from those few at the top. Yet, in the end, we remain slaves and serfs, terms now marketed under different names whose exploitations are controlled under different functions. Most of us live in worlds of corporate feudalism, working for corporations, toiling endless hours and sacrificing most valuable time for the profit of those who employ us. We are given ‘wages’ that must, inevitably, be returned to the same corporate world that ‘pays’ us as we are forced to purchase the food, shelter and clothing we produce, not to mention the vast assortment of products of escapism designed to placate and control us.
The seven day week is designed to exploit as much labor from our energy as possible, granting us two days of rest and escapism before the same routine yields its debilitating momentum month after month and year after year, until finally, after years of servitude and sacrifice to those who exploit us, we awaken in old age, our energy gone and our time spent, becoming raisins in the sun asking ourselves where a life worth living has disappeared to. The seven day week is a mechanism of control, a tool of elitist exploitation of the masses, one we never seek to question, or alter. Instead, we are conditioned to its acceptance seemingly from birth, taught to blindly follow five days of labor in exchange for two of rest, never asking ourselves why in times of over-abundance and over consumption so much of our lives is devoted sacrificing to our employers when life is too short to not enjoy and experience.
The genius is in the illusion that we own and have control over our lives, in the cascade of charades, mirages and fictions we adamantly believe in and seldom question. Yet we live in homes and property that are overpriced, forced to pay mortgages and interest to the corporate world that until the end retains control over them. We must buy the products the corporate world decides to sell us, needing their stores and goods for our nutrition, wants and needs. Through the television the corporate world tells us what to think, how to think, how to behave, interact and communicate. It conditions us to consume its products and services, creating fantasy in order to manipulate the still primitive human brain. It creates trends, dictates changes, force-feeds styles, manufactures fragile psychologies and concocts peer-pressures so that we never stop consuming in our quest to attain the fantasy we are bombarded with yet can never attain. In the end, our feudal lords give us labor, food, shelter, protection and security, all in exchange for our freedom, our valuable time left living and our ever-dwindling reserves of energy. Feudalism revisited, or feudalism evolved?
Our feudal lords, through years of methodical conditioning, establish in us and throughout society a dependency on them for survival. We cannot escape their grip, as we are forever indebted to them and addicted to what our labor helps produce. Molded into obedience and subservience, acquiescence and conformity, from cradle to grave becoming robotic producers and mass consumers, our energies methodically engineered like slaves of the past, our minds transformed to those of the automatons of the future, we cling to our feudal masters like babies to their mother’s breasts as society has been created with all the mechanisms needed for the Establishment to continue exploiting the mass of humanity.
Billions of us live in a Matrix-type fantasy; to the elite we are nothing more than an Energizer battery harvested to produce and consume, voraciously exploited for our energy and easily controlled animal passions, behaviors and instincts. The society we believe in and help protect is nothing more than one vast control mechanism, designed for exploitation, manipulation and the further corruption of humankind. It is created to maintain the status quo, where few bask in wealth and power while the many linger in virtual serfdom.
In this world the fantasy we have since birth been made to believe in hides an ominous reality we are afraid to confront. It is a world where those born in privilege prosper while the many at the bottom linger in perpetual limbo, forced to live life in a man-made purgatory full of exploitation, subjugation and oppression that is as old as civilization itself. In every era, in every corner of the globe this hierarchical scheme has ruined more human life than any war or disease, robbing individuals of talent, ability, opportunity and a chance to push themselves out of the caste the system systematically places them in since birth, unable to escape their inherited bondage, unable to enjoy the pleasures of the life of members of the Establishment and unable to experience life beyond the day to day subsistence that marks their existence on Earth.
Humanity is the story of man exploiting man, always to the benefit of established power, never in communal brotherhood, forever creating wickedness upon each other so that one segment of humankind prospers while another suffers. In this corruption can we see the root of all human wrong, ruining lives and rotting experiences, those in power abusing their perched positions of control to enrich and aggrandize themselves and their bloodlines while emaciating the rest of their fellow man. As long as the many continue falling for the magic tricks of the few, as long as we blindly follow and never question, as long as we remain complacent, placid and sedentary, the fraternity that is humankind will never experience greatness.
Every war, every genocide, every form of ethnic cleansing, every forest decimated and ocean devastated, every family living in indigence and child dying of malnutrition, every plague extinguishing life and pollution causing disease, every act of injustice and every case of inequality has as its root cause the debilitating ailment called corruption. From the beginning it has ruled humanity. Indeed, it is humanity, ingrained in our animal selves, born of greed, selfishness and the worst in the human condition, unable to be purged from our psyche. It is humans breathing the addictive qualities of power and wealth that become corrupted, like a virus contaminating all that they touch, see and hear. From corruption of power rises corruption of humanity. This reality is being celebrated and crowned this week in Washington.
Corruption of Social Engineering
It is from the ghettos and rural areas, comprised of mostly poor and working families, that the Establishment finds the cannon fodder needed to wage war. It is these sons and daughters of misfortune, trapped in urban reservations or rural wastelands, hindered by wretched educational institutions and severe shortages of work and opportunity that are forced by social engineering to become the killing machines pushing the triggers, buttons and levers of the instruments of death so profitable to the military industrial complex. It is these young men and women whose anemic opportunity in life, thanks to decrepit environments and government abandonment, makes them the marching army of the corporate world, sacrificing the rest of their lives, forever living haunted by demons and/or the maimed horrors of man fighting man, for nothing more than profits, revenues, power and the ego of the Establishment. Through training innocent and moral boys and girls are transformed into cold-blooded killers and destroyers of life, obeying the dictates of greed addicts and warmongers.
