Bonzie Bean Blog

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation.

And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared in the past year, driving the world’s poor - who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food - into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits.

Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months to the end of February had more than doubled over the same period last year, from US$543 million ($695 million) to US$1.12 billion. Its profits increased from US$1.44 billion to US$2.22 billion.

Cargill’s net earnings soared by 86 per cent from US$553 million to US$1.030 billion over the same three months.

And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from US$363 million to US$517 million.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, saw its income for the three months ending February 29 rise more than 12-fold, from US$42.2 million to US$520.8 million.

Let’s see. Oil companies are making some of the largest profits ever and Agribusiness is making huge gigantic profits while people around the world stand in food lines. Hmmm…

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Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

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Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic and political reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.

Assuming that likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing — an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals — must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.

If not the white-guy syndrome, why would even a shocking minority of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters say they prefer McCain to the other Democrat? How otherwise to explain the nation’s widespread bipartisan rejection of the Bush presidency and yet a willingness to let McCain continue in that vein?

Although he previously harshly criticized the enormous waste in the Iraq occupation as a senator, today, as a presidential candidate, he opens the door to a hundred years of taxpayer dollars tossed down the drain in Iraq. The man who was tortured now hugs a leader who authorized the same.

By so unabashedly embracing the most glaringly failed U.S. president ever, McCain has surrendered the right to be considered an independent candidate, judged on his own merits and personal history. A vote for McCain is a vote for that rancid recipe mixing religious bigotry, imperial arrogance and corporate greed.

Is it too much to imagine that Americans might wake up from this national nightmare and discover that the CEO of Halliburton, who replaced Dick Cheney when the latter selected himself to be Bush’s vice president, now has his headquarters in Dubai, tucked safely into the obscenely oil-revenue-rich UAE that our troops were sent to Iraq to protect?

But even still, after almost eight years, there is no national outrage, or even seriously sustained media interest, over the fact that Cheney’s old company profited enormously from ripping off U.S. tax dollars going into the Iraq occupation. Nor is there even much curiosity about the shenanigans of Halliburton, which is doing business with Arab oil sheiks at a time when the U.S. banks these Middle Eastern oil interests bought into are moving to foreclose on American homeowners.

It’s just the sort of egregious betrayal of the trust of the taxpayers that Sen. McCain might have gone after, before he sought to don the soiled robes of the Bush presidency.

Robert Sheer

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Before you open a door and enter into the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a large bronze sculpture of a strapping cowboy greets you, with the wide-eyed optimisim of the mythic west, a handkerchief dangling from the back pocket of a pair of jeans, and cowboy hat in hand.

It’s called "After the Ride" and it is a tribute to Ronald Reagan.

Or make that the myth of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as the fawning exhibition area that paints a flattering, blemish free portrait of his life unintentionally reveals, went from a childhood and small college upbringing in Illinois to a Hollywood "B" film career, to spokesperson for the GE corporation, to Death Valley Days, to the political life that led him to the White House.

The key transition, not noted as such by the library narrative, is when Reagan became the hired front man for GE, hosting a program for them but also going around the country selling the concept that the corporation is a benevolent and positive force in our lives, without any downsides.

Reagan went from a "B" movie career to an "A" career as a political salesman for corporate wealth and control of the government. In the turbulent social climate of the ’60s, his wealthy backers (who regarded him as a prize race horse for a right-wing coup for the super rich and corporate welfare) watched as Reagan won the governorship and masterfully was guided in the use of wedge issues such as "Guns and God" to lure the emerging displaced middle class into voting Republican.

Aside from the "October Surprise," when Reagan negotiators allegedly convinced the Iranian mullahs to hold onto our hostages until Reagan’s inauguration day (they were literally released after he was sworn in), the GOP had perfected the selling of a myth about America — and they had the hale and hearty actor to sell the product.

