Wartime for All of Us in America

Wartime in America

There is a war in America. The war can only be won by destroying the enemy and capturing the long sought objective of the neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative foreign policy advocates.

The war on terror is a convenient red herring that has been be used successfully to distract the American public away from the real war and its goals. The various insurgents, terrorists, and their numerous attacks on American troops in foreign lands serve to cement the belief that our enemy is without not within the gates. Politicians quake at the mere thought of being branded by the opposition as being ‘soft on terror’ even as their fathers and grandfathers were fearful of being called ‘soft on communism’.

What then is the real war? What is the true objective? Who are the enemies?

The Real War

There is not a declared war. No declaration of war act as specified in the US Constitution has been passed by the Congress or signed by the President. There is only an authorization to allocate federal funds for the President to conduct operations against anyone he identifies as an enemy to America “using all appropriate force”. No nation is at war with America. America is at war with no nation.

The true war is more of a civil war within the borders of America. The combatants, in their most base form, are those who want to create an imperial Presidency with broad dictatorial powers not subject to review by anyone and those who stand in the way of that happening.

The objective of the Imperialists is to bring to America the policies that have for generations been visited by our government and corporations on the rest of the world. In this view, America itself is the last great economic prize left on the planet. They mean to have it for themselves.

The True Enemy

The Imperialists use savage aggression in foreign countries to spark reprisal attacks on American military personnel and civilians abroad. These attacks and casualties are then used as distractions to the American public but nonetheless are disguised as proof that our enemies are deadly and are foreign. This threat from without is supposed to justify more restrictions on dissent within America. Further restrictions on information availability are made as well. The goals are to give the Bush Administration absolute control over all information available to the American public and to stifle dissent to their objective.

The enemies of the Imperialists are many but none are foreigners in foreign lands. There is no foreigner capable of stopping their vicious quest for absolute power in America. But there are many enemies to their objective who are Americans. In fact, most Americans are their enemies in this.

The Real Objective of the Real War

Most Americans when asked about whether they support the moving of manufacturing jobs offshore are opposed to it. Most Americans when asked if they support the growing military budget are opposed to it. Most Americans when asked it they support Social Security, do. Most Americans when asked whether they support increased federal spending for social services such as education and transportation favor it. Most Americans when asked about health care say they want a single payer plan. Most Americans do not approve of wiretaps without a warrant. Most Americans believe the enormous transfer of wealth into the hands of weapons manufacturers is a waste. Most Americans believe in the Constitution and think that government officials should be bound to follow it. These Americans are the true enemy of the Imperialists in the war for absolute power because they oppose the real objectives of the Imperialists.

The neo-liberals have had as their objective a return to the unregulated economy of the Gilded Age. They have long stated their desire to eliminate the social reforms instituted by FDR to end the Great Depression. An event the neo-liberals chalk up to market forces at work. Human misery is not important to these monsters in their quest to create a real world example of their theoretical model of a market driven economy. In fact they do not want a market driven economy any more than neo-conservatives want global democracy. Neo-liberals want an economy they alone can profit from and that they control absolutely.

Thus, the real objective of the Bush Administration is for a return to the age of the Robber Barons. A time when poor people starved in America and a feudal few ruled over all with an iron fist.

To this end all other events must serve.

What's Wrong With America's Election Process?

Part 1: The Casting and the Counting of Votes


I have no objection to letting the people vote at any time on any issue and I will count their ballots. For elections are not determined by those who cast the votes but by he who counts them. –Josef Stalin


The elections of 2000 and 2004 produced many charges of fraud. In an effort to address those charges the Republican controlled Congress attempted to “reform” the election process by requiring the uniform use of electronic voting machines and ballot counting machines that local election officials must rent or lease from private corporations.


Most of these corporations, most notably Diebold, are owned and run by staunch Republican conservatives who have stated that they would do “whatever it takes” to produce Republican winners in the election.