Yet the soldiers now in Iraq and Afghanistan -- whom Bush ironically praises while helping to seal their fates – fighting men and women of similar circumstances and situation, also exploited and from birth condemned, are but the latest in a long line of humans fighting the wars of the elite. From the beginning of time, in societies ruled by divisions, classes and castes, where there are segregations of poor and rich, it has always been the poor, those without power and control, who are the ones sacrificing life, mind and limb, not to mention wages, taxes, blood, sweat and tears, for the warmongering aspirations of the Establishment. It is usually the working and middle classes that must bear the sacrifice of the war effort, while the rich are content to live in their infallible bubble of supremacy, their lives neither altered nor molested by the realities and horrors befalling those at war and those faced with the necessity of burying their loved ones.
As has always been the case, the elite can circumvent having to serve in war, for many years able to bypass duties reserved for all others thanks to influence, power, connections and wealth, while the poor and middle class must be sacrificed, either through social engineering or conscription, because they lack the parameters that wealth and power spring forth. Through time and regardless of society or race or region, when divisions in socioeconomic status penetrate the core of human interaction, it is the children of wealth who escape the wickedness created by their fathers, whose actions condemn those born in the lower echelons of a caste system. Whether slave or serf or soldier, regardless of time or place, the corruption of humanity assures the lower classes will continue fighting for the so-called honor, the mistakes, the greed, the incompetence, the malice, the warmongering aspirations and the sought-after land, labor and resources of another. This has never ceased to be the case, and will most likely continue deep into the remaining years of humanity.
The story of war is the story of one side’s poor fighting another side’s poor, for the benefit of the Establishment and the detriment of those mothers and fathers who must do what no parent should have to do, bury their son or daughter. The exploitation of the masses functions thanks to the corruption of society, imposed by the implementation of control mechanisms designed to rob the people of power, knowledge, and of the will to fight a system which only acts to betray illusions and charades. Telling the troops they fight for freedom and democracy and against tyranny while providing nothing but pillaged profits to the corporate world and human hell to Iraqis is one such illusion told by the elite to their army of killing machines.
While 150,000 under funded, unarmored and undersupplied American troops do battle with an entire nation of 25 million Iraqis, for no other reason than to further expand the pockets of the Establishment and the power of the corporatist elite, the distinguished ladies and gentlemen attending the coronation of corruption, adorned with the fruits of our labor, our blood, sweat and tears, will wine and dine until the early hours of the morning, laughing, joking, conversing, living in their sheltered bubble of endowed wealth and inherited position, in one night wasting forty million dollars, enough money to save the lives of countless soldiers in need of armor and innocent Iraqi civilians in need of humanity. Is there any doubt ghetto soldiers born in concrete jungles and rural grunts living in isolated abandon are simply considered expendable cannon fodder doing the slave work of the elite when those that send them to war, based on lies, deceits and under false pretenses, celebrate fraudulent election triumphs and the pleasures endowed to privilege, at a cost of $40,000,000, while dozens of troops are killed and hundreds maimed for life on a weekly basis in Iraq?
While the elite celebrate the coronation of the corruption they have unleashed upon the world the corruption of soldier and Iraqi minds continues to claim the futures of tens of thousands of once vibrant energies. For many of those who must bear witness to the wickedness ingrained in human war, the psychological trauma and maimed minds they will forever have to live with will be a sad reminder of Establishment exploitation of their futures. Most of those affected will never be the same, devastated in mind and spirit thanks to what they did, saw and experienced acting on behalf of those profiteers and greed mongers presently celebrating the coronation of corruption. Their futures will be lived in nightmares and stresses, in psychological horror and altered existence. Many will never be able to exorcise the inner demons tearing them apart, creating years of turmoil and shattered lives. The ghosts of those they killed and maimed, those they dehumanized and destroyed will haunt them until their dying days. Images of blood spattered, torsos maimed and appendages blown off will linger, as well as the visions of death and the smells of rotting corpses. The catastrophe they have unleashed, on orders from those at the top, will remain in their minds long after they return home. Normalcy will never again be achievable. Divorces will ensue, health costs will accumulate, grief and anger will fuse together, life will lose meaning, jobs will be lost, many will find themselves homeless, begging for food and shelter, abandoned by the same government and elites that sent them to sacrifice body and mind for the fortunes of a small minority.
In Iraq the age-old battles pitting one nation’s poor against another nation’s poor for the benefit of the few elite at the top is being played out, with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dying for an immoral and unjust war of choice, based on lies and deceptions, designed for corporate profit and pillage, sacrificing those of the lower American castes as easily expendable cannon fodder and as armed slaves furthering the profits, lands, and power of those celebrating the coronation of corruption. Yet those celebrating the crowning of corporatism care not an ounce for the death and destruction they have wrought. Possessing no empathy or understanding, no remorse or guilt, onwards they continue in their exploitative ways, robbing the nation blind, both of its treasure and loved ones, and laying siege to an entire Iraqi society whose only crime was living in lands saturated with the devil’s excrement and deemed vital to the imperial aspirations of warmongers, greed addicts and power hungry deviants.
Into the Nest of Corruption
Remember, celebrating the coronation of corruption are members of the military-industrial complex, the oil oligarchy, the ruling elite, the corporate Leviathan and the political class. Chief Executive Officers and executives of Fortune 500 companies, Establishment patriarchs and their loving juniors believing themselves nobility by blood if not by high crimes and misdemeanors, greedy bankers and immoral corporatists always seeking more, energy magnates controlling the strings of the Puppet in Chief, media moguls and their army of journalist minions, those Likud-loving, Israel-first neocons, prostitute politicians and their lackey yes men and women, legions of defense contractors and corporate lobbyists trained in the fine art of buying politicians and writing laws, former military brass exchanging the uniform for an Armani, and the unmistakable lovers of revolving doors who always place the interests of their employers before those of the nation can be found cruising Washington in stretched limos and walking on red carpets.