The myth of "morning in America" obscured the emerging theft of jobs from the middle class by creating emotional hot buttons for rural and working class voters to gravitate toward: Their values were under attack by liberal extremists, they were repeatedly told. Only the Republicans could save the nation from further moral degradation, the myth went — and only the GOP could guarantee victory in foreign conflicts (even if the conflicts were often unnecessary and the GOP failed to achieve "victory," however it might be defined).

Because our perceptions today are so dependent upon television as a source, how one acts as president or senator has superseded, in large part, what one does.

Ronald Reagan made many working class and rural voters proud to be Americans again, but meanwhile, behind the scenes, corporate lobbyists and Reagan’s aides (who were really running the show) went about dismantling factories in places like central Pennsylvania and moving them overseas, sometimes — literally — in the dark of night.

It was the Republican version of "Let them eat cake." Only, in this case, it was: "Let them eat God, Guns, and Patriotism."

This process that began with Reagan’s election continued through Bush I — and even on to the Clinton Administration, as he aggressively pursued NAFTA and followed the neo-liberal economic agenda of opening up the gates of exporting jobs in return for larger corporate profits — and it rocketed ahead in the administration of Bush II into a juggernaut of betrayal of the middle class.

Hunting and faith are important to many people in rural America and small towns — as faith is throughout America — but there has and will be no threat to those core "values." There is no gun control measure with any remote possibility of passing in any state that would affect hunters — and Democrats and civil libertarians are ardent supporters of the right to follow one’s religious beliefs without government interference.

So, Barack Obama’s remarks in San Francisco, as borne out by a true understanding of the Ronald Reagan myth, are ultimately true. His mistake was that he said what he said in a way that allowed the twin corporate D.C. insiders — McCain and Clinton — to once again demagogue the issue into one of emotion, rather than fact.

And that is what the attack on Obama is about: demagoguery.

I can’t save workers from voting against their own economic interests when they vote to defend values that no one is going to take away from them. And I understand that Clinton and McCain are playing on the pride of such displaced members of the middle class. No one wants to be told that they have been duped for nearly 30 years by the wealthy backers of the Republicrats. Rural and small town Pennsylvanians want to feel proud about America and themselves — and the uproar from the McCain and Clinton camps once again presses the hot button of dignity, while privately believing in (whatever Clinton is saying on the campaign trail today) policies that will continue to erode the earnings and standard of living of the very people that they claim to be championing.

The media owned by corporate elites has a role in this, too. Last month, the conventional wisdom of the media, for the most part, was that the deteriorating rust belt of Western Pennsylvania had left many former decently paid workers angry and bitter. But, on a dime, the new conventional wisdom, after Obama’s remarks, was that it was insulting to say that these same people are angry and bitter. Nothing says more about the non-factual based reporting of the mainstream press than that sudden conversion, because the mainstream media represents the global corporate interests of its multinational parent companies who reap the profits of moving jobs overseas.

What Obama said was shorthand for this grim reality: no one is really threatening the traditions of hunting, or anyone’s faith, or heterosexual marriage. But there are plenty of politicians among the Republicrats — usually the Republicans, but Hillary Clinton has joined with them on this one — who exploit the fear that conspiratorial "leftist" forces are conspiring to end hunting and religious belief in America. This is the heart of being a demagogue, because it is an appeal to emotion that has no basis in fact. It is how Republicans have won many an election, and how Senator Clinton is now trying, in a last gasp, to obtain the office she has compromised so much of her life pursuing.

As someone who was born and raised in Illinois, and having lived here my adult life, I was always surprised by how little connection Reagan appeared as an adult to have with his home state. During his presidency, he rarely returned here, and his persona was tied to the myth of the cowboy, the triumphant rugged conqueror of the West. Illinois was just part of his early biography. He seemed to have no strong emotional attachment to the very Midwest roots that he so championed. It just didn’t fit in with the mythic figure that came out of his films, Western ranch (which was the inspiration for Rove getting Bush to buy his Crawford spread and do a Reagan "cut the brush" imitation), and heroic GI movie roles during WW II (which he never actually fought in.)