The software code used in these computerized machines has been found by federal courts to be proprietary. This means that the corporation may refuse to disclose its code to government regulators. Thus, there is no way to objectively determine whether a particular corporation’s product has or has not been tampered with to produce a desired vote count outcome. The voter has only blind faith that the partisan owners of the equipment would resist the temptation to ‘fix’ the vote count with the sure knowledge that they would never be caught having done so.


This corporatization of the voting process has created another transfer of public moneys into the bank accounts of corporate owners while leaving the public with a deeply flawed, unregulated system open to dishonesty and fraud.


The privatizing of America’s election process has effectively ended democracy as it was previously known.




Part 2: Election Profiteering



Although the use of privately owned, unregulated voting machines and vote counting machines has probably ended democracy in America, there is a second, older, and more pernicious attack on democracy in America. That is the high price all Americans pay for media moguls' salaries and bonuses.


The single most challenging and expensive obstacle to overcome for a candidate running for elected office is informing the voters about the candidate’s message.


There are three avenues now available for educating the public and specifically voters to anyone who aspires to public office. The first is the print media. This includes signs, billboards, flyers, mailers, brochures, magazines, and newspapers. Of this group the least censored are the signs, flyers, mailers, and brochures. They may also be the least expensive due to competition among printers in the marketplace. The use of billboards, magazines, and newspapers, the mass print media, can be very expensive for placing ads and those ads increasingly are subject to the politics of the media owner. For example, Clear Channel, owner of the majority of the nation’s radio stations and billboards, has refused to publish ads from candidates and groups with which its primary owner disagrees. Rupert Murdock’s newspaper empire, NewsCorp, has also refused to publish at any price campaign ads from individuals and groups is has identified as “irresponsible” these have tended to be anti-corporate or anti-Republican groups.


The mass print media is largely owned and operated by political conservatives. The publishers and editors they hire are similarly conservative. To different degrees those media managers will exercise censorship over the message any candidate can give to the public via their publication. For many years however a sure way to circumvent editorial censorship was by purchasing an advertisement. The dollar cancelled censorship as long as the ad was within legal and moral bounds. In recent years, however this avenue has been shut by very ideologically inspired owners who see control over the message as being more important in the long run than achieving a profit in the short run. A liberal, progressive candidate will not be evaluated favorably by those owners and editors and they will exercise as much control as they can over the content of the message the candidate wishes to inform the voter of. The choice is that a candidate can attempt to publish an anti-business or reformist message in an ad but the media controllers and censors will now refuse to sell the ad space for that message.


The prices charged for political advertising is also marked up over commercial advertising. Some may argue that this is merely obeying the law of supply and demand, but in fact it is more closely akin to profiteering. Candidates are faced with the choice to pay the going rate or not communicate their message with the voters.


There is a basic law of advertising that repetition is the key to improving sales. The more the public is exposed to a message, commercial or political, the more likely they will believe all or part of it. So the candidate who wants to be successful will produce and get published as many advertisements as possible.


The broadcast media is the second avenue for publishing a message. Unlike the print media, the broadcast media utilize public property, the airwaves, to send out their product to the public. Each broadcaster must apply for a license to use a defined portion of the airwaves and pay a fee for that use. The exception to this is the public’s broadcasters (i.e. PBS) who are granted a portion of the airwaves gratis by statute. In theory, a broadcaster is regulated and the public is given opportunities to complain about the service or content that broadcaster has produced during the license period. At the end of the license period, the broadcaster must renew the license before the Federal Communications Commission. At that time the public’s input is supposed to be considered in granting a renewal, however Clear Channel’s owners changed the rules regarding this when they were successful in paying a fine of $2 million in exchange for having hundreds of public complaints cleared from their record just prior to license renewal hearings by the commission. To put it in perspective, that fine was equal to the revenue generated by just two and a half minutes of commercial time during a single Super Bowl, but the complaints regarding a variety of practices by Clear Channel had been accumulating for the entire license period, year and years.
The same censorship that exists in print media is present in broadcast media as well. Owners who tend to be political conservatives – indeed, too often they are the very same persons who control many of the print media outlets – are increasingly refusing to broadcast political messages with which they disagree. These advertisements or candidate messages are censored and labeled as “controversial” or “irresponsible” by the station owners who disagree with them and want to keep the public from learning of the content of the message.