Without corruption of humanity, this distinguished group has no serfs, no slaves and no control. It has no power, no profit, and no wealth. It has no war, no conquest and no soldiers or army to kill, destroy and devastate. It has no feudal domination of land and man, no control over daily lives. Without the degradation of millions in the United States and billions worldwide, the elite cannot maintain an imbalance that has existed for thousands of years, where the few at the top live lavishly through the fruits of our sweat and the exigencies of our toil while the rest subsist on the measly crumbs that like emaciated dogs we oftentimes find ourselves fighting over.
With the bubble of luxury do they surround themselves in, unable to see the reality of the world they possess. Never will they know what it is like to live in a shantytown, ghetto, reservation or a cardboard box. They can never understand what their policies and laws help to unleash onto society, making impossible the lives of millions and forever condemning billions to lives living in utter decay, unable to escape the living purgatory the Establishment creates. To them, billions of humans subsisting on two dollars a day, with 700 million children surviving on one dollar per day are made to disappear along with their humanity and concern for their fellow man. Millions dying each year of malaria or tuberculosis or typhoid or dysentery or other easily treatable diseases are but a statistic, a number without a face, an inconsequential asterisk added to mortality figures caused by structural adjustment programs or overburdened third world debt or by the mismanagement of American sponsored leaders.
To the Establishment now celebrating the coronation of corruption, the plight of black Africa, dying and destabilizing thanks to tens of millions of deaths due to AIDS, its societies in disarray and in extreme poverty, and the devastation in Asia wrought by the cataclysmic tsunami is of no more importance than the annoying buzzing of a fly. When the profit motive is placed way ahead of the people motive, long-suffering continents can seem as far away as to make them invisible. Donating a few hundred million in Africa to fight AIDS, knowing this will accomplish little, and a few hundred million in Asia to quiet worldwide criticism of selfishness, knowing so much more is needed to make a difference is of little consequence to those whose only motive is the profit one.
However, when it comes to the annual military budget, now $450,000,000,000 strong, and growing, and the additional $200,000,000,000 now wasted for the needless war in Iraq, those celebrating the coronation of corruption waste no time using all tools at their disposal at promoting the cause of war and the instruments of death whose profits line the bank accounts of the ruling members of the military-industrial complex. Not to be outdone, the American oil/energy oligarchy, blinded by the huge pillage expected in the selling off of Iraqi oil fields, cares nothing for over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians whose lives are now extinct, their lands confiscated and corporatized to the friends, families and connections of the administration.
Through lies, manipulations and deceits, through the continued dumbing down of America and through the conditioning power of the television the Establishment bombards the public with information that serves only the best interests of the elite, manipulating and distorting news and facts, disseminating propaganda that is believed and absorbed. Through the power to shape society and the people it dominates and controls, the elite now celebrating the coronation of corruption dictate what was, what is and what will become, distorting history and creating the present in order to manipulate the future. This is the recipe for success used by the Establishment for centuries, using their barriers, their buffers, their tools of propaganda, their mechanisms of control spread throughout society, their conditioning of minds and domination of lives to calibrate in the masses a symphony of support and acquiescence for their vested and newfound interests. This is the way it has always been done, and the way it will continue. It is ingrained in the human condition, never stopped, never questioned and never fought.
The coronation of corruption shows us how a few at the top can control the vast majority of the people. It shows us that the same patterns emerge throughout history, without fail, thus allowing us to peer into the future. Warlike leaders create warlike people, immoral, arrogant and selfish elites create the same vices in the citizens they control. Their ideologies become our realities; their fictions become our truths. All they have to do to push society in a certain direction is use the tools at their disposal, orchestrating social and mental engineering by conducting various apparatuses at once, thereby shaping views and beliefs from a multitude of platforms. For example, if the people begin questioning the system that exploits them, overcoming purposely placed barriers and divisions, becoming blind and deaf to propaganda, becoming riled and questioning, new Pearl Harbors can always be concocted, new wars of aggression conjured up and new enemies created to distract us away from the real war taking place against us by the real enemy of the people. We are easily toyed with, for society is a matrix geniusly run by the Establishment, full of fantasy and brainwashing and mental conditioning to the dictates of those in power.
At the zenith of the highest mountain do those celebrating the coronation of corruption stand, basking in self adulation, mesmerized by their omnipotence, perched above the clouds circling the vast heavens, yet blind do they remain to the plight of the common man, unable to see below through the cloudy haze of arrogance and ego-driven self-importance. In reality, they do not care for their subjects, for we are self-reproducing entities whose lives are easily replaceable by our own progeny. The assembly line called human procreation assures those celebrating the coronation of corruption of unlimited slaves, soldiers, producers and consumers ready, willing and able to bow down in servitude to the powers that be. The magic wand of the elite has worked for thousands of years, using time tested methods to control, exploit, dominate and subjugate the majority, as always protecting its interests while quashing those of the masses.
No ideology or belief can be allowed to be birthed that may threaten the system now in place. No idea or rebellion or revolt that may change the balance of power will be tolerated, even if it may give rise to the salvation of humanity and the planet. The communal interests of the masses be damned, it is the power of the elite that must be retained, oftentimes using the citizenry itself to achieve these purposes. While the majority succumbs to the growing threats of perpetual war, biological plague, dwindling resources, overpopulation and global warming, it is the elite that prosper and remain protected. In order to achieve long sought goals, we have become, to those holding the reigns of power, quite literally, easily expendable entities. Whether the interests sought cost 3,000 lives, or 100,000 dead or 5,000 soldiers killed or one million lives extinguished, to the elite, the bottom line of profit and power over people rules and, in cost benefit analysis, we have become the means to an end.