So we understand that some of the working class who buy clothes at Wal-Mart that they used to make — because the price is right — only the blouses and shirts are made in China now — we understand that they feel insulted by some politician telling them that they’ve been taken for a ride, that no one is going to stop them from hunting or going to their church, but that the people who peddle that nonsense to them are allowing corporations to steal their jobs and wallets from right in front of their noses. That’s a tough pill to swallow, that you’ve been swindled for 30 years.

Mark Karlin

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There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann’s Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo

And all because Obama mentioned something we’ve known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation’s heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.

To quote Obama:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

So what the hell else is new?

Then Obama adds:

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

While not precisely correct, it’s a good enough generalization for an American audience not really listening anyway. Obama’s remarks were not in the least controversial and just plain boring in terms of content. Certainly not newsworthy. (But don’t forget Ward Churchill)

Yet he had no sooner closed his mouth than this media manufactured hell broke loose. "Oh my gawd," they screamed. This guy has the unmitigated gall to suggest that their might be some bitterness out here in the lily white realms of Grant Wood, grange halls and Methodist church suppers! Right here in River City!" where the combination of God rhetoric and Chamber of Commerce boosterism have managed to ban the word from public discourse. Even the mention of it can be explosive, simply because there is so much if it stuffed inside working folks, inside the lockbox of denial that comes with being the citizen of a culture in collapse.

Put more simply, the self-serving "blogger-reporters" and Hillary Clinton media machine had managed to kick Obama in the balls from behind.

Along with the bitterness charges came the guns and God stuff. Well, we Red State rubes out here in the working world do own a lot of guns, though very few of us "cling" to them in the desperate sense the speech implied. As to what Obama described as our clinging to religion, we do not so much cling to it as it clings to us as a vestige of our heritage. It’s neither a good nor bad thing in and of itself, but mighty damned useful to fear mongering politicians and the screen writers of television crime shows.

For me, listening to politicians talk, then listening to the media talk about politicians talking, rates right up there with swapping spit with a gingivitis victim. I do not like nor trust nor much listen to Hillary, McCain or Obama. And I wouldn’t vote for any of the three even if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a bottle of Jack Daniels. However, after hearing Obama’s March "race speech," in Philadelphia, I can understand the Obama cult a little better. Those people are desperate.

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

I’m from Winchester, Virginia, the very kind of place and people Obama was talking about when the rotten tomatoes started hailing down. So allow me to say this: we white members of the sweating class have been working alongside laboring immigrants, legal and illegal, for decades and have not been killing them with our personal arms in a rage of antipathy, in so far as I know. The reason, near as I can tell, is that we do not give a happy shit one way or another because most of us do not have interest or knowledge enough to fester on the topic. Nor the time. When we fester on stuff, it’s about making car payments and trying not to default on our mortgages. Working two and sometimes three jobs per household does not leave much time to develop political opinions, much less informed ones. I’d be willing to bet there is not a working class person within four blocks of where I now sit who has even heard of this media manufactured Obama fracas. Yesterday Smokey, the apartment maintenance man next door, helped me haul a dead washing machine to the city dump. I asked him what he thought about the Obama thing.

"Huh?" he said.

He spoke for millions.

Nobody out here that I know particularly "hates niggers", blames Mexicans or is willing to use their personal firearms against any of those people, unless they find one of them crack crazed and coming in through a bedroom window at 2 AM, in which case there will be a loud boom, and the perp is gonna look like a pizza splattered up against the wall. Otherwise we just stand before the incompressible system that fucks us blind. And in that there is certain bitterness.

Let’s get to the nub of this thing here: Obama, Hillary and McCain are farting through silk while playing out their roles in our theatrical state’s false drama called presidential elections, while smug and media sanctioned pundits snark from the edge of the proscenium arc of politics, each hoping to draw enough attention to have his or her own proscenium in that national cathedral of the American consciousness — television.

Before too long this earth shaking "incident" will be drowned out by the accumulating noise of the election year. Then even the election’s hoopla will all be wiped away when Oprah Winfrey, in one of her ever grander spectacles of televised largess, gives away the city of Detroit to the sixth grade author of the most heart rending essay on black poverty.

