i begin to think i'll be winding down my letters to the local electronic fishwrap. here's one i'd been working on posted here that will probably never see electronic ink in my local 'paper';

“Apparently a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.” Gore Vidal

In almost every sphere of American governance, internally and abroad, America’s poor political institutions have yielded the poorest decisions. America has over-extended itself everywhere, serves myths rather than facts, and lets greed run its governing of most everything, while wasting resources on achieving nothing of worth. America’s present attitude in the world; supporting dirty wars and coups in many places at the same time and treating others as game pieces to be moved is a desperate attempt to shake the world to gain advantages it couldn’t secure through accepted means of authority and policy. America is a great beast without reason; it’s a dangerous schizophrenic with weapons.

Making weapons is big business, perhaps the biggest. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America is responsible for around 70% of worldwide arms sales and spends as much on the machinery of war as the rest of the developed world combined.

‘Our’ government spends half of the federal budget on killing machines and supporting technology. It says it’s working for, and wants peace and is concerned about addressing social injustice and poverty. Its estimated there’re about 50 million Americans living in poverty, people, who, one would imagine, would benefit if some of these funds used for their improvement.

We trust our parents. From them we learn about the world we live in. Where did our parents learn what they know? Was what they taught us correct? After we learn from our parents, where do we learn what we know? What do we learn from the fact that today in California kids need at least 50 vaccinations before they’re allowed to go to school? The bigger question is this: Is what we learn true? When we get old enough to question the information on which we base our lives, we quickly learn it’s mostly incorrect. Someone has put it there to deceive us in order to control us: reality is impossible to see when you rely on ‘our free press’ or schools; to tell you what’s true.

Most people don’t get the true picture. They’re too busy with their daily lives to give any time to verifying what the world tells them, what they learn from their peers, neighbors and acquaintances. They generally accept what’s presented to them, and move on. This attitude shortens the lives and damages the quality of those lives for the vast majority of people on this planet.

Investigating how false history gets installed into the minds of its victims clearly shows that the people committing crimes on a scale grander than most people can imagine are the liars providing the information that leads people in the wrong direction, that rallies them for wars that don’t need to be fought, and convinces them to consume products and eat foods that are bad for them. The result is ‘consumers’ have been lost in a poison fog that creates wealth for the clever few and leaves misery for the manipulated majority. There’s no difference between what you hear on TV and what comes out of the mouths of politicians. That should tell you that there’s no real journalism anymore, at least not on the ‘official’ level.

As Stalin had show trials, America has show elections that confuse ‘consumers’ keeping them distracted from important issues. Who do you vote for if you want to end the wars, halve the military budget, end affirmative action, get the government out of family life, control criminals, and slap down NSA?

Those in power arrogantly look down their noses at ‘consumers’ as if they’re stupid, and worthless, whose position in life make them unworthy of respect, human rights, or even an honest answer. It’s visible in the face of a cop, as he nonchalantly soaks students with pepper spray, or pumps bullets into anyone who dare disobey him. It pours from the mouths of politicians and journalists who seemingly rely on you being stupid enough to believe their endless stream of lies. It’s legal for them to threaten and commit offensive violence. They can take your property without consent. They spy on your email and bank accounts at will. They go into trillions of dollars in debt and then stick your grandchildren with the bill. They lie with misleading statistics and use accounting wizardry no business could permit, and this just scratches the surface.

Government regularly announces that there will be no Social Security measurable benefit increase next year. Government links Social Security benefit increases to their own measure of inflation. If the government says “no inflation” then there’re no benefit increases. It’s like letting a student grade his own paper. It’s no surprise that the official definition of inflation doesn’t reflect the real increases in the costs of living. Medical care costs always skyrocket. Rent and food prices do the same as do gas and electric. Taxes, of course, go nowhere but up. But government says there’s no inflation. In actuality, it amounts to a stealth decrease in benefits. They constantly change the way they calculate inflation so as to understate it.

“Them against us”, is the reality.  “Global struggle against violent extremism,” is the war we’re sold, says whoever is President.  Keep the pressure up and the fraud going.  Never let the debate discuss the merits of the strategy or the results of the policy.  Thinking can never be allowed to penetrate emotions.  Attack any opposition to the course of escalation and permanent intervention.  Fight them “Over There”, so we can be safe here. 

Any sane human must admit that the native population sees the troops as invaders not liberators. What does killing and maiming innocent citizens accomplish to advance the goals of those ‘violent extremists’?  If we’re to believe the ‘official’ bombast: they want to destroy our freedom. The Empire doesn’t need any outside help to eradicate out Bill of Rights.  The Patriot Act is the gift of the War of Terror against America.  How are the alleged objectives of the World Islamic Front achieved by destroying our freedom?  The Empire’s occupation of the Middle East, waging war for Zionism, and control over oil isn’t won by killing random civilians.  Are the terrorists that stupid or have the public been bamboozled into accepting a phantom threat as the excuse to surrender their way of life?

Wall Street needs a National Security State because the Bankers are unwilling to return the money they stole from us, and that’s why they flood the Empire with Third World immigrants. They want divided nations where the people can’t unite and say No to corruption. The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) closed 57,000 manufacturing plants in America. Since then both ‘parties’ have allowed uncounted millions of illegal immigrants into America.

The government or rather those who think they own it want us to quake in our boots because they might arrest and do bad things to us. Getting arrested for your courage and honesty is far better than starving to death and death is better than watching insane, power mad people destroy the land you love.

Those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution; the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign, are at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Going to war is the most consequential step a government can take. If the people have nothing to say about going to war, the government can hardly be described as representative. We regularly vote for peace and get war from ‘our’ representatives.

‘Consumers’ have an assigned interest in fake network news. It allows you to do nothing, because if you recognized how absurd and insane the news really was, you would feel an urge to take action, and then you would really feel lost. ‘Consumers’ won’t be able to see things any other way and so prefer to accept whatever lies the news dispenses, in order to maintain the fantasy that things are all right and under control. This deplorable situation also applies to many people who have seen through lies and false realities and recognize something about how the planet is being run: They see themselves as very, very small, when it comes to “confronting the powers-that-be”. They haven’t connected with their own imaginations; and will ridicule any attempt to encourage that connection.

America is a peculiar sort of empire. Americans have been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War  if not before; We denied its existence even while our soldiers were administering “water cures”, waterboarding, to disobedient Filipinos more than a century ago. We told ourselves we were liberating those Filipinos: the Empire not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in a curiously American brand of Christianized liberation theology. In it, American troops are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as liberators and freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers. The American superpower lacked staying power, because it never intended to stay. The “staying” aspect of the Vietnam War was often referred to in America as a “quagmire” like our Afghan predicament. For the Vietnamese their country was no “big muddy” that sucked you down. It was home. They had little choice in the matter but to fight.

Obama said: “We occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn’t do what we need them to do if it weren’t for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had,  if we didn’t have that dose of realism, we wouldn’t get anything done, either.” Sounds like The Empire from the Star Wars movies. None of our wars have been justified since at least Korea, if not before. This is the Empire using its sanctions and military leverage to avoid, “twisting the arms” of countries that don’t do what the Empire “needs them to”… essentially twisting those country’s arms. At least saint Obama was honest about that. Then again, this is the same guy who said, “We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace.”