Today, into the nest of corruption can the rest of humanity see into, watching as $40,000,000 is wasted to celebrate the triumphant victory over the American people. The coronation of corruption is upon us, full of splendor and arrogance and apathy. When nothing has changed for centuries, even millennia, when the elite possess the confidence that they will continue to rule today and into the future while we continue to drool in kneeling subservience, who can blame them for partying in resplendent accomplishment? To them the system works like magic, and if the best we can do is a few hundred full moon risings directed at their Puppet in Chief, then perhaps we deserve what our ancestors and ourselves are subjected to and our future generations will undoubtedly experience.
To do nothing is to live in denial and accept the lie of our existence. To sit in silent complacency is to welcome the domination over our lives. The failure to act is an act in failure, and a warm embrace to an unmitigated corruption befalling humankind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. Valenzuela’s new novel is now on sale through Authorhouse.com at Echoes in the Wind Sales Page. A philosophical, educational and spiritual story on humanity and our civilization, as relevant as today’s headlines, this book is almost 600 pages in trade paperback form on sale internationally through secure web page transaction. Additionally, the novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, as well as other online book sellers. If preferred, the novel can also be ordered at any local brick and mortar bookstore worldwide through the book’s ISBN number, 1418489905.
Before you do anything else, BUY CROSSING THE RUBICON NOW!!!!! Mike Ruppert has done an utterly brilliant job, I'm on the last chapter and it's one of the best books on the subject that I have ever read. GO AND BUY IT NOW!
Here we have the real power behind the throne, one hardly ever hears about Cheney which to my mind says he's the one really running the show. The Big Boys are all like vampires, the bright sunshine of the public's gaze makes them recoil in terror and retreat to the underground "undisclosed location", is it undisclosed because it's really a coffin? I'll let you make your mind up about that but make no mistake about this, when you look into the face of Dick Cheney you are staring into eyes of evil.
by Michael Kane
In an argument of over 600 pages and 1,000 footnotes, Crossing the Rubicon makes the case for official complicity within the U.S. government and names Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the crimes of 9/11. Since the publication of this book (to which I had the privilege of contributing a chapter), many people have asked to hear the case against Cheney argued "short & sweet."
I will make it as short as possible, but it can never be sweet. There are 3 major points made within this book that are crucial to proving Cheney's guilt. I shall first list them and then go on to prove each point as laid out in Crossing the Rubicon.
1. Means - Dick Cheney and the Secret Service: Dick Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11. (Click here for a summary of these points)
2. Motive - Peak Oil: At some point between 2000 and 2007, world oil production reaches its peak; from that point on, every barrel of oil is going to be harder to find, more expensive to recover, and more valuable to those who recover and control it. Dick Cheney was well aware of the coming Peak Oil crisis at least as early as 1999, and 9/11 provided the pretext for the series of energy wars that Cheney stated, "will not end in our lifetime." (Click here for a summary of these points)
3. Opportunity - 9/11 War Games: The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one "live-fly" exercise as well as simulations that placed "false blips" on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney's management. (Click here for a summary of these points)
Here is the supporting documentation as laid out in Crossing the Rubicon, making a legal case against Dick Cheney for the crimes of 9/11.
"We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes..."
This is just great, the most powerful man in the world is a mental patient! We've covered Dubya's mental state on codshit before and it fits perfectly, the man is a puppet. If he is REALLY running the US then I am a monkey's grandfather! Based on his previous record in business it's clear that not only can he not string two intelligent words together, he couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery! What we in the world want to see is a Second American Revolution where the good, honest, decent, kind, compassionate, caring people who make up 95% of the US population rise up and overthrow the 5% of scumfucks that have seized control of that great country.
Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a "paranoid meglomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose "lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad" showcase Bush's instabilities.
President George W. Bush is taking anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President's mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
"It's a double-edged sword," says one aide. "We can't have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally."
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
"Keep those motherfuckers away from me," he screamed at an aide backstage. "If you can't, I'll find someone who can."
Bush's mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President's wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.
Today's lesson is in WAR CRIMES, you know like the ones we are perpetrating in Iraq? Like the ones that our squaddies and the yanks have been hauled up for? Like the ones described below? Of course it's always the ones at the bottom of the chain taking the orders that get the blame while the suits who started it all get off without so much as a slapped wrist.
The U.S. military is resorting to collective punishment tactics in Iraq similar to those used by Israeli troops in the occupied territories of Palestine, residents say.
Military bulldozers have mown down palm groves in the rural al-Dora farming area on the outskirts of Baghdad, residents say. Electricity has been cut, the local fuel station destroyed and the access road blocked.
The U.S. action comes after resistance fighters attacked soldiers from this area several weeks back.
"The Americans were attacked from this field, then they returned and started cutting down all the trees," says Kareem, a local mechanic, pointing to a pile of burnt date palms in a bulldozed field. "None of us knows any fighters, we all know they are coming here from other areas to attack the Americans, but we are the people who suffer from this."
The military action follows a similar round of attacks and retaliation earlier this month.
U.S. Army Brigadier-General Mark Kimmit told reporters then that the military had launched 'Operation Iron Grip' in the area to send "a very clear message to anybody who thinks that they can run around Baghdad without worrying about the consequences of firing RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), firing mortars."
Gen. Kimmit said "there is a capability in the air that can quickly respond against anybody who would want to harm Iraqi citizens or coalition forces." Then as now, local people denied any knowledge of harbouring resistance fighters.
And now, as then, they say they have to pay the price.