November is still seven months away. No normal person can stand, much less relish, seven more months of all this. But we will wallow in it all for the same reason a hog spends most of its life knee deep in shit. It has no other choice, it has plenty of company, and doesn’t know any other way of life.

One of these days, when it comes to the thundering non-controversy of Obama’s remarks, the blogosphere and the media may start asking the right kinds of questions. The kind Smokey asked me after I explained the Obama controversy to him:

"Who the fuck cares?"

Joe Bageant

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There is no doubt that AIDS erupted in the U.S. shortly after government-sponsored hepatitis B vaccine experiments (1978-1981) using gay men as guinea pigs. The epidemic was caused by the "introduction" of a new retrovirus (the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV for short); and the introduction of a new herpes-8 virus, the virus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, widely known as the "gay cancer" of AIDS. The taboo theory that AIDS is a man-made disease is largely based on research showing an intimate connection between government vaccine experiments and the outbreak of "the gay plague"

The widely accepted theory is that HIV/AIDS originated in a monkey or chimpanzee virus that "jumped species" in Africa. However, it is clear that the first AIDS cases were recorded in gay men in Manhattan in 1979, a few years before the epidemic was first noticed in Africa in 1982. It is now claimed that the human herpes-8 virus (also called the KS virus), discovered in 1994, also originated when a primate herpes virus jumped species in Africa. How two African species-jumping viruses ended up exclusively in gay men in Manhattan beginning in the late 1970s has never been satisfactorily explained.

Researchers who claim AIDS is a man-made disease believe it is much more likely that these two primate viruses were introduced and spread during the government’s recruitment of thousands of male homosexuals beginning in 1974.

Large numbers of gay men in Manhattan donated blood for the experimental hepatitis B vaccine trial, which took place at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan in 1978. Extensive evidence supporting the man-made theory of AIDS is easily found on the Internet by Googling: man-made origin of AIDS; and in my two books, "AIDS and the Doctors of Death" and "Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot."

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Written in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America discusses in depth the political, social and governmental aspects of American society from an outsiders perspective. Tocqueville observes the human nature that still remains today which allows for deception through ideas that are “…precise even though false,” as well as the tendency even in the earlier days of America to rely on “…ready-made opinions” rather than our own.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French Historian and political thinker. While I don’t necessarily agree with every one of Tocqueville’s positions, Democracy in America is an important book that can be used as a guide to measure change that has taken place since its writing, as well as to gain perspective on what has always been.
When reading through this book it is difficult not to see parallels between American society in the 1800’s and the America of today. However, there are glaring differences as well. Already existing negative tendencies in human nature have been exacerbated by social engineers that have attempted to alter and guide society according to their own visions. Power and authority are now largely trusted and seen as sources of protection by a large portion of the population rather than threats to personal liberty and freedom, though this is changing. True community is becoming increasingly rare. Government has expanded exponentially.
All of these changes have an impact on how much freedom we enjoy - and how much freedom can be taken away without much resistance.
Tocqueville points out possible weaknesses in our system of governance, stating that if Americans abandoned the republic, “…they would move quickly to despotism without tarrying for long in monarchy.” He observed even in his day a trend away from “that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times…”
Tocqueville’s insight into the world of America 170 years ago provides an important perspective and path to introspection for present day Americans.
Below are some interesting excerpts from Democracy in America:
Americans rely on authority only when they cannot do without it

“Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own. Social authority makes them mistrustful and anxious, and they rely upon its power only when they cannot do without it. This first becomes apparent in the schools, where children play by their own rules and punish infractions they define themselves. One encounters the same spirit in all aspects of social life. An obstruction blocks a public road, interrupting the flow of traffic. The neighbors immediately set up a deliberative body. Out of this improvised assembly comes an executive power that will remedy the ill before it occurs to anyone to appeal to an authority…” (p. 215)