One of the most famous examples of this kind of censorship was when an anti-war group, MoveOn.org conducted a contest to create a TV commercial that was critical of President Bush. The winning commercial, “Child’s Pay,” depicted small children engaged in menial labor and asked the viewer who they thought would have to pay for the enormous national debt President Bush was running up. It was a powerful video. MoveOn.org had raised the money to purchase commercial broadcast time during the Super Bowl game but the owners of the network refused to sell the airtime for the commercial to MoveOn.org saying that its was a “biased and irresponsible message.” There is no record of such censorship of messages by the same network supporting President Bush or his party or attack ads against his opponents for being “biased or irresponsible.”


Broadcast media also runs up the prices for airing candidate commercials. Unlike the print media where a newspaper, for example, could add pages to accommodate extra ads, the broadcaster has only 24 hours of broadcast time per day to sell. This induces a true competitive market between candidates in which the candidate with the most money can send his message to the public more often. The question is whether the best interests of the electorate are served by a market driven campaign system in which the voices and messages of the richest candidate are the only ones heard.


We see, then, that America’s electoral system is also deeply flawed as it regards political campaigns. The various privately owned media exercise extreme control over both content of political messages and who gets exposed to them. To a certain degree the censorship exercised by the media owners is related to profits but as we have seen, there are too many instances where profit was not involved. Most of the time it is though.


Thus, a candidate must, to be successful, raise substantial sums of money to purchase commercial time and advertising space. This can be done most efficiently by seeking donations from a relatively few very wealthy donors. Otherwise a candidate must gather small sums from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual supporters. Although, Howard Dean’s campaign of 2004, opened a new source of revenue: the Internet appeal.


The third avenue available to a candidate to send a message to the public is the Internet. Much has been made of this possibility but it is unlikely that a candidate will be successful in reaching out to an undecided voter via a web page. By their nature, web sites are passive and voluntary. That is to say, that TV viewers who are undecided about who to vote for will watch whatever commercials shown during the program they viewing (research suggests the view may mute the audio though). An Internet user must seek out a candidate’s message thus the candidate is essentially fishing for viewers of a web page and those will most likely be supporters rather than undecided people.


A web page can be the least expensive of all of the three avenues of influencing voters during an election.


The influence of money on elections in America is overwhelming. Candidates do not have time to contact hundreds of thousands of people and convince them to give small contributions so they focus on persuading wealthy people to give large contributions. The rich, then, have a very great influence on election results and on the opinions of the voters, for people believe according to their experiences in life, and so he who controls those experiences controls how people will believe. It is also known as “controlling the message.”


To reform elections in America we must attack the root of the problem: money. There are many proposals that claim to do this. The various “campaign finance” laws that regularly are issued by Congress are merely cosmetic and none are designed to open up the election process to challengers to the status quo. To do this we must follow the money.


Politicians, the people’s servants, are dependent on wealthy donors. They need the donors’ money to buy commercial airtime and advertisements. Most of the money raised by a campaign goes into these two avenues of getting the message to the voters. So, any true election reform must address the power exercised by broadcasters and print media owners. Until the 1994 election this was done by the Doctrine of Fair Time. Under that doctrine, broadcasters and publishers were required to provide commercial and advertising space equally to candidates. After the Republican “Revolution” of 1994, Congress acted to change this doctrine to one where “the market” ruled the election process. Money became the only factor in the amount of advertising a candidate could expose the voters to. The cost of elections, and the corresponding windfall profits to the owners of broadcast and print media took off after the doctrine was dropped. The move increased the power of the rich dramatically.