"They destroyed our fences, and now there are wolves attacking our animals," said Mohammed, a schoolboy. "They destroyed much of our farming equipment, and the worst is they cut our electricity. They come by here every night and fire their weapons to frighten us."
People need electricity to run pumps to irrigate the farms, he said. "Now we are carrying water in buckets from the river, and this is very difficult for us," Mohammed said. "They say they are going to make things better for us, but they are worse."
Going into fields littered with unexploded mortar shells after the U.S. retaliation has become hazardous now. "We asked them the first time and they said okay, we'll come take care of it," said a farmer who called himself Sharkr. "But they never came."
Other residents say soldiers beat them up during random home raids. "I was beaten by the Americans," said Ihsan, a 17 year-old secondary school student. "They asked me who attacked them, but I do not know. My home was raided, our furniture destroyed, and one of my uncles was arrested."
This article is superb, I agree with this one completely. We need more people to open their eyes and see what's going on!
by David MacGregor
Right in the middle of the great Tsunami disaster, another disaster hits the global headlines: Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi, and wearing a swastika arm band!
The world is aghast. The world is outraged. The world is full of shite.
The reason for the outrage, so we are told, is that Prince Harry has offended millions of people by thoughtlessly wearing the hated symbol of Nazism--that unique German manifestation of fascism and National Socialism. More particularly, he has offended world Jewry.
How can anyone be offended by a symbol--unless they are truly offended by what it represents? And what does the swastika represent? It is the symbol of tyrannical state power. The symbol of racial supremacy and racial persecution. The symbol of nationalism gone mad. The symbol of the corporate state. The symbol of aggressive war and foreign occupation. The symbol of mindless collectivism and statism. The symbol (to borrow a phrase from Orwell's 1984) of a boot stamping on the human face--forever.
Ultimately, it all boils down to one single word--fascism. And just in case you're not clear on the definition of fascism--it means the corporate state--the merging of state and corporate power. It means the nationalisation of property by alternative means--not by seizing it off individuals, but by controlling it. It means the merging of the *I* into the *We*.
The Nazis had it right when they labeled their brand of fascism as National Socialism. For that's what it is--socialism wrapped in nationalism. The final end point of a thoroughly evil philosophy.
My question is: How can a world bloated by fascist sympathies and inclinations be offended by seeing the symbol of its own basic political thinking? How can anyone who supports the philosophic premises of fascism be outraged by the globally-recognised symbol of it? Only if they are hypocrites or plainly ignorant.
And a second related question: Why do we remember, every year, the sacrifice of millions of young soldiers in WWII--in the cause of defending freedom against fascism--while we idly sit by and watch that freedom trashed day in and day out? We're being drowned by the very ideas WWII was supposed to have defeated.
Yes, I'm offended by the symbol of Nazism--because I understand what it really means. But for most people, it's a knee-jerk reaction fuelled by a stupid and anti-mind media--backed by the thoroughly fascistic state.
Am I offended by Prince Harry wearing a swastika at a fancy dress party? Not one bit. I'm offended by the fact we're living in an increasingly fascist world--and that barely anyone notices. I'm offended by the people who ARE fascists--not those who dress up as them. That's the real outrage--offence at the image, not the reality.
If I thought people's hysterical objections to this event were in any way a serious upsurge of antifascism, then I'd be cheering. But it isn't. Fascism is the order of the day. Fascism is the rising tide of modern political thought. Fascism is the new pop-philosophy.
You don't believe me? Well, consider this:
Under communism, your property is confiscated outright. Under fascism, you retain nominal ownership--but not control.
Want to allow smokers into your restaurant? Bad luck, you don't have control over your property. Want to drive without wearing a seat belt? Tough. How you use your body and your car is not for you to decide. Want to cut that tree in your back garden? Think again, it's not you who can make such decisions about your own property. Want to open a business in your basement? Not likely. Want to keep all the money you earn by your own hard work? Silly boy!
George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)
The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.”
The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.
A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.”
One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”
A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?”
The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.”
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
If the actions—rather than the words—of the oil business’s major players provide the best gauge of how they see the future, then ponder the following. Crude oil prices have doubled since 2001, but oil companies have increased their budgets for exploring new oil fields by only a small fraction. Likewise, U.S. refineries are working close to capacity, yet no new refinery has been constructed since 1976. And oil tankers are fully booked, but outdated ships are being decommissioned faster than new ones are being built.
A thought-provoking new anthology edited by English historian Vivian Bird casts stark new light on what really happened at Auschwitz during World War II. As the evidence shows, the official "facts" just don't add up.
George Bush will be sworn in as president of the United States for a second term today in a lavish Washington ceremony, amid mounting international concern that his new administration will make the world a more dangerous place.
"The soldiers are doing strange things in Fallujah," said one of my contacts in Fallujah who just returned. He was in his city checking on his home and just returned to Baghdad this evening.
As America crowns her new Emperor the world watches with nervous eyes and pounding hearts. Please spare a few moments to think of all the kids getting killed in Iraq for lies, oil and the corporatekleptocracy.
Basking in the glow of power, partying to the tunes of extravagance, rubbing shoulders with their fellow immoral brethren, this minority of humanity exclusively invited to descend upon the realm of political prostitution in order to mingle, cajole, bid, wage, bribe and buy the services of the legions of whores in governance could care less about the shattered world they have both created and profited from. Dressed in the pageantry of tuxedos and designer gowns, feasting and entertained with the best money can buy, surrounded by lavish environments and barren morality, expensive taste and indigent honor, the small entity known as the Establishment continues riding the chariot of flourishing circumstances while trampling the lives of billions of humans not granted the luck of being born into privilege and fortuitous circumstances, silver-spoon fed, from the cradle to the grave destined to grip the whips of power, wealth and perpetual exploitation. 