Enlightenment disseminated throughout the country

“The United States has no capital. Enlightenment, like power, is disseminated throughout this vast country. Hence the beams of human intelligence do not all emanate from a common center but crisscross in every direction. Nowhere have the Americans established any central direction over their thinking, any more than they have established any central direction over affairs of state.” (p. 210)

The intelligence of ordinary Americans

“Nothing makes me admire the common sense and practical intelligence of the Americans more than the way in which they avoid the countless difficulties arising from their federal constitution. Seldom have I met an ordinary American who could not distinguish with surprising ease between obligations stemming from laws passed by Congress and obligations originating in the laws of his state…” (p. 187)

Ready made opinions

“In the United States, the majority takes it upon itself to provide individuals with a range of ready-made opinions and thus relieves them of the obligation to form their own.” (p. 491)

An idea that is clear and precise…

“Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.” (p. 186)

Rise of aristocracy

“What can be foreseen right now is that if the Americans did abandon the republic, they would move quickly to despotism without tarrying for long in monarchy. Montesquieu said that there is nothing more absolute than the authority of a prince who succeeds a republic, because the indefinite powers once fearlessly entrusted to elected officials would then be placed in the hands of a hereditary leader. This is true in general, but particularly true of a democratic republic. In the United States, officials are not elected by a particular class of citizens but by the majority of the nation; they directly represent the passions of the multitude and are entirely dependent on its will. They therefore inspire neither hatred nor fear. Thus, as I noted earlier, little care has been taken to limit their power by circumscribing their action, and the range of arbitrary discretion left to them is vast. The habits fostered by this way of ordering things could outlast it. American officials could keep their indefinite power yet cease to be answerable to anyone, and it is impossible to say where tyranny would then end.

There are some among us who expect to see an aristocracy arise in America and who are already predicting exactly when it will seize power.” (p. 460) [emphasis added]

That virile candor…

“Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists.” (p. 297)

Distinguished men shun careers in politics

“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power, an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” (p. 227)

An immense tutelary power…

“I therefore believe that the kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples is unlike any the world has seen before. Our contemporaries will find no image of it in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces my idea of it and captures it fully. The old words “despotism” and “tyranny” will not do. The thing is new, hence I must try to define it, since I cannot give it a name.

I am trying to imagine what new features despotism might have in today’s world: I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country.

Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living?

Every day it thus makes man’s use of his free will rarer and more futile. It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. (p. 818) [emphasis added]

Reduced to timid and industrious animals…

“The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole. Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. He does not break men’s wills but softens, bends, and guides them. He seldom forces anyone to act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.” (p. 819)

In absolute governments…

“In absolute governments, the high nobles who surround the throne flatter the passions of the master and voluntarily bend to his whims. But the masses of the nation are not inclined toward servitude; often they submit out of weakness, habit, or ignorance, and occasionally out of love for royalty or the king. It is not unknown for a people to take pleasure and pride of a sort of sacrificing their will to that of the prince, thereby marking a kind of independence of soul in the very act of obedience. In such nations degradation is far less common than misery. There is a great difference, moreover, between doing what one does not approve of and pretending to approve of what one does: one is the attitude of a man who is weak, the other a habit that only a lackey would acquire.” (p. 296)

The people maintain sovereignty…

“As the first people to face the redoubtable alternative I have just described, the Anglo-Americans were fortunate enough to escape from absolute power. Their circumstances, background, enlightenment, and, most of all, mores enabled them to establish and maintain the sovereignty of the people.” (p. 61)

In closing I think that it is worthy to again mention Tocqueville’s comments on education in America, for schooling is one of the most obvious methods of molding society. Tocqueville writes,

“Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own. Social authority makes them mistrustful and anxious, and they rely upon its power only when they cannot do without it. This first becomes apparent in the schools, where children play by their own rules and punish infractions they define themselves.”