How to fix it? Remove the influence of money for advertising. There are several methods that can be employed. One might be to restore the Fairness Doctrine so that each candidate has equal access to media. Another might be to restrict candidates’ media outlets. Say only to PBS television and radio where campaigns would have to “sponsor” programming much as corporations do. The profits from the “sale” of sponsorships for PBS programming by political candidates would benefit a broader spectrum of the public than does funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the accounts of a relatively few number of media owners. If a cap on charges for such broadcast commercial time were also imposed the power of the rich in elections would be broken. More candidates with progressive or reformist messages could be heard by the general public, who polls show, favor liberal progressive social services programs such as health care and social security. It also would severely reduce censorship by media owners of the messages that they permit the public to see or hear, which, in turn, will benefit individuals and groups espousing liberal, progressive, and reformist causes.

Stopping the Gang of Four

When he was in college, George W. Bush lettered as a Yale cheerleader, but was a very unremarkable student who, in spite of the best of hired tutors and the influence of a prominent grandfather and father (both Yale men), graduated with a grade point average of C. His peers remembered him as a party guy who never bought a drink or a meal for anyone and lied without conscience. They also recalled that he was a very good cheerleader who was able to get the crowd on its feet.



As Bush entered adulthood he attempted to follow his father and grandfather into business. One of his first attempts was a start up wild-cat oil company he named, “Arbusto” believing arbusto to be Spanish for ‘Bush’ and thus a clever play on words. (Arbusto is the Mexican word for ‘shrub’ not ‘bush’.) Arbusto Oil never went anywhere but south into bankruptcy. Unable to succeed as a businessman, Bush then went to work for others as a ‘landman’.



In the oil business a landman is the guy who negotiates with the rancher to get the mineral rights and drilling rights to his land. The goal of a landman is to trick the farmer out of his oil for as little money as possible. It is a job, similar to used car salesman, in that it requires the ability to deceive with a straight face while appearing to be “technically” truthful, and to whip up enthusiasm for the project/car in the farmer/customer. His employers remembered Bush as being a pretty good landman.


Bush eventually was given another chance to be an entrepreneur by his family when he was installed in Harken Oil as an owner and board of directors member. Harken also went south soon after Bush jointed it and attempted to direct it. Bush was able to avoid the financial losses of a failed business because, a the member of the company’s audit committee, he gained key information that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and was able to sell his shares privately to a family friend two weeks before the collapse. Selling them privately meant that Bush avoided indictment for insider trading that would have resulted by selling them on the stock market. Later, when asked why he bought the shares off Bush the friend said that it was a small price to pay for helping the son of the Vice President of the United States.



Without investing any of his own money, Bush was given shares in a baseball team. As an owner, he took on the job he had done so well in college, cheerleader. He attended every game and glad handed the crowd and players with smiling enthusiasm. He was not given any control over the finances of the team, however, by the other investors. Bush’s reputation as a businessman was poor and besides he was known to be a real boozer (he had been arrested twice: once for vandalism while drunk; once for drunk driving). But he was the eldest son of the Vice President of the United States and scion of one of the most prominent, wealthy, and influential families in America. Everyone knew that his family rewarded its friends even as it punished with a ruthless vengeance those who stood up to family members. (It was supposedly said by those close to the family that Bush inherited his mother’s short temper and vindictiveness.)



As a politician, Bush’s first attempt was a bid for U.S. House of Representatives. He campaigned hard. But those who voted against him recalled that he did not strike them as a man to be trusted.



During the 1980s, Bush campaigned for his father’s bid for President and Vice President. He also found religion. One story has it that on the campaign trail in Alabama, Bush attended a fundamentalist camp meeting and watched spellbound at how the preacher controlled the passions of the congregation and successfully extolled them for cash donations. Supposedly in an epiphany, Bush said that he could do that same thing back home in Texas. After the campaign, Bush began to attend a Bible study group in Texas where he learn more about the vocabulary of the fundamentalists. Professing to be an avid Bible reader, even after he became President, he gave some listeners doubts for, when asked what his favorite Bible passage was, he criticized the reporter for trying to catch him in a ‘trick’ question.