Through the crowning of an emperor with no clothes, the crowning of Establishment failure and mediocrity, and the crowning of the corporatist controlled marionette smearing an entire world with the feces-stained incompetence of the elite, the Establishment can once again be seen for what it has systematically done for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization enriching and empowering itself through the exploitation and suppression of the rest of us, genetically passing down through the generations the torch of diluted blood saturated with the oils of entrenched power. 
At the expense of the masses and the common plebian, namely you, me and billions more, the elite of society, those few at the top, whether in ancient Egypt or Sumeria, imperial Greece or Rome, whether in feudal Europe or medieval Arabia, in Renaissance times or Enlightenment eras, whether in dictatorships, tyrannies, fascist regimes, communist systems, democracy charades or fictional freedoms, have maintained power through the overthrow of the will of the people, through the evisceration of the communal interests of the many as well as through the control of all aspects of governance and society. 
For what is society composed of but the mechanisms of control the Establishment places at our feet, shackling our ability to rebel and revolt under the oppression and exploitation befalling our ancestors, ourselves and our descendents to come? Since humankind rose to perceived greatness castes and social classes have been in place, forever condemning untold human beings to a hierarchical system of perpetual exploitation that robs talent, ability and opportunity. From ancient times the priest classes deemed themselves conduits of the gods, proclaiming themselves direct manifestations of unseen deities, exploiting the ignorance and primitiveness of the masses who were made to cater to high priests and their families, thereby enriching, empowering and forever setting apart this group of corrupters from those now ruled and exploited. In time rose kings and royalty classes, again conniving the people into subservience by proclaiming direct relation with gods and metaphysical manifestations of fantasy, using the blood, sweat and tears of the masses for the abundant and ever-growing power and wealth destined for the ruling nobility. 
Whether Caesars or emperors or pharaohs or popes or kings or nobility or generals or politicians or corporations or capitalists the exploitation by the ruling class of the masses has never stopped. It has breathed life since our beginning, living inside our society, giving rise to the vast number of inequalities, injustices and wasted lives now ruining our civilization. The control the Establishment uses is all encompassing, from the religions that inculcate in us primitive ideology no longer useful to the world of modern man, conditioning us to believe in invisible fantasy and obey the false prophets who preach them, controlling and oppressing the mind and maintaining ignorance; to the education that brainwashes, dumbs down and fosters allegiance to the ruling elite; to the social classes that segregate, alienate and exasperate; to laws that serve to benefit those in power and wealth; to the work we must perform in order to survive which robs us of energy to care or the will to fight and resist; to the television that manipulates and re-wires human brains to the dictates of government and the corporate world, creating the escapism of entertainment to divert attention away from the exploitation that is our lives; to the charade of democracy and elections that serves only to distract and divide; to the media designed to confuse, manipulate and disseminate propaganda; to the credit card, mortgage and loan whose sole purpose is to control through debt and interest payments; to social security numbers that make of you but a mere number to the government, your entire history easily traceable and apparent; to the launching of wars to create enemies, thus taking our eyes away from the real enemy; to jingoism designed to foster rabid nationalism and blind patriotism; to government itself which is a mechanism of, by and for the ruling elite; to the exploitation of fear planned so that we acquiesce to the erosion of freedoms and rights at home and the immoral wars of aggression and war crimes abroad. 
Everywhere one looks control can be seen. Everywhere one stares corruption of humanity by the Establishment can be found. The pyramid of exploitation, where the elite stand alone at the top while the masses suffocate together at the bottom must be maintained, lest the elite lose power and control. Social classes are purposefully kept the way they are because from the poor and working classes the elite find their serfs, slaves and automatons. From the middle class they find their buffers and protection from the lower classes, as those in the middle, whether lower middle to upper middle, become easily controlled through the illusion of dreams and the complacency of materialism. 
Capitalists need minimum wage earners from which to exploit, paying cheaply to profit mightily. They need undereducated masses to fill dead-end jobs and assembly-line chores, transforming a plethora of blue-eyed babies into blue-collar workers and brown-eyed humans into burger flipper slaves. The corporate world of today’s crony capitalism thrives on social engineering, depending on the masses for labor, production and mass consumption. The masses cannot be allowed to find liberation through education, nor free-thinking minds through enlightenment, nor be allowed to escape the caste predetermined for them, for they are needed to push the buttons and the levers of the capitalist division of labor and operate the tools and the machines of the corporation. Thus, real education, as emancipating to the mind as it is, will never reach the mass of society, for in knowledge there is power and in ignorance there is control. This is the story of organized religion throughout history, and now it is the sad chapter of modern man’s dive into the abyss called capitalism. 
Threats to the Establishment are never allowed to prosper lest the majority stand up and expropriate power away from those few at the top. Yet, in the end, we remain slaves and serfs, terms now marketed under different names whose exploitations are controlled under different functions. Most of us live in worlds of corporate feudalism, working for corporations, toiling endless hours and sacrificing most valuable time for the profit of those who employ us. We are given ‘wages’ that must, inevitably, be returned to the same corporate world that ‘pays’ us as we are forced to purchase the food, shelter and clothing we produce, not to mention the vast assortment of products of escapism designed to placate and control us. 
The seven day week is designed to exploit as much labor from our energy as possible, granting us two days of rest and escapism before the same routine yields its debilitating momentum month after month and year after year, until finally, after years of servitude and sacrifice to those who exploit us, we awaken in old age, our energy gone and our time spent, becoming raisins in the sun asking ourselves where a life worth living has disappeared to. The seven day week is a mechanism of control, a tool of elitist exploitation of the masses, one we never seek to question, or alter. Instead, we are conditioned to its acceptance seemingly from birth, taught to blindly follow five days of labor in exchange for two of rest, never asking ourselves why in times of over-abundance and over consumption so much of our lives is devoted sacrificing to our employers when life is too short to not enjoy and experience.