Having been released at last from my 12 year prison sentence in public school a short time ago, memories of what I was taught - but mostly what I was not - are still fresh. Anyone who has been through public school knows that they no longer operate the way Tocqueville describes them. At the time of Tocqueville’s writing, most schools were still free from the great managerial system that would eventually swallow the nation. The Rockefeller family and other interests had yet to fully seize control of the school system and begin molding the minds of generations.
In 1839, echoing many of Tocqueville’s observations of American society, Orestes Brownson wrote “In Opposition to Centralization” that,

“A government system of education in Prussia is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society, for there all wisdom is supposed to be lodged in the government. But the thing is wholly inadmissible here . . . because, according to our theory, the people are supposed to be wiser than the government. Here, the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give the law to the government. To entrust, then, the government with the power of determining the education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master. This fundamental difference between the two countries [United States and Prussia], we apprehend, has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters.”

The “new” oppression of an immense tutelary power that Tocqueville struggles to define is here and now. We must remember where we came from. We must re-discover the wisdom of our ancestors.

Daniel Taylor

Citation:
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York, NY: Library of America, 2004.

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"You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. You are a slave, like everyone else, you were born into bondage.  Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch.  A prison for your mind." - Morpheus - The Matrix

Never before have so few invested so much, for such long a time, to confuse so many people, about so many things.  Never before have so many free people willingly betrayed their own country, their own religion, even their own family, in order to gamble for the opportunity to serve the interests of the powerful few, who are known to reward loyalty so extravagantly.  This is typical behavior for a country that gambles enough to support its public school system with proceeds from lottery ticket sales.  

Our government, with the help of the psychos and sycophants who worship at its feet, has created a police state, which the people allow to masquerade as a democracy.  The various wars against this or that problem in America, but more specifically, the "war on drugs," have been used successfully by our overlords as an excuse to create a police state apparatus, and with it, new omnipresent agencies which made illegal searches and the invasion of privacy in America commonplace, long before the Patriot Act applied it to every facet of our lives.  

The American government, in bed with the magnates of big business (the dictionary definition of "fascism"), have been at war with the American people for a very long time.  Fat cat Republicans, who regularly bankroll both parties, have long plotted to replace democracy with a fascist dictatorship. Corporations have invested billions in foundations to study the people, in order to make more efficient war upon their minds.

America has the largest prison population in the world, not by accident, but by design.  Many years ago it became apparent to the masters of our government that the American people would never submit to the involuntary slavery that awaited them.  One day, when the people realized what was being done to them, circumstances would devolve into a military confrontation between Washington and the people.  When that day comes, it would be better for government mercenary forces if most young men of fighting age were either overseas, or in jail.

Like the revolutionary movie "Matrix," every totalitarian state will eventually produce an underground resistance, which will find its own charismatic leaders, who can convince enough fellow slaves to rise-up into an irresistible critical mass.  It will be the same way here in America, once Internet researchers finally manage to blow the lid off the 911 cover-up, or one of the other pressure cooker political cover-ups that are now being brought to a boil on the stove.  When the people can finally get a clear glimpse of the totalitarian state rising around them, they will throw off all pretense of self-serving self-restraint.  

The nature of the overthrow will depend upon the length of time required to alert the masses to the dangerous truth.  If the people can be aroused to perform their patriotic duty to restrain their government from destroying the world, before it crosses the nuclear threshold, then peaceful change is still possible.  The lunatic-in-chief and his supporters in both the political parties are prepared to use nuclear weapons against vast civilian populations, if We the People are unwilling to stop them.  This new phase in the war that is allegedly being fought in America’s defense will represent the final transmutation of that war into a totally new war, fought to prevent alleged nuclear weapons construction, by unleashing actual nuclear destruction.  Strangelove’s "wet dream," a nuclear free-fire zone.

The disaster unfolding in Washington is like nothing the earth has ever seen.  The highest form of government ever produced by man is putting the final stages of planning on freedom’s demise, and yet the freest people in the history of the world believe that they are powerless to change anything, as they watch excitedly from the sidelines, screaming patriotic hymns to Obama, Clinton and McCain.  The planners and their stooges ultimately believe in their own ability to carry forward the grand "success" stories of Iraq and Afghanistan into the rest of the Muslim world.  The illusion that they can destroy select areas of the rest of the world without destroying us, helps to calm the delirious worry-free psyches of an immoral society, ready to kill the world to save their own sorry asses. 