Bush has always relied upon men who were older and smarter. When he was teamed with Dick Cheney in 2000, it was a match made in neo-con heaven. Bush had the charisma and cheerleader enthusiasm to sell the public the conservatives’ bill of goods while Cheney was the man behind the throne.


Once elected in 2000, Bush appointed Donald Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense, a key position in any putz. It was Rumsfeld and Cheney who had been a young team during Nixon’s attempt at the creation of an imperial presidency back in the early 1970s, and it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who tried unsuccessfully to submarine the Freedom of Information Act by convincing President Gerald Ford to veto it. It was Cheney and Rumsfeld who helped conceal the Iran-Contra illegal deals from the US public and the Congress during Ronald Reagan’s Administration. They have a long history of making the work of the Executive Branch secret. Mostly that is because what they want to do to accomplish their goals has tended to be either contrary to law or would be unpopular with the American public – a fairly moral and law abiding group of people.



In the current White House workings, it appears that Bush has lots of time for working out on his bicycle, in the weight room, jogging, and taking extended vacations (so far, 366 days in five years). He is the point man for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld team. He is the 'land man' who has been told he has a silver tongue that can convince the rest of us to agree to anything in support of the eternal war on terror/evil. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condolezza Rice have the important role of repeating the message over and over so that it is drummed into the media and thus into the peoples’ minds.



What is amusing to remember is that Cheney and Rumsfeld have convinced Bush that he is a smooth talker and that he does a great job as a communicator. In exchange, Bush lets them run the Executive Branch and leave him to more corporeal amusements and escapes. It must have been a wake up call to him when his erstwhile attempt to cheat the American public out of Social Security went flat. No matter how many times Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and a host of media surrogates repeated the message that privatizing Social Security would make everyone richer, safer, or more thin, the public refused to buy. Worse, the public began to question the “trustability” of the guy who was so brazenly trying to cheat them for the enrichment of a wealthy elite.



With each apparent reversal to their plans for a new imperial presidency, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice gang of four have come back with a more outrageous counterattack. For example, when Senator John McCain convinced first the Senate and then the House to pass his anti-torture bill, not the first law banning torture on the federal books, Bush quietly added a signing statement that basically declared that he would respect the law against torture if it suited him to do so and would not obey it when he felt that he did not want to for reasons of “national security”. Effectively, throwing down the gauntlet to Congress. The only way to stop the Gang of Four from firmly establishing a new imperial presidency that is above the law and outside the ethical and moral norms of civilized society, is by removing them from office.



It is very unlikely that Congress, whose majority members are dependent on the Republican Party for funding in their next re-election bid, will risk their own campaigns just to keep the Gang of Four from ending our federal republic. So, it falls to the Democratic Party, currently 18 votes short of a majority in the House and five votes short of a majority in the Senate to defend democracy and the rule of law in America. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party leadership has shown little interest in upsetting the status quo, preferring instead to safely remain the minority party.



Why is that? Well, the GOP controls most of the media through like NewsCorp in newspapers and television or Clear Channel in radio. The politically right wing owners of those have refused to hire “liberals” or Democrats as publishers, producers, or editors. They have refused to even accept ads non-Republican, non-conservative, groups have tried to buy in the conservative media.



The same attack media that stifled the Clinton Administration with a barrage of invented “scandals”, rumors, and spurious personal attacks, can be turned in a heartbeat on any Democrat who attempts to rock the Republican corporate profit machine (which is how they view the control of Congress coupled with the White House). Remember how they successfully attacked Al Gore’s credibility and John Kerry’s service record?



So it will take an especially wary electorate and an especially courageous Democratic leadership to save our way of governing ourselves. You can help by writing a flood of letters and email messages to newspapers, magazines, and the Democratic Party urging them to act decisively.