The genius is in the illusion that we own and have control over our lives, in the cascade of charades, mirages and fictions we adamantly believe in and seldom question. Yet we live in homes and property that are overpriced, forced to pay mortgages and interest to the corporate world that until the end retains control over them. We must buy the products the corporate world decides to sell us, needing their stores and goods for our nutrition, wants and needs. Through the television the corporate world tells us what to think, how to think, how to behave, interact and communicate. It conditions us to consume its products and services, creating fantasy in order to manipulate the still primitive human brain. It creates trends, dictates changes, force-feeds styles, manufactures fragile psychologies and concocts peer-pressures so that we never stop consuming in our quest to attain the fantasy we are bombarded with yet can never attain. In the end, our feudal lords give us labor, food, shelter, protection and security, all in exchange for our freedom, our valuable time left living and our ever-dwindling reserves of energy. Feudalism revisited, or feudalism evolved?
Our feudal lords, through years of methodical conditioning, establish in us and throughout society a dependency on them for survival. We cannot escape their grip, as we are forever indebted to them and addicted to what our labor helps produce. Molded into obedience and subservience, acquiescence and conformity, from cradle to grave becoming robotic producers and mass consumers, our energies methodically engineered like slaves of the past, our minds transformed to those of the automatons of the future, we cling to our feudal masters like babies to their mother’s breasts as society has been created with all the mechanisms needed for the Establishment to continue exploiting the mass of humanity. 
Billions of us live in a Matrix-type fantasy; to the elite we are nothing more than an Energizer battery harvested to produce and consume, voraciously exploited for our energy and easily controlled animal passions, behaviors and instincts. The society we believe in and help protect is nothing more than one vast control mechanism, designed for exploitation, manipulation and the further corruption of humankind. It is created to maintain the status quo, where few bask in wealth and power while the many linger in virtual serfdom. 
In this world the fantasy we have since birth been made to believe in hides an ominous reality we are afraid to confront. It is a world where those born in privilege prosper while the many at the bottom linger in perpetual limbo, forced to live life in a man-made purgatory full of exploitation, subjugation and oppression that is as old as civilization itself. In every era, in every corner of the globe this hierarchical scheme has ruined more human life than any war or disease, robbing individuals of talent, ability, opportunity and a chance to push themselves out of the caste the system systematically places them in since birth, unable to escape their inherited bondage, unable to enjoy the pleasures of the life of members of the Establishment and unable to experience life beyond the day to day subsistence that marks their existence on Earth. 
Humanity is the story of man exploiting man, always to the benefit of established power, never in communal brotherhood, forever creating wickedness upon each other so that one segment of humankind prospers while another suffers. In this corruption can we see the root of all human wrong, ruining lives and rotting experiences, those in power abusing their perched positions of control to enrich and aggrandize themselves and their bloodlines while emaciating the rest of their fellow man. As long as the many continue falling for the magic tricks of the few, as long as we blindly follow and never question, as long as we remain complacent, placid and sedentary, the fraternity that is humankind will never experience greatness. 
It is from the ghettos and rural areas, comprised of mostly poor and working families, that the Establishment finds the cannon fodder needed to wage war. It is these sons and daughters of misfortune, trapped in urban reservations or rural wastelands, hindered by wretched educational institutions and severe shortages of work and opportunity that are forced by social engineering to become the killing machines pushing the triggers, buttons and levers of the instruments of death so profitable to the military industrial complex. It is these young men and women whose anemic opportunity in life, thanks to decrepit environments and government abandonment, makes them the marching army of the corporate world, sacrificing the rest of their lives, forever living haunted by demons and/or the maimed horrors of man fighting man, for nothing more than profits, revenues, power and the ego of the Establishment. Through training innocent and moral boys and girls are transformed into cold-blooded killers and destroyers of life, obeying the dictates of greed addicts and warmongers. 
Yet the soldiers now in Iraq and Afghanistan -- whom Bush ironically praises while helping to seal their fates – fighting men and women of similar circumstances and situation, also exploited and from birth condemned, are but the latest in a long line of humans fighting the wars of the elite. From the beginning of time, in societies ruled by divisions, classes and castes, where there are segregations of poor and rich, it has always been the poor, those without power and control, who are the ones sacrificing life, mind and limb, not to mention wages, taxes, blood, sweat and tears, for the warmongering aspirations of the Establishment. It is usually the working and middle classes that must bear the sacrifice of the war effort, while the rich are content to live in their infallible bubble of supremacy, their lives neither altered nor molested by the realities and horrors befalling those at war and those faced with the necessity of burying their loved ones. 
As has always been the case, the elite can circumvent having to serve in war, for many years able to bypass duties reserved for all others thanks to influence, power, connections and wealth, while the poor and middle class must be sacrificed, either through social engineering or conscription, because they lack the parameters that wealth and power spring forth. Through time and regardless of society or race or region, when divisions in socioeconomic status penetrate the core of human interaction, it is the children of wealth who escape the wickedness created by their fathers, whose actions condemn those born in the lower echelons of a caste system. Whether slave or serf or soldier, regardless of time or place, the corruption of humanity assures the lower classes will continue fighting for the so-called honor, the mistakes, the greed, the incompetence, the malice, the warmongering aspirations and the sought-after land, labor and resources of another. This has never ceased to be the case, and will most likely continue deep into the remaining years of humanity. 