The war on terrorism uses our beliefs against us.  It has been exposed as a holy war between Christianity and Islam, at least that is evidently what the Zionist neocon authors of the war want it to be.  It is only a matter of time before it becomes obvious to everyone that the war of the new world order is a war against all religion.  Religious belief and basic human morality must be allowed to serve as the basis for the fight against this war, because it is a war on life itself.  The inherent evil of the whole operation must become the rallying point for the people to oppose the war.  It is nothing less than an egotistical human attempt to overthrow the moral basis of international law, replacing it with the inhumane law of parasitic capitalist Darwinism.  Kill everyone who refuses to be made into a slave!

Religious extremists are primary tools for manipulating religious populations into embracing false violent beliefs, in direct contradictions to the peaceful books they were taught from.  In both politics and religion, it is the extremists who stand-out, commanding attention, if not respect.  It is through the various targeted extremists that the false religious and political beliefs are introduced into the mainstream of ideas.  It is within this flow of ideas that we must wade, to fight the false ideas of a war of civilizations and its counterpart a "holy war" between Christianity and Islam.

It is time that extremists in the cause of religious truth and freedom took the fight to our corporate government.  We do not have to bow before a form of Zionist-sanctioned political correctness, which leaves no room for truth in an entertainment/indoctrination bureau which masquerades as a free press.  Our "free press" has allowed itself to become the greatest threat to freedom our nation has ever faced.  It is impossible for a free people to defend itself against an administration of deadly lies when the truth is so easily buried.  The American people must become their own press, in order to get around the main obstacle to freedom.

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Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that began: “Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.” According to this story, Olson reported that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.”²

      Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided the only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance, that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border). Also, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation’s support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Ted Olson’s report was important in still another way, being the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers had box cutters.³

      However, although Ted Olson’s report of phone calls from his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of 9/11, this report has been completely undermined.

Olson’s Self-Contradictions

Olson began this process of undermining by means of self-contradictions. He first told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone.” But he contradicted this claim on September 14, telling Hannity and Colmes that she had reached him by calling the Department of Justice collect. Therefore, she must have been using the “airplane phone,” he surmised, because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.”⁴ However, this version of Olson’s story, besides contradicting his first version, was even self-contradictory, because a credit card is needed to activate a passenger-seat phone.

      Later that same day, moreover, Olson told Larry King Live that the second call from his wife suddenly went dead because “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.”⁵ After that return to his first version, he finally settled on the second version, saying that his wife had called collect and hence must have used “the phone in the passengers’ seats” because she did not have her purse.⁶

      By finally settling on this story, Olson avoided a technological pitfall. Given the cell phone system employed in 2001, high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were impossible, or at least virtually so (Olson’s statement that “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well” was a considerable understatement). The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004.⁷

      However, Olson’s second story, besides being self-contradictory, was contradicted by American Airlines.

American Airlines Contradicts Olson’s Second Version

A 9/11 researcher, knowing that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, noticed that AA’s website indicated that its 757s do not have passenger-seat phones. After he wrote to ask if that had been the case on September 11, 2001, an AA customer service representative replied: “That is correct; we do not have phones on our Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack.”⁸

      In response to this revelation, defenders of the official story might reply that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time: she had used her cell phone. However, besides the fact that this scenario is rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology employed in 2001, it has also been contradicted by the FBI.

Olson’s Story Contradicted by the FBI

The final disintegration of Ted Olson’s story came in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20^th hijacker. The evidence presented to this trial by the FBI included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. In its report on American Flight 77, the FBI report attributed only one call to Barbara Olson and it was an “unconnected call,” which (of course) lasted “0 seconds.”⁹ According to the FBI, therefore, Ted Olson did not receive a single call from his wife using either a cell phone or an onboard phone.