The story of war is the story of one side’s poor fighting another side’s poor, for the benefit of the Establishment and the detriment of those mothers and fathers who must do what no parent should have to do, bury their son or daughter. The exploitation of the masses functions thanks to the corruption of society, imposed by the implementation of control mechanisms designed to rob the people of power, knowledge, and of the will to fight a system which only acts to betray illusions and charades. Telling the troops they fight for freedom and democracy and against tyranny while providing nothing but pillaged profits to the corporate world and human hell to Iraqis is one such illusion told by the elite to their army of killing machines. 
While 150,000 under funded, unarmored and undersupplied American troops do battle with an entire nation of 25 million Iraqis, for no other reason than to further expand the pockets of the Establishment and the power of the corporatist elite, the distinguished ladies and gentlemen attending the coronation of corruption, adorned with the fruits of our labor, our blood, sweat and tears, will wine and dine until the early hours of the morning, laughing, joking, conversing, living in their sheltered bubble of endowed wealth and inherited position, in one night wasting forty million dollars, enough money to save the lives of countless soldiers in need of armor and innocent Iraqi civilians in need of humanity. Is there any doubt ghetto soldiers born in concrete jungles and rural grunts living in isolated abandon are simply considered expendable cannon fodder doing the slave work of the elite when those that send them to war, based on lies, deceits and under false pretenses, celebrate fraudulent election triumphs and the pleasures endowed to privilege, at a cost of $40,000,000, while dozens of troops are killed and hundreds maimed for life on a weekly basis in Iraq? 
While the elite celebrate the coronation of the corruption they have unleashed upon the world the corruption of soldier and Iraqi minds continues to claim the futures of tens of thousands of once vibrant energies. For many of those who must bear witness to the wickedness ingrained in human war, the psychological trauma and maimed minds they will forever have to live with will be a sad reminder of Establishment exploitation of their futures. Most of those affected will never be the same, devastated in mind and spirit thanks to what they did, saw and experienced acting on behalf of those profiteers and greed mongers presently celebrating the coronation of corruption. Their futures will be lived in nightmares and stresses, in psychological horror and altered existence. Many will never be able to exorcise the inner demons tearing them apart, creating years of turmoil and shattered lives. The ghosts of those they killed and maimed, those they dehumanized and destroyed will haunt them until their dying days. Images of blood spattered, torsos maimed and appendages blown off will linger, as well as the visions of death and the smells of rotting corpses. The catastrophe they have unleashed, on orders from those at the top, will remain in their minds long after they return home. Normalcy will never again be achievable. Divorces will ensue, health costs will accumulate, grief and anger will fuse together, life will lose meaning, jobs will be lost, many will find themselves homeless, begging for food and shelter, abandoned by the same government and elites that sent them to sacrifice body and mind for the fortunes of a small minority. 
In Iraq the age-old battles pitting one nation’s poor against another nation’s poor for the benefit of the few elite at the top is being played out, with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dying for an immoral and unjust war of choice, based on lies and deceptions, designed for corporate profit and pillage, sacrificing those of the lower American castes as easily expendable cannon fodder and as armed slaves furthering the profits, lands, and power of those celebrating the coronation of corruption. Yet those celebrating the crowning of corporatism care not an ounce for the death and destruction they have wrought. Possessing no empathy or understanding, no remorse or guilt, onwards they continue in their exploitative ways, robbing the nation blind, both of its treasure and loved ones, and laying siege to an entire Iraqi society whose only crime was living in lands saturated with the devil’s excrement and deemed vital to the imperial aspirations of warmongers, greed addicts and power hungry deviants. 
Remember, celebrating the coronation of corruption are members of the military-industrial complex, the oil oligarchy, the ruling elite, the corporate Leviathan and the political class. Chief Executive Officers and executives of Fortune 500 companies, Establishment patriarchs and their loving juniors believing themselves nobility by blood if not by high crimes and misdemeanors, greedy bankers and immoral corporatists always seeking more, energy magnates controlling the strings of the Puppet in Chief, media moguls and their army of journalist minions, those Likud-loving, Israel-first neocons, prostitute politicians and their lackey yes men and women, legions of defense contractors and corporate lobbyists trained in the fine art of buying politicians and writing laws, former military brass exchanging the uniform for an Armani, and the unmistakable lovers of revolving doors who always place the interests of their employers before those of the nation can be found cruising Washington in stretched limos and walking on red carpets. 
To the Establishment now celebrating the coronation of corruption, the plight of black Africa, dying and destabilizing thanks to tens of millions of deaths due to AIDS, its societies in disarray and in extreme poverty, and the devastation in Asia wrought by the cataclysmic tsunami is of no more importance than the annoying buzzing of a fly. When the profit motive is placed way ahead of the people motive, long-suffering continents can seem as far away as to make them invisible. Donating a few hundred million in Africa to fight AIDS, knowing this will accomplish little, and a few hundred million in Asia to quiet worldwide criticism of selfishness, knowing so much more is needed to make a difference is of little consequence to those whose only motive is the profit one. 
However, when it comes to the annual military budget, now $450,000,000,000 strong, and growing, and the additional $200,000,000,000 now wasted for the needless war in Iraq, those celebrating the coronation of corruption waste no time using all tools at their disposal at promoting the cause of war and the instruments of death whose profits line the bank accounts of the ruling members of the military-industrial complex. Not to be outdone, the American oil/energy oligarchy, blinded by the huge pillage expected in the selling off of Iraqi oil fields, cares nothing for over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians whose lives are now extinct, their lands confiscated and corporatized to the friends, families and connections of the administration. 
In an argument of over 600 pages and 1,000 footnotes, 
Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a "paranoid meglomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose "lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad" showcase Bush's instabilities.
George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