      Back on 9/11, the FBI itself had interviewed Olson. A report of that interview indicates that Olson told the FBI agents that his wife had called him twice from Flight 77.¹⁰ And yet the FBI’s report on calls from Flight 77, presented in 2006, indicated that no such calls occurred.

      This was an amazing development: The FBI is part of the Department of Justice, and yet its report undermined the well-publicized claim of the DOJ’s former solicitor general that he had received two calls from his wife on 9/11.

Olson’s Story Also Rejected by Pentagon Historians

Ted Olson’s story has also been quietly rejected by the historians who wrote Pentagon 9/11, a treatment of the Pentagon attack put out by the Department of Defense.¹¹

      According to Olson, his wife had said that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers.”¹² This is an inherently implausible scenario. We are supposed to believe that 60-some people, including the two pilots, were held at bay by three or four men (one or two of the hijackers would have been in the cockpit) with knives and boxcutters. This scenario becomes even more absurd when we realize that the alleged hijackers were all small, unathletic men (the 9/11 Commission pointed out that even “[t]he so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5” and 5’7” in height and slender in build”¹³), and that the pilot, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was a weightlifter and a boxer, who was described as “really tough” by one of his erstwhile opponents.¹⁴ Also, the idea that Burlingame would have turned over the plane to hijackers was rejected by his brother, who said: “I don’t know what happened in that cockpit, but I’m sure that they would have had to incapacitate him or kill him because he would have done anything to prevent the kind of tragedy that befell that airplane.”¹⁵

      The Pentagon historians, in any case, did not accept the Olson story, according to which Burlingame and his co-pilot did give up their plane and were in the back with the passengers and other crew members. They instead wrote that “the attackers either incapacitated or murdered the two pilots.”¹⁶

Conclusion

This rejection of Ted Olson’s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. Also, if Ted Olson’s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing technology to pretend to be his wife.¹⁷ In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, should we not suspect that other parts were as well?

      The fact that Ted Olson’s report has been contradicted by other defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.

NOTES

¹ This essay is based on Chapter 8 (“Did Ted Olson Receive Calls from Barbara Olson?”) of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).

² Tim O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane,” CNN, September 11, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson).

³ This was pointed out in The 9/11 Commission Report, 8.

⁴ Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, September 14, 2001 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html).

⁵ “America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).

⁶ In his “Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture,” delivered November 16, 2001
(http://www.fed-soc.org/resources/id.63/default.asp),
Olson said that she “somehow managed . . . to use a telephone in the airplane to call.” He laid out this version of his story more fully in an interview reported in Toby Harnden, “She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane,” Daily Telegraph, March 5, 2002 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/telegraph030502.html).

⁷ I discussed the technical difficulties of making cell phone calls from airliners in 2001 in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 87-88, 292-97.

⁸ See the submission of 17 February 2006 by “the Paradroid” on the Politik Forum (http://forum.politik.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-133356-p-24.html). It is quoted in David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 75.

⁹ United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html). These documents can be more easily viewed in “Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11^th Flights”
(http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

¹⁰ FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” “9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11,” 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008,
(http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).

¹¹ Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007).

¹² O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane.”

¹³ 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 16
(http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf).

¹⁴ Shoestring, “The Flight 77 Murder Mystery: Who Really Killed Charles Burlingame?” Shoestring911, February 2, 2008 (http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/02/flight-77-murder-mystery-who-really.html).

¹⁵ “In Memoriam: Charles ‘Chic’ Burlingame, 1949-2001,” USS Saratoga Museum foundation (available at http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/analysis/chic_remembered.html).

¹⁶ Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007), 12.

¹⁷ Of these two possibilities, the idea that Ted Olson was duped should be seriously entertained only if there are records proving that the Department of Justice received two collect calls, ostensibly from Barbara Olson, that morning. Evidently no such records have been produced.

This article is based on Chapter 8 of Dr. Griffin’s new book, "9/11 Contradictions:  An Open Letter to Congress and the Press," (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).